The aspirations of the Labour Party

Lovely hedge behind her

According to Margaret Curran "Here in Scotland only Scottish Labour has a clear answer".

So what is this clear answer… because I’m mystified?

You see only a few short weeks ago Mrs Curran, you were telling all of the world, and most particularly all the Labour constituencies that voted YES, that you were ditching Blairism and returning to socialism, just like in the good old days when you and your mate, Johann, joined the party. (How is Johann by the way? Seen much of her lately?).

And now it looks like you are about to elect as branch leader, Jim Murphy, a Blairite who’s never had a job outside politics, unless of course you count a 9-year educational career (sans diplôme universitaire), and who was one of Blair’s most staunch lieutenants, supporting all his right wing nonsense that so closely aped Thatcherism… and indeed took it further than even the rusty lady would have dared (Atos anyone?).

Furthermore it looks as if, for a year and a half, while the said Jim is in London, he will be represented in this country, by his doppelganger.

Kezia Dugdale is 33 a good deal younger than Jim (47) and she’s actually got a got a degree in something

Kezia, the thinking man's Jim Murphy

(law), but, like Jim, she’s never had a actual job in the real world.

After qualifying, she worked for the local student’s union and the National Union of Students, before obtaining employment with George (the noble) Foulkes. And when George went to spend more time in “the other place”, (where the booze is cheaper) she got his old seat. The most notable thing on her Wikipedia page, is that she complained about BBC Alba, the Scottish tv station dedicated to Gaelic speakers. She appears to be one of these Scots who believes that everyone should buckle down and speak English.  I wonder if she would use the proposed authority over road signs (should our masters in the Commons and our Lords in …erm, the Lords, approve the devolution of that stunning power to mere Scots) to remove the Gaelic from them.

I’m intrigued then, to discover what this potential new powerhouse, English based branch leadership team will come up with. In fact, looking at Maggie’s speech the policies are all to do with the UK so at least Jim will feel at home with them in the London apartment.

According to Mrs Curran, these are Labour's key policies:

*Freeze energy prices and save every Scottish household £120. 

A creditable aim, although I'm not sure where the £120 comes from.  Some people have so little to spend on energy that they would be getting their fuel free if that were applied across the board.

The privatised and mainly foreign-owned energy companies are at liberty to increase prices as and when they wish, pretty much regardless of energy prices, which, at the moment, are falling steeply.  In France, where the government has a controlling share in the power companies, the president can simply dictate how much rises in power prices will be. Not so here. A sovereign government, of course, can bring in whatever laws it wishes to, so no one is denying that it can be done. However, with what consequences, you have to ask. The English part of the grid is already heavily dependent on imported electricity and is in dire need of investment. I doubt that freezing the prices is the best way for the government to encourage that investment from the energy companies.

*Ensure the recovery is fair by introducing a 50p tax on people earning £150,000 or more and lift people out of tax with a new 10p starting rate. 

Well that is perfectly creditable, but in honesty the 50p won’t make that much difference.  Someone worked out that, in Scotland, as little as £8 million would be raised by this. A great deal more in England, I have no doubt, but hardly substantial.

The 10p tax band is not "new". It did exist until Gordon Brown doubled it. It was certainly helpful for some and I would applaud its reintroduction, but of course the really poor don’t benefit from it, because they earn so little that they already pay no tax. The aim must be to get wages up.

* Fix the economy by drawing a line under low-paid and insecure work by ending exploitative zero-hours contracts and raising the minimum wage to £8 an hour over the course of the Parliament. 

Well, that all sounds very fine and noble, except that aspiring to raise the minimum wage by 25p every year is hardly the great socialist dream, when, let’s be honest, the living wage, even now, is around £10 per hour, and even at that, it’s not much of a living…just enough to keep you from the food bank. Lord only knows what it will be in 2020.

If Labour’s policy is to draw a line under low paid work, it’s hardly a stunning start.

And it’s all very well to say that they will end zero hour contracts, but I would be interested to see how they are going to do this. Even some Labour councils use zero hour contracts… and for some people (students, mothers with young children for example) zero hours are sometimes quite useful. They must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

"That's a fair and funded plan from Labour” says the good Margaret.

“It is also lacking in real aspiration”, says Munguin, and of course, he’s right.

A socialist party would be a sight more radical. What are the policies over the post office? Can we expect to see the railways renationalised and made a service for both public and industry? How about power companies? What about the lamentable levels of social security and the appalling treatment of the sick and disabled? What about pensioners living on handouts on one of the worst pensions in the developed world?

