Starmer, Corbyn, and implications for May’s Scottish elections
Speymouth
The big political story of the moment is of course the psychodrama enveloping Keir Starmer and the Labour party over the fallout from Starmer’s decision to appoint serial sleaze magnet Peter Mandelson to the high profile position as British ambassador to the USA despite Mandelson’s close ties to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and decades long history of alleged corruption being public knowledge. The scandal has already seen Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney tender his resignation, or more accurately resign before Starmer threw him under the bus in a last ditch effort to save his political skin.
There is currently a febrile atmosphere in the Labour party, Starmer is due to speak to Labour MPs this evening in what has been described as a charm offensive an attempt to calm nerves, but given that he reportedly would fail to recognise most of them if he walked past them in the street, this may not go as well as he might be hoping. It certainly doesn’t help that Keir Starmer is to charm and charisma as Love Island is to particle physics.
To be fair, very few members of the Scottish public would recognise any of the careerists and useless yes men and women who make up Labour’s spineless Scottish contingent of MPs. None of them are memorable or have distinguished themselves. My own MP Elaine Stewart has been spectacularly useless, failing to speak out on any issue, more than happy to back the retention of the abhorrent two child cap on benefits, just as happy to support Starmer’s U-turn, and quite willing to nod through the hideous cuts to disability benefit, which as a disabled person myself I feel very strongly about. I look forward to her being booted out at the next Westminster election. She’s been as useful to the community of Carrick and South Ayrshire as a complaint to the BBC about pro-Reform bias in Question Time.
I’ll certainly be talking more soon about Starmer’s self-inflicted travails and the implications these have for the Labour party in Scotland at May’s Holyrood election. But this is a rapidly developing story and the next couple of days will be critical for Starmer’s political survival as well as for the already dismal electoral prospects for the Labour party in Scotland in May.
Anas Sarwar is currently doing his familiar impression of an octopus camouflaging itself under a rock in an attempt to avoid a Scottish media which isn’t inclined to go looking for him anyway, but the Daily Record is reporting that a group within the Labour party in Scotland is pushing nepo-baby Sarwar to speak up against his patron Starmer and tell him that it’s time to go. But since Sarwar only got his current gig due to his loyalty to Starmer, once Starmer goes, Sarwar won’t be too long out the door behind him.
In the meantime let’s not forget that as well as describing Mandelson as his old friend and posing with a chummy photo with him long after Mandelson’s associations with Epstein were public knowledge, Anas Sarwar already had his own questions to answer about his tolerance of a Labour figure who was pally with a convicted sex offender. Although she will not be standing for re-election in May, Glasgow MSP Pam Duncan-Glancy has not been kicked out of the Labour party for her friendship with former Labour councillor Sean Morton, who in 2017 was convicted but spared jail for possessing images of girls under 15 and of a couple having sex with a dog. In January last year Morton was sent to prison for sixteen months after pleading guilty to possessing indecent images of children and breaching his sexual offences order. Duncan-Glancy continued to maintain her friendship with Morton even after he was sent to prison.
But there are other developments elsewhere which are deserving of attention. On Sunday, Your Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, adopted a resolution at its Scottish conference in Dundee which reads as follows: “Your Party Scotland believes that an independent Scotland is the best route to improve the lives of people in Scotland and achieve socialism.” The motion was approved by 63% of party members in attendance, which isn’t hugely surprising given that a significant segment of those at the conference were previously affiliated with the Glasgow Greens, are disaffected former Alba members, were associated with the Radical Independence Campaign, or the abortive left wing independence party RISE, which campaigned in the 2016 Holyrood elections but failed to make an impact and was deregistered as a party in 2020.
This means that for the first time ever, Scotland has a pro-independence party which is a branch of a British party, whose Scottish branch is not even fully independent itself and which still lacks a Scottish leader. It’s scarcely surprising that Your Party’s pro-independence stance has been met with not inconsiderable scepticism from many sections of the broader Scottish independence movement. We’ve been here before with promises made to Scotland by Westminster-centric parties. If Your Party is serious about Scottish independence it could start by granting independence to its own Scottish branch. There still remain far too many questions about Your Party’s stance. Corbyn has said that it should be for the people of Scotland themselves to say if they want another independence election, but what does this mean in practice? Would a pro-independence majority in Holyrood be the benchmark or would we see more of the goalpost shifting we’ve seen in the past? Given the long and shameful history of lies and betrayal Scotland has experienced from Westminster parties it’s far too big an ask to expect us to accept another vague promise, particularly one that comes from a party founded by Old Labour figures wedded to the idea of the Westminster road to socialism.
The party is promising to contest the Scottish elections in May, but it may struggle to field a full slate of candidates in time and there’s a serious risk that its participation could prove counter-productive, especially being a risk to the Scottish Greens, taking away votes that would otherwise have gone to a Green candidate on the list and preventing them from being elected, allowing an anti-independence candidate, even one of Reform’s ghouls, to get in instead.
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