Jim Devine and the desecration of Robin Cook’s legacy

By Yousuf Hamid

Now that the inevitable has happened and we know Livingston MP Jim Devine will never again have the honour of representing Labour at any level it is worth reflecting on the level of anger that party activists feel which I think supersedes even the anger the public have expressed over the expenses scandal on the whole during the past few weeks.

As a party activist I’ve stated throughout this expenses scandal that I get the angriest when it’s Labour politicians who have abused the expenses system because, quite frankly, I expect better from a Labour MP.

There’s no way of saying this without sounding utterly sanctimonious and it’s not that Liberal Democrats, Conservatives or Nationalists are fundamentally immoral but Labour must have a moral superiority over other parties. Harold Wilson famously said that the Labour party is a moral crusade or it is nothing and the party must never lose that.

I remember when I first felt motivated to join the party; I read in a Modern Studies textbook that there was a mile that separated 2 areas of Glasgow called Bearsden and Drumchapel and there was a life expectancy differential of 20 years.

Like most people I thought it outrageous and it is the great desecration of society – by deprivation, poverty, ill health and illiteracy – that motivated most members to join our party.

A cause, not a career, may appear to be little more a than a second rate soundbite but it has some truth in it. I absolutely demand a much higher standard for Labour politicians than any other and it is for this reason that I will have no sympathy for any Labour politician who has abused the expenses system.

And Jim Devine was supposed to be filling the great shoes of Robin Cook after he died in 2005.

Robin Cook was the first Labour politician I had ever heard speak at a hustings at Glasgow Central Mosque before the 2005 General Election.

I was too young at the time to fully understand all of the debates of the night but I was incredibly impressed by the man. Since then he continued to impress me and was the most honourable man in the House of Commons in the run up to the Iraq war, sacrificing his career in Government to do what history will prove – and to an extent already has proven – to be the right thing. He was by all independent accounts a genuine, thoughtful, intelligent and overwhelmingly principled parliamentarian.

He was one of the great Scottish Labour figures who dominated British politics and was one of the great 4 Scottish Labour intellectuals with Gordon Brown, John Smith and Donald Dewar who should have been the driving forces in the Scottish Parliament but chose to drag the Conservatives out of power on the grandest stage of them all.

I remember during the Glasgow East by election talking to an activist from Livingston who told me how, during Jim Devine’s by-election, it was incredibly easy to get Labour promises as people were so bound to the legacy of Robin Cook that they would vote for us as the most fitting eulogy to the great man.

What a disgraceful way for Robin Cook’s legacy in Livingston to end up.