What about the obscenities of nuclear weapons, which Mr Blair in his autobiography admitted were only kept as a status symbol? Is it defensible that while children are going to school hungry and pensioners shiver with their outdoor clothes on in front of a one bar fire, the country will spend well over one hundred billion pounds buying a status symbol?

No. Instead Mrs Curran contents herself by wishing to ensure that workers will, in five years time, be earning £8 an hour.

Bravo Labour. 

But I accept that they will never be able to do what they should do until they change the underlying fundamentals of the British economy, based on what is accepted British policy across the UK parties. And that will never happen while the city of London rules the roost.

As Derek Bateman so clearly points out on his blog, this is the situation in Britain. If they want votes then what is Labour going to do about it?

“The underlying truth is that Britain is bankrupt, living on sovereign debt and personal credit cards, buying imported goods instead of equipment for industry, creating low paid jobs which need benefits to eke them out, still borrowing massively because tax receipts are too low while opposing the immigration that can boost economic activity and dividing the country by stripping away the benefits that are the glue of British society.”

Incidentally, I have no earthly idea where Margaret got the impression that Nicola Sturgeon was advising people to vote Labour to keep the Tories out. It's like no message I've ever heard form the First Minister.  I can only assume Mags has been sitting to close to Gideon in the members' dining room. As the song goes "Things go better with Coke".

How's that again Mags?

SCOTTISH LABOUR IS GOING LEFT, OR SO SAYS MRS CURRAN

So, according to Margaret Curran, Labour in Scotland is going to ditch the legacy of Tony Blair and return to its “socialist principles” ahead of the UK election next May.

Mrs Curran says Ed ­Miliband is going to stand up to big business.

In an article for Scotland on Sunday, the most junior member of the shadow cabinet appears to have been given the job reversing the direction of Labour, which is odd, given that at their recent party conference, far more senior members of the party were talking about more austerity than the Tories, being tougher on benefits than the Tories, and a minimum wage of £8 per hour by 2020, a laughable ambition when a decent living wage must be around £10 an hour in 2014.

By Margaret says, without a flicker of a smile:

“The socialist principles of equality, redistribution and ­social justice need to shape our politics as much today as they did when I joined the party.”

She is on tour… a bit like Nicola Sturgeon, laying out what she thinks Labour stands for. She will talk in traditional Labour strongholds that voted Yes in last month’s referendum in an effort to win back the party’s core support.

Around a third of Labour ­supporters voted Yes in the ­September referendum.

Curran’s piece trots out a load of words that actually say nothing at all:

“When we see a country divided, we should not be satisfied" (erm no, we should not... so, what have we been doing about this division in our society Margaret?) "It should make us work even harder to bring our country together." (So are we going to start doing that now, after 40 years of division since Thatcher?  Oh well, better late than never.)

“We need to listen." (I've heard that before. Didn't Ed tour the country, listening?) "But what people say also needs to shake us into action and we need to change.” (Ah, well that would make a change")

 

Labour standing up to big business

 “We have a leader across the UK who has learned the ­lessons of Iraq and opposed military action in Syria" (but not Libya, and not Iraq again), "who refuses to kowtow to vested ­interests like the banks and the energy companies and who believes that politics is about building a movement of ­working people to change our country.” (No, you don't. You have a weak man with absolutely no ideas whose confidence is torn to shreds, whom few like, and who is generally considered to be weird!)

As usual Labour is fighting the wrong election.

Scottish Labour may feel that to save itself and the well paid jobs of its MPs, MSPs and other officials, it must move to the left to win back the votes of the people it was created to represent, but the problem is, and this is fundamental to the whole independence debate is… "Scottish Labour, so what?"

When it comes to the UK, what exactly is the importance of Scottish Labour? 

Well, of course in UK electoral terms they represent somewhere in the order of 40 fairly solid Labour seats. And given the current state of politics where there is little between the two major UK parties, that is the difference between 10 Downing Street, and mixing with President Obama adn the King of Saudi Arabia on the one hand, and back to the back benches, having failed for Ed, with the added embarrassment that his brother might have succeeded.

Labour’s problem is that in much of Scotland, the north of England and Wales, they should be representing the working classes. People living on poverty wages, among the worst levels of benefits in Europe, and the lowest pensions in the developed world (bar Mexico). They should be fighting tooth and nail for better conditions, more social housing, a living wage, lower rents, better and cheaper public transport, etc, but in the south-east of England, as peter Mandelson pointed out so long ago, they need to attract the votes of a very different constituency. A constituency that would have to help pay for all these upgrades to the way the poor live. And the “south east” has four times the population of Scotland! 

Someone who looks up to Ed... Novel.

