WHERE WOULD LAMONT'S LABOUR TAKE US?

There are, I suppose, many reasons that people want independence for their country.

The fact that independence is the natural state for a country is probably first among these. And even if it is not articulated, it’s at the back of everyone’s mind.

Others may cite, in the case of Scotland, that a relatively poor backwater of the UK, where comparatively little has been spent could, in fact, be one of the richest countries in Europe, if not the world. And that our way of life could be completely transformed by being masters of our own money.

One of my personal thoughts about remaining in Britain (the political rather than geographical Britain, that is), as a relatively left leaning person, has been the move of the UK to the right. For me, I suppose, it must have started under Mrs Thatcher where services were routinely sold off at rock bottom prices so that we could all become part of a “shareholding society" (or so that her friends in the city could make a killing, whichever you think more appropriate). [Surely Mrs Thatcher couldn't have been so stupid that she did not realise that soon after people had bought shares, they would sell them off for profit to big organisations which, in the end would control our Gas, Electricity, Telecommunications, Airports, Steel, Oil (and in England, Water) to mention only a few. And that in many cases these companies would be based in abroad.] 

Then we were all to become property owners as she sold off council housing at amazingly low prices... tempting even relatively hard line socialists with the notion of owning their own house, and all for only a few thousand pounds.

If you add that to the fact that she smashed the unions and shut down the kind of industries where they thrived, you can see that by the time she was stabbed in the back (metaphorically) by the Tory Party, she had completely changed the face of the UK. Major carried the programme forward with one of the most audacious, expensive (and disastrous) of all privatisations: Railways. 

And because Scotland was ruled directly from London, nearly all of these privatisations affected us too, wherther or not we wanted them.

Any hope we might have had of a move back to the left, as might have been expected when, after 18 years of Tory rule, England voted the Tories out and Scotland got its beloved Labour Party as rulers, was very soon knocked on the head, as Tony Blair set about the business of 'de-socialisting' Labour. Fortunately he was forced by the Council of Europe to set up a separate Scottish parliament, which he hoped to control from London. (A parish council, he called it).

Happily, despite his wishes, and a great deal of coming and going of Mandelson’s men (Lance Price used to arrive in Edinburgh ‘capuchoné’) and possibly because Labour needed the Liberals to form a Scottish government (or executive as we were told to call it) Blair failed to control his parish council, at least to the extent that he would have liked and Scotland retained some vestiges of the pre-Thatcher days.

Now Britain has a new Thatcher, who has taken on the privatisation of the health service in England; there is a Labour party in England that will not reverse these changes if it gets into power, and we have a Labour Party in Scotland that seems to be, despite protestations to the contrary, taking orders from London.

So, where would this leave us on the health front if we were to reject independence and then elect a Labour government for a devolved Scotland?

Would they bring in a private health service and would there be any advantages in that? I'll rephrase that...would there be any advantage for us in that. Because, as Craig Murray points out, Dr Éoin Clark has done an analysis of how the current government’s supporters have fared as a result of the privatisations and why would that not equally well for Labour.

Alex Neil says that it won’t happen in Scotland under the SNP, although there is a already a level of privatisation in personal care. But a report for what Labour is pleased to call 'NewsNat Scotland', shows that the costs of operating health services in Manchester are far lower than in Glasgow, and that, at least initially, there seems to be little difference in the level of service. 

But then, to begin with the privatisation of care homes seemed to work well, before big business took a hand in it, greed took a grip, it all went pear shaped and the government had to bale the whole sorry lot out. What will happen when French, American or Chinese companies buy out the current providers, then find that insufficient profit can be made?

And what other right wing Thatcherite policies would a future "Labour" party adopt in Scotland, at the behest of its English parent party to keep the south-east of English on side?

I wonder what your thoughts are...