Joani Reid and the rat-pack

Maybe it’s something in the water in East Kilbride and Strathaven, but the Westminster constituency seems to be cursed with morally bankrupt MPs. The present constituency boundaries are new and was first contested in the July 2024 Westminster general election, but the constituency broadly covers the same area as the abolished East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow constituency which in 2019 elected Lisa Cameron for the SNP only for her to defect to the Tories in October 2023. She chose not to step down and cause a by-election but accepted a minor government position as the Parliamentary Private Secretary for Scottish Secretary, the colonial governor Alister Jack himself. She then unsuccessfully sought selection as the Conservative candidate in what was then considered the safe Tory seat of Wokingham – although it was actually taken by the Lib Dems in 2024’s general election. Wisely she did not seem to consider stand for re-election as a Tory in East Kilbride and Strathaven as that would have meant facing the ire of the Scottish independence supporting constituents whom she had so shamelessly shafted. No wonder, an SNP MP defecting to the Tories is like one of the Seven Dwarfs supplying the Evil Queen with cyanide then feeding the apple to Snow White.

Cameron now makes the occasional appearance in the anti-independence Scottish media complaining about how she was bullied and how toxic Scottish politics are. Just a wee thought Lisa, maybe it wouldn’t be so toxic if people like you didn’t get themselves elected on a broadly left of centre pro independence platform and then defect to the Tories because Rishi Sunak was nice to you personally, which in your eyes was apparently enough to negate all the damage and harm caused by Tory policies to the constituents you were supposed to be representing.

But that’s all sewage under the bridge.

In the July 2024 Westminster general election the seat fell to Labour like so many in Scotland did, and we are now dealing with the fall out from that disastrously bad set of decisions. East Kilbride and Strathaven seems to have made a spectacularly poor choice in electing the granddaughter of the late great Jimmy Reid, Joani Reid, as their Labour MP. About the only thing that Joani has in common with her grandfather is the name on which she trades. Jimmy Reid fully supported Scottish independence, his granddaughter is a Starmite Labour party hack who was a Starmer loyalist Labour councillor in Lewisham before being parachuted into East Kilbride so Labour could trade on her family connections.

Upon being elected rector of the University of Glasgow in 1971, Jimmy gave a famous speech about the rat race which it is worth quoting here:

Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts and before you know where you are, you’re a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, “What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?”

His granddaughter is one of those people who stays silent in the face of injustice in order not to prejudice her chances of promotion and self-advancement. She was silent when her party threatened to slash the benefits of disabled people, the most vulnerable in society. She did not speak out against the injustice of the two child cap on benefits when her party decided not to abolish it, even though it has been described by anti-poverty charities as the single biggest driver of child poverty in the UK. She voted to strip pensioners of the universal winter fuel payment. She did not speak out when her government shafted women affected by the changes to state retirement age even though Labour had made great play while in opposition of giving those women the just compensation which the Ombudsman’s office had ruled they deserved.

She voted in favour of proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation and demanded that protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza be cancelled after the attack on the synagogue in Manchester as a “mark of respect”. She has not signed a letter signed by over 80 MPs and peers from all parties calling for sanctions to be imposed on Israel. But while she has been silent about an actual genocide, she has been highly vocal in condemning antisemitism in the UK, which very often is not antisemitism but condemnation of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, a topic on which she has had very little to say. At every turn Reid has remained silent in the face of injustice when speaking out would go against the dictates of the most right wing Labour leadership in history.

Reid has now weighed in on the immigration hysteria in a way which would not be out of place for a Reform UK politician, attacking the SNP after the party’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn said the Home Office is letting Glasgow City Council and residents down by not processing asylum applications in a timely manner and leaving the City of Glasgow to pick up the pieces and house asylum seekers without proper funding being in place.

There was not an iota of compassion from Reid about desperate people in truly dire circumstances or any acknowledgement from her of the efforts of Glasgow to adhere to its honourable tradition and culture of being a welcoming city and help them. Instead Reid treated us to Reform-esque invective, writing on Twitter: “The SNP are taking the biscuit.

“They chose to turn Glasgow into sanctuary for asylum seekers through their own virtue-signalling policies, and now they want the Home Office to bail them out.

“It’s the same old story – grandstanding about compassion, then crying foul when the bill arrives. Real leadership means planning ahead and building enough homes, not blaming Westminster every time their own posturing backfires.”

In fact the housing crisis in Glasgow is a result of decades of Labour mismanagement. It was the Home Office which selected Glasgow as a dispersal city for asylum seekers. Under the SNP, Glasgow has built more social housing than Manchester and Liverpool combined.

Labour isn’t going to push back against the rise of fascism in the UK, it’s going to lean into it in a hopeless and doomed attempt to chase Farage’s coat tails. Jimmy Reid would have had compelling and eloquent words about the rise of fascism and he’d have spoken about it with a humanity and passion for combating injustice that is alien to his granddaughter.

Joani Reid and the Starmer Labour party she so faithfully represents have become those people her grandfather warned us about. His daughter, like most of Labour’s Scottish representatives, is a fully paid up member of the rat-pack. He must be birling in his grave. The dignity and human spirit which he so eloquently spoke about over 50 years ago can only be defended in an independent Scotland.

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