I trust you will bear with me if I post another piece on the Labour Party, but I have become convinced that they have a death wish, because it is difficult to believe that they could be so collectively stupid. As you all know, I loath the Labour Party but at the same time I realise that a meaningful democracy must have meaningful debate and opposition. The problem is that within the Labour Party there is nothing remotely resembling meaningful. All of the leading personnel in the Labour Party in both England and Scotland are committed neoliberal free marketeers and not only cannot see any genuine alternatives to the poison of austerity but don't want to consider any if they are presented with them.
It beggars belief that the Scottish Labour Party are seriously considering Kezia Dugdale as their next leader and is testimony to the real absence of any talent within this sorry institution. If you want to know the real poison within Labour just consider their retiring leader Jim Murphy. It tells you all you need to know about this person when his final speech as leader of Scottish Labour was given in London to the Policy Exchange.
The Policy Exchange describes itself as a conservative think-tank. It is based in London and the Daily Telegraph newspaper described it as "the largest, but also the most influential think tank on the right". The Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, is reputed to consider it his favourite think-tank, whilst the Political Editor of the Evening Standard referred to it as "the intellectual boot camp of the Tory modernisers’". The right-wing Independent journalist, the quite appalling John Rentoul, called it"the best think-tank in the business". The following is true, I did not make it up. On Wednesday 11th September 2013, I checked my calendar to make sure that it wasn’t April the First as I genuinely couldn't believe what I was reading. It was reported in both the Times and the 'i' newspapers that the Policy Exchange had released a Report called 'Cultures of Dependency' in which it recommended that the unemployed should be made to commute 90 minutes in order to sign on. To make sure that this was not a wind-up, I went onto their website to check this. In addition, it recommended that where everyone in a family was unemployed they should be required to sign-on together as a group. I live in Scotland where it is a 45 minute journey from Glasgow to Edinburgh by train or car, thus a 90 minute commute. The reasoning behind this proposal is that commuting to claim will ”boost the unemployed person’s confidence and open up their chances of finding work further afield”. Thus, what this think-tank is proposing is that all the unemployed in Glasgow should travel over to Edinburgh to sign-on whilst all the unemployed in Edinburgh will travel to Glasgow. Presumably, in the course of this commuting, the unemployed from Glasgow will discover many employment opportunities in the Edinburgh area whilst the unemployed from Edinburgh will find similar employment opportunities in Glasgow. If such opportunities exist, why are there unemployed people in Glasgow and Edinburgh in the first place? Perhaps I am missing something in this cunning plan? However, unless the authorities are going to pay for their travel, no unemployed person will be able to afford to do that and will therefore fail to register as unemployed, and that of course is exactly what the neoliberals in the Policy Exchange wish to happen. If the authorities do pay the journeys then the Social Security bill will escalate exponentially, but of course that will not happen. This policy proposal displays a genuine insanity. All over Britain, the unemployed will be travelling a 90 minute round trip from Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle etc. indeed all over the country, simply to register as unemployed. The person(s) who came up with such malignant nonsense must be genuinely disturbed. It does, however, reveal the true depth of hatred and contempt that the neoliberals harbour for the disadvantaged in our society, and it is this society that Jim Murphy is a supporter of and it is such policy proposals that are animating the leadership of Labour. Remember this person is already a member of the neoliberal right-wing Henry Jackson Society. This is the nature of the Labour Party in 2015 and is why the membership of the Scottish Labour Party is currently sitting at around 15,000 and falling.
Unless members of the Labour Party are going to raise their voices against the destruction of their party by these brain-dead careerists then it is goodbye Labour. There are simply no underlying ties between the concrete realities facing Labour in Scotland and those facing them in England. Winning in England requires adopting policies and strategies that will kill them stone dead in Scotland and if they can't see that then they don't deserve to survive. You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
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