Cracking article (click link for full item). The most troubling question that may be asked about Murphy’s tour is this one: you’ve been a Labour MP for 15 years, Jim, so why didn’t you ever get up off your arse during that time to conduct a tour of 100 towns to highlight urban deprivation and social inequality? You waited far too long to show you cared about anything beyond your career and, when you finally did, you chose the wrong subject to get all passionate about: the British state. The same can be said about Labour in Scotland and could probably pass as its epitaph. Because, if something very drastic and very radical doesn’t happen to the party in this country soon, then it is effectively finished as a serious political entity and will become a party of the undead. It will be condemned to spend the next two generations in the same twilight zone as that occupied by the old British Liberal party throughout the 20th century. Those Scottish nationalists experiencing problems in accepting the independence defeat are gleefully portrayed as stumbling through the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief model. Some grief. Seven years ago, their party remained in opposition in its own devolved parliament. Since then, it has become the natural party of government in Scotland, having achieved an overall majority of seats and having come closer to bringing the British establishment to its knees than Hitler, Napoleon or Christine Keeler. Its membership currently sits at around 70,000, almost three times what it was on 18 September. If Carlsberg made political defeats… It is Scottish Labour’s party chiefs and its senior strategists who need to acknowledge, and quickly, what has just happened to them and to face reality. In four of their five most impenetrable redoubts, their core voters rejected the most intense barrage of anti-independence propaganda that any had ever encountered. They lost Glasgow and North Lanarkshire, for heaven’s sake. For two years, every Scottish MSP and all the Westminster ones that matter hectored Labour’s most loyal voters with wave upon wave of attacks on Scottish independence: only Labour at Westminster can deliver true social justice; there are too few of you adequately to foot the annual care bill; your pensions are at risk. Yet still, almost 40% of their supporters rejected these lines. #45PLUS #HopeOverFear
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 19:47:31 +0000
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