New Labour losing Glenrothes would have been a fascinating scenario. Holding it is rather dull. Not unnaturally the voters there were more concerned with ameliorating their situation in a degrading economic climate in the UK than with providing for more speculation on the collapse of the Labour party in Scotland.
The Labour-held Westminster seats in Scotland are like a petrified forest that would be cut down in any general election. Held since the Conservatives suffered the Thatcher wipe-out which reduced them to an English party, the same fate awaits tens of Labour Westminster MPs from Scotland, reducing Labour, too, to an English party. But this Scottish voting fodder is the means with which the national New Labour Executive sustains its grip on power; and in the case of the Westminster prime minister providing his only electoral validity.
A second New Labour loss of a safe seat in Scotland would have opened the vision of permanent minority status for Labour at Westminster. It would have spurred the devolutionary process in the United Kingdom, and not just in Scotland, as Westminster became an English parliament. It would have altered both major UK political parties to being contenders from the centre right and the centre left only in England. It would have produced a Scottish opposition of the centre right to the SNP which would assume the position of dominant party of the centre left in Scotland.
The growth of the permanent, administrative governance and its identification with an authoritarian state that is being imported with our assimilation into the European Union would no longer be inevitable. A highly devolved Scotland and England would defeat the regionalisation that breaks local unities and threatens our democracy.
Congratulations Mr Roy, congratulations New Labour, and best wishes for their future to the electors of Glenrothes.
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5 comments:
"It would have produced a Scottish opposition of the centre right to the SNP"
Sorry, what?
Whatever are you referring to?
If there are any centre-right parties in Scotland they are very well disguised. There are only left-wing parties in Scotland - in order of progressive leftness they are Lib-Dem, SNP, Labour, and whatever Tommy Sheridan's outfit is called.
The not-the-conservative party is irrelevant and practically non-existent.
Hardly surprising, !2.50 that there is no centre-right party in Scotland after the approaching a century of demoralising, demeaning, culturally detumescent, collectivist, authoritarian nightmare the people there have had to put up with from the Labour ascendancy.
HG: I have nothing to add to your last comment, except to say that the word verification for this post is:
andinit
Spot on - how do they do it?
HG, interesting statistics on Glenrothes from Old Holborn. 30% are economically inactive, 30% are public servants.
Turkeys. Christmas?
There's some old scandal about Glenrothes of the ground nut scheme variety, Elby. A huge tax-funded investment in mining and client statees being built a coal wonderland, I think.
Pity about the geology. Though the actual miners who used to go underground and cut coal (old-fashioned idea that, though their descendants still call themselves miners) did warn the Labour government that there were forbidding problems,they hadn't got the point:
working the coal was just something for them to do; the point was herding them into settlements and dribbling them welfare. It's been going on a long time, the desensitizing and controlling of the people.
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