Why should I vote for a Labour party bent on its own destruction in Scotland?

By Peter Thomson

I am an ex-Labour voter, from a family of dyed in the wool Labour voters. So there will be those who read LabourList who would consider me a traitor, turncoat or mountebank; for my heresy in ditching the party.

I agreed with the ditching of clause 4 – it was politically stupid to retain it and in the changing world economic environment, illogical. The evidence is clear – command economies fail their people. The Communist Chinese have now acknowledged that fact and are seeing their economy grow by 7% this year.

I hoped that ‘Teflon Tony’ would be a man of his word and so he got my vote in 1997. Like many, I now feel I was conned because what we got was not a reformed and vibrant Labour Party but increasingly a party run from 10 Downing Street and Millbank which shifted ever more to the centre-right making the Lib Dems and SNP look increasingly like true centre-left parties.

As a Scot I have seen Labour in Scotland turn and eat its own with disastrous results in Holyrood. We have watched Tony and Gordon’s placemen and women come and go. With each attempt by Millbank and Downing Street to control Holyrood we have seen Labour in Scotland implode to the point that Iain Gray, Brown’s current pick as leader of Labour in the Scottish Parliament, is known to all and sundry as ‘Elmer Fudd’. The only Labour head of house at Holyrood with any cojones was Henry McLeish but the Brownite faction in Scotland did him in because they thought him “Tony’s man”. In return the anti-Brownite faction in Scotland ensured that Wendy ‘Planet Brain’ Alexander’s tenure was short lived.

Then Brown and the Tories came up with the ‘Calman inquiry’ whose findings were going to whip the Scots back into the Unionist line, ironically paid for by the Scottish Taxpayer. Scottish papers at the time of this big announcement warned that Calman would back fire on Labour and the Tories in Scotland. The main result is that Calman agrees Scotland should raise the bulk of its own taxation income – the fiscal autonomy option – Brown’s response, obfuscation, delay and denial handed the Scots even more direct evidence that the SNP do have the country’s best interests at heart. After all Calman apparently agrees more with Alex Salmond position than Gordon’s.

Then we have had the orchestrated personal attacks on Wee Eck (Salmond) of the SNP: the £400 of Westminster pies affair (while Labour let Hain off with out criminal charge for a £130,000 breach of PPER); the lying to Holyrood scam over a prisoner escape (nope, Eck just did what the police asked him to do); the two salaries disaster (Wee Eck draws his MP’s salary in full and the third of his MSP salary – which he has to draw under regulations – is paid into a Foundation in his mother’s name that is run by its trustees for the benefit of his constituents); the hollow cry for him to resign his seat as MP (Why? Saint Donald the Dewar didn’t).

With each of these empty attacks, orchestrated from Millbank and Downing Street, the Scots increasingly become more and more fed up with the shallowness and hypocrisy of Labour and by default the Union of Parliaments. All the while Wee Eck and the SNP sit on the sidelines having to do nothing more than keep their noses clean, carefully play their left of centre policy cards and garner the vote share.

So why waste a vote on a New Labour Party, set on its own self destruction, when the option is to vote for the SNP and its positive vision for Scotland?