LABOUR PREFERS TORY RULE TO HOME RULE
Aamer’s column for Scottish Sun on Sunday 16th March 2014
MORE PANDAS IN EDINBURGH ZOO THAN TORY MPS IN SCOTLAND
Gordon Brown and David Cameron were back in town this week to lecture us on how to vote in the Independence referendum.
As protestors gathered outside the Tory Party conference they chanted there are more Scottish Pandas than there are Scottish Tory MPs. Two pandas and one MP to be precise.
Whilst most people don’t really care what Cameron has to say, for some reason when Gordon Brown speaks he is accorded some respect and his pronouncements awaited with baited breath.
From the promises he made on Monday it would be easy to forget that he was at the heart of a Labour Government for 14 years. For twelve of those years he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and in the last two as Prime Minister he managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
I’ve always wondered why the words of this ‘failure’ are treated as such pearls of wisdom.
On his watch Labour Ministers wined and dined billionaires, whilst simultaneously slashing the living standards of millions of ordinary people who had voted them in. Any promises Gordon makes today are too little and far too late.
Senior Scottish Labour politicians have recently been queuing up to declare their values of Socialism, Solidarity and Social Justice. The problem is that it’s a bit like Gordon Brown turning on his smile, that embarrassing look of a brass plate on a coffin which nobody believes is genuine.
Rehearsed, boring and lacking passion are the qualities of Scottish Labour. Should Johann Lamont actually say something remotely interesting, surprising though that is, she is soon kicked into touch by her Westminster colleagues.
Labour’s target no matter what the issue is always the SNP Government but they know that there is a limit to what Scotland can do whilst Westminster has control over welfare and taxation.
It’s all very well Labour blaming everyone else for our woes but since the end of the Second World War there have been 18 general elections of which Labour has won half. The way they go on one would think they had never had the opportunity to change this country for the better.
Labour built the welfare state but they also began to dismantle it, thus giving the confidence to the Tories to carry on with the decimation. The Westminster elite are completely out of touch with reality, never having experienced poverty, they closest they will have come to hunger is some tokenistic one day fast for charity.
Britain’s super-rich have seen their wealth increase by an average of 30% to a total of £336 billion, the biggest increase in over 22 years all the while the poorest have seen their wages fall by 14% over five years. Crisis what crisis?
Gordon says we are ‘Better together’ but how so? We are certainly not making the same sacrifices. UK is on track to become the most unequal country in the developed world as 100,000 more Scottish children will be pushed into poverty by 2020. The Tories attack the poor because they can but what is more galling is watching a Labour Party compete in a race to the bottom.
Scottish Labour will never develop a backbone as long as their interests are dictated by a Westminster elite and the financial needs of the South East. Sadly they prefer Tory rule to Home rule for the people of Scotland.
