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What is the point of Labour ?


pawpar

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45 minutes ago, williemillersmoustache said:

If anything this is good news. Keith's long term strategy is to try and win back some of the ultra unionist 10-15% of the Scottish electorate they've lost to the Tories while completely ignoring the remainder. 

Bald men, battling over the same old broken comb. 

The cynic in me has to assume that, since the whole “press release” boils down to their announcing absolutely nothing, it was purely intended as an opportunity to deliver some “SNP BAD” from the muppet wing of the Labour Party (which is most of the Labour Party). 

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In response he pointed to Brown’s Commission on the Future of the UK, which is due to report and make ­recommendations to the party later this year.

“I am in favour of further ­devolution and that is one of the principles that sits behind the work the Gordon Brown is doing us on the ­Commission on the Future of the UK.

“And within the framework for that the only thing we are not going to countenance is the break up of the Union but otherwise we are open to further devolution without being ­specific.”

He added: “What we know is there needs to be change. Change should not be breaking up the Union but there needs to be change and Gordon is looking into what the options for that are.”

 

They must think we've got memories like sieves. What happened to that last lot of "further devolution" we were promised by Brown back in 2014?

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Scottish Labour should support calls for a second referendum on independence, regardless of its position on the constitution, former union boss Len McCluskey has said.

The party has always been steadfastly against another vote, despite dissent from some MSPs.

But Mr McCluskey, who was the general secretary of Unite for a decade and a major figure in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, said the SNP “have stolen the radical clothes of Scottish Labour”.

“We’ve been telling Labour in Scotland since 2007 – when a certain Nicola Sturgeon won a seat in Glasgow – to wake up and smell the coffee,” he said on the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland programme.

“The reality is the SNP have stolen the radical clothes of Scottish Labour and Scottish Labour have lost the trust of ordinary working people.”

To win back that trust, the former union leader said: “They’re going to have to battle really strongly; in my opinion they should support a second referendum on independence, what they actually do when that referendum comes can still be debated.”

He added: “The truth of the matter is that, in the opinion polls, it doesn’t appear to matter who the leader of the Scottish party is, we’re not making any headway.

“Labour has to do something imaginative and radical, because it’s not like the SNP are being successful in public services or education or health and yet Labour can’t put a glove on them at the moment.”

Scottish Labour dropped two seats in this year’s election, down to 22, although polls had predicted they would fall further.

The showing comes despite positive polling numbers for leader Anas Sarwar, who had been in post for less than three months at the time of the vote.

Meanwhile, Mr McCluskey weighed in on the levels of industrial action being seen in Scotland, with trains set to be cancelled during the COP26 climate conference if a deal is not reached with the RMT union by 5pm on Wednesday.

“I’ve never met a worker who likes being out on strike – workers take strike action because of that frustration, because they feel there’s a sense of injustice,” he said.

“It’s easily resolved – around the table the appropriate individuals could come up with the type of offer where the workforce feels they are being respected.”

He added there is always a “dilemma” when public service workers take strike action, because “innocent members of the public suffer”.

“It’s why, in my experience, workers are always that much more careful about making that decision.”

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Jeremy Corbyn told me yesterday that his big idea for us is to have a federal system with more powerful regional parliaments based upon the German system and associated with that would be the abolishing of the House of Lords.

Here was me thinking that Holyrood was the most powerful devolved parliament in the world.

I'm not sure that anyone can be found that would think that the HoL will be gone in the next decade. In fact, I'd be hard pushed to think of any serious commentator that would predict that would be likely any time this century.

it really is hard to think of Corbyn with any seriousness. Thing is Gordon Brown is the very embodiment of serious (or at least that is the image) and his offer is exactly the same.

 

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On 21/10/2021 at 14:43, williemillersmoustache said:

If anything this is good news. Keith's long term strategy is to try and win back some of the ultra unionist 10-15% of the Scottish electorate they've lost to the Tories while completely ignoring the remainder. 

Bald men, battling over the same old broken comb. 

Ulsterisation of Scottish politics has already happened. People are too entrenched in their positions on Scottish independence- hence relatively small movements in independence polling since 2014.

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15 minutes ago, sparky88 said:

Ulsterisation of Scottish politics has already happened. People are too entrenched in their positions on Scottish independence- hence relatively small movements in independence polling since 2014.

It probably doesn’t help that ultra UK nationalists eagerly adopted the term “unionist” from across the Irish Sea, and at least one is constantly going on about “partitioning”. Then again, I suspect Ulsterisation suits those types down to the ground.

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