I've just watched an interview on Channel Four News with Andy Burnham who's standing for election to be the next leader of the Labour Party. This man is reputed to be the most left-wing of the candidates so far standing for the Labour leadership and at the end of the interview, Krishnan Guru Murthy asked him why, given what he had just said during the interview, he did not simply join the Conservative Party? Now I'm sure people reading this blog may think I am a bit hard on Labour at times and that they cannot be as bad as I say they are, but I rest my case. That was the conclusion of Guru Murthy, that Burnham is in fact a Tory and is promoting a Tory agenda for a future Labour government. As Labour will support the lowering of the benefit cap we learn today that this will affect a further 90,000 households, placing a further 40,000 children into poverty. If that's left-wing then the English language has lost all meaning and I shudder to think what the rest of Labour's candidates will come up with, particularly the appalling Liz Kendall and the grotesque Yvette Cooper. If that is the best trio Labour can come up with, the party in Scotland will not recover
for the foreseeable future. The Scots will never tolerate such cretins.
You see Britain's crisis is not only economic and political, its also moral and ethical. To a Westminster politician, economic considerations are paramount and no other considerations are allowed to deflect them from pursuing wealth. Free marketeers claim that they take inspiration from Adam Smith, but that is just nonsense. Smith was adamant (if you'll excuse the pun) that economics must be guided by moral and ethical considerations and he would be disgusted by the Westminster hatred of the poor and disadvantaged and of the naked greed displayed by the British elite. For Smith economics had to take account of the whole of society and he was scathing of policies that simply focused on the economic, on profit and loss. In addition, for Adam Smith, the true wealth creator in society was the working man, not some economic gangster working in a bank or the City of London.. As he states, the property that every person has in their own labour is the foundation of all property and that property he calls the most sacred and inviolable. Wealth is not money according to Smith, it is the amount of goods and services produced through the labour of working people driven by an advanced division of that labour. Money is the product of wealth, but it is not wealth itself, it is labour, as Smith tells us that is "the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities". As a result, the ferocious exploitation of zero-hours contracts is a violation and a hideous distortion of a property that is sacred and inviolable.
What Britain must find, as a matter of priority, is an alternative economic and political model, and that is the real thrust behind the Scottish rejection of Westminster and its personnel. The Scots may not articulate it like that, but it is because they have a real and concrete alternative available and they have accepted it willingly. It is not the SNP they are voting for as a great many people voting nationalist are not nationalists, it is a vision and the SNP are the immediate recipients of that desire for real change as they are the only alternative available at the moment. That is what Labour simply refuse to accept, and, if they continue with their refusal to see reality they will cease to be a major party as they are genuinely irrelevant just now and will eventually cease to have any relevance whatever. Labour must ditch free market neoliberalism if they are to survive. You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat.
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