In her article for SoS, Curran says that her “number one priority” as Secretary of State for Scotland would be a Scottish Jobs Guarantee and getting the country’s young people “back to work”. (Novel idea. No one has ever thought of that before!)

She tells whoever is listening that for working Scots, the party would seek to “improve their conditions so they don't have to work two or more jobs just to make ends meet”. (I'm sorry Mags, that means putting wages up to a livable level and you won't do that, not in 10 years you won't.)

She insists that “That means ending exploitative zero-hours’ contracts and starting to ­increase the minimum wage to £8 an hour". (No, it means increasing the minimum wage to £10 an hour pretty much right away, and that could never happen, not even under the SNP! Companies just wouldn't stand for it, prices would rocket and those without wages would starve unless benefits and pensions were dramatically increased...like that's gonna happen!)

She goes on: "And we will show exactly whose side we are on by freezing energy prices and reforming the energy market once and for all. Even with less money, we will change the country for good.” (You mean renationalise it? No, I thought not. So how can you regulate it? It's in a market.)

Maggie, it's all words. They sound pretty but unless you're 18 you've heard them all before, every 4 or 5 years.  

Most of your suggestions are unworkable and in any case, the minute you have these 40 MPs to bolster your chances of forming a government every single policy will be ditched in favour of keeping the bankers and the City happy.

Nice try, but we aren't all muppets.

SOME OF LABOUR'S DREADED "FOREIGNERS" APPEAR TO THINK THAT THE AYES HAVE IT

The Labour Party, from the much loved and highly respected socialist, Tony Benn, to erm... Maggie "Stairheid" Currant, who is..erm... an MP or something, is fixated with the horror of people becoming foreigners when Scotland gets her independence.

I always thought that socialism was an international thing, but then again, I'm forgetting that socialism and the Labour party have about as much in common as the Queen and a kilo of cheap margarine.

Anyway, it seems that the foreigners who make up the extensive diplomatic community in Edinburgh, feel that the Negative side are on the slide and the Yessers are starting to pull up towards a win.

Maybe better start looking at enlarging your consulates there people. 

Embassies take up a lot more room.

THIS IS WHAT WENT WRONG

REPORT OF LABOUR FOR INDEPENDENCE CONFERENCE -- Allan Grogan

I have been delighted to see the coverage of our policyconference this past weekend. In what one social website described as one ofthe top ten events in Glasgow last weekend. Perhaps it was being in thehistoric STUC building which made the event such a creative and interactiveexchange of ideas, in which all views were respected and listened to. I wasvery proud of the members who were in attendance and more excited than ever todeliver a Labour vision post independence.

 The event began by affirming our belief in a return to Clause IV and support for removal of Trident. Such views have been long held in the hearts of many Scottish Labour households and I am delighted to see the support for their return.

 Following this, we spent the rest of the morning listening to and then discussing the merits of The Common Weal with Jimmy Reid Foundation director, Robin McAlpine. This meeting really was the perfect start to our conference as you could see the light bulbs go on in our members' heads. The Common Weal is an exciting vision; one which we believe will bring equality, social justice and prosperity to Scotland. We are delighted to strongly support the concept and seek to find a Labour vision of this proposal.

 The Common Weal discussion set the stage for the rest of our conference. Throughout the two days, I was excited as expert session leaders provided enough to raise lively debate on all matters from drug addiction to investment. I would like to thank all of our invited guest speakers including, Robin McAlpine, Dr John MacDonald, Jenny Robertson from Phoenix residential treatment centre and perhaps our biggest star this weekend George, a former addict who had the courage to share his story with us.

 With only two days it is only right that we do not confirm ourselves to all that was discussed and in areas such as health, education and the economy more work will need to be done. However, I am very pleased to announce these decisions voted, and approved by our members:

1. Reject Nuclear Weapons in Scotland
2. Support Common Weal concept and contribute to it
3. Support full-employment Keynesian development policy
4. Support Major Banking reform in the New Scotland
5. Support the establishment of a Nationalized Scottish Central Bank
6. Support for 2nd language education from the age of 7 years.
7. Support an introduction of a living wage
8. Establishment of a state owned oil company such as the Norwegian company
9. Not to join NATO but to explore other joint defence international agreements
10. Expansion of universally free childcare.

We hope that this will be the beginning of our vision of what an independent Scotland can look like. It is an exciting time within our country. The SNP will offer their vision in November, we look forward to other parties and organisations announcing their visions as we are; to give the people of Scotland a choice of what our nation can become with a yes vote.

Our message should be simple, vote yes and choose from these visions. Choose no and get more of the same.

I hope many more of you will join us and help to shape a Labour vision of what Scotland could be like after a yes vote.

Allan Grogan

Leader

Labour for Independence.