KEVIN McKenna’s article about the Labour party was timely, but misses the point (Why many in Yes movement stuff care about the fate of Scottish Labour, January 20). The simple fact is that within the context of a modern Scotland there is no place for Labour, they have become a historical anachronism.
Labour are the political equivalent of the typewriter, vitally necessary in a historical and technological era, but now redundant. In short, Scotland no longer has a need for the Labour party and it is being deserted by its former supporters because it has nothing to offer. They may retain a relevance in England and Wales simply because they are not the Tories, but, as in Northern Ireland, they have no political space in Scotland and are superfluous. Should another viable English party emerge – an English equivalent of the SNP – then Labour may well disappear altogether.
READ MORE: Kevin McKenna: Why many Yessers still care about fate of Scottish Labour
Labour was the product of a particular environment, and that environment has disappeared. They could have adapted and retained a relevance, but that possibility vanished when Labour became captured by careerists for whom it was merely a mechanism whereby they could gain a parliamentary seat – the people like Blair and Brown, and our own Sarwar, for whom the party they represented was immaterial; they merely chose the party that would best secure them a political career within the geography they belonged to.
Having abandoned its roots in the labour movement and its working-class heritage, Labour lost any ideological justification for existing because it stopped representing real people with real needs and simply evolved to represent the individual selfish goals of those who were now its decision-makers.
READ MORE: Scottish Labour: Former Biden aide joins Anas Sarwar leadership campaign
As a result, Labour’s philosophy and its policies became a mirror image of its leadership, people who in truth were empty vessels with no connection to a deeper commitment than their own self-aggrandisement, and who despised those whom they purported to champion. In classic British cap-doffing deference, the working people who were the membership and who chose the candidates gave their party over to those they considered “their betters”, to people they assumed “knew better” and who were supposedly educated, but who had never worked, had no experience, no philosophical roots other than their own advancement, and who were both class and culturally alien to Labour voters. By this process Labour lost its soul and its purpose and abandoned the very reason and the people it came into existence to represent.
Scottish Labour’s intellectual bankruptcy went even deeper with their extraordinarily slavish kowtowing to their Westminster masters, and nothing demonstrates their predicament better than their attitude to independence. Simple common sense should tell them that their position is untenable; that, if they genuinely seek to represent “the people”, they should recognise the evolving preferences of those people, modify their stance, and provide leadership. But no, their betters – those public school, Eton and Oxbridge geniuses who must be obeyed – insist that their precious Union matters far more than an ignorant Scots electorate who don’t know what’s good for them.
Brexit was another own goal as, if they genuinely represented working people, they would have persistently warned those same people of the catastrophe that Brexit represents for them. Scottish Labour supporters understood this because they had a genuine alternative, a party that did persistently warn them, and so they turned to them in despair at a Labour party that had truly lost its soul. So, Scottish Labour is faced with the reality that it has no constituency, no identifiable base and nothing of substance to offer. Like the typewriter, it has become a historical artefact: quaint, but obsolete.
Peter Kerr
Kilmarnock
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