KEZIA FAILS TO IMPRESS

I have to say I'm a little confused here.

I understood that Kezia (and for that matter, Ken) were very much against theirs being an "autonomous party", but now it seems that they are autonomous. 

When did that happen?

I also understood that she was very much against Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader, because he would leave them "carping on the sidelines". I realise that she said that this was before he won a whopping 60% of the vote for the leadership, but surely her problem was that he would not win an election. There has seemed to be very little doubt expressed in comments from Labour MPs, even members of the shadow cabinet, and from all the press, including the Guardian and the Observer, that a large number of Labour Party MPs are not behind him (some have refused to serve in his shadow cabinet), and some have made it clear that they will openly defy him. Mr Falconer, Blair's flat mate, was on television today telling Marr that he would resign from the Shadow Cabinet if some of Corbyn's policies went through. 

Does Kezia seriously think he has more of a chance now of becoming prime minister than he did a few weeks ago, with a fractured party? Certainly the polls don't indicate that he does.

We have established that the Autonomous Scottish Labour, led by Kezia, will be able to make policy at conference... but what's new? It always could. Neil Findlay, when questioned about Trident, pointed out that the Scottish conference had voted it down in the past.

Fat lot of difference it made though. 

The British Labour Party simply ignored what the Scots thought. 

Will that change? How could it change?

As for the matter of Kezia controlling the Scottish whip instead of Mr Corbyn, at the present moment with only one MP it hardly makes any difference, but there will undoubtedlyly come a day when Labour has two, three, or even 20 or 30 MPs.

The party may even be in government in the UK one day.

If the English/Welsh Party whips their MPs to vote one way, and the Scottish Party whips their MP(s) to vote another way, how will that work? 

And at the present moment, with one MP (who is personally anti-WMD) will he be whipped by Kezia to vote the way that Scottish conference decides or the way that British conference decides, or the way the shadow cabinet decides?

If they are in government, could it mean that they could lose a vote?

It all sounds very confused to me, and not satisfactory.

Despite the fact that clearly there was no intention on the part of the interviewer to ask about Education, Kezia was clearly itching to talk about it and managed to get in the interesting "factoid" that 50% of the poorest pupils couldn't read when they left school.

She seemed pleased to get that in.

Perhaps she was lucky not to be questioned more deeply about it though.

If I'd been interviewing her I'd have wanted to know:

What is the definition of the poorest students?

How many of them are there? Tens of thousands, thousands, hundreds, tens, seven?

Where are they? Arte they concentrated in one place or all over Scotland or what?

Are there any other contributory factors, apart from poverty, which might be taken into consideration?

And then I would have pointed out that those who are 16 now, would have started at school 11 years ago. Within a pretty short period of starting school, and certainly in the first year there, they would have been shown how to write the alphabet. The building blocks of being able to read and write.

The current government came to power in 2007, or 8 years ago. 

So which party was in government during the first three years in which these poorest kids would have studied the foundations of reading and writing?

If you've got to the age of 8 and not picked it up, you're going to have a very hard time catching up.

Be careful what you desire, Kezia.

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On the subject of Kezia, I read on Twitter that she recently said that she didn't get involved with Better Together events.

I think she did: