Letters / Left wing bias?
I couldn’t help but smile when I read about ‘Blatant bias’ from the BBC (SN, 08/11/14) from someone whose own left wing leanings are well known locally, and who is also involved with organising a union, of all things.
I read on, and was further amused by discussions of why Ed Miliband would or wouldn’t be a good candidate to lead the Labour Party into the next general election (in May 2015).
At that point, I stopped to think about things a bit more carefully for a short time; and then realised that the true implications of Alex Salmond’s petulant and malicious post referendum failure demand (for the immediate activation of the rest of the ‘devo max’ powers for the Scottish Assembly) still haven’t yet begun to sink in.
Very briefly, and as I understand it, granting Salmond’s demands for what will effectively be ‘Home Rule For Scotland’ has to be matched exactly by corresponding powers for ‘Home Rule For England’ and ‘Home Rule For Wales’ (and Northern Ireland too), if the final constitutional situation is to stand up unchallenged and unchallengeable in law.
What this seems to mean for the English Labour Party is that 40 or so of their Scottish MPs who are currently sitting in the House of Commons will no longer be able to vote at all on English matters at Westminster.
This situation amounts to exactly the same thing as the direct by-election loss of 40 Labour seats in parliament. Since, by its own recent admission, the Labour Party already needs to win an additional 69 seats at the next general election in order to have any chance of forming a Labour government to replace the LibCon coalition – even before ‘Home Rule For England’ kicks in – surely this means that it will now need to find 109 new seats by that time, or be unable to contend for office?
How is it going to do that, I wonder, given the present quality of its leadership?
On that basis, and as far as I can see, it really won’t matter at all who leads the Labour Party into the next general election – because it’s already failed as a result of Alex Salmond’s unintentional free parting gift to the Brits last September, and will probably become extinct by this time next year.
We, as voters, can help that long overdue change along – and not necessarily in favour of the Tories – simply by making sure that we all turn out to vote (postally or in person, it doesn’t matter which) in May 2015, just as we did on 18 September of this year.
On that occasion, we stalled Alex Salmond’s political ambitions altogether in one move; and at the same time managed to help avert what would have been a disastrous social, economic and political error given the total lack of real preparation for independence on Salmond’s part.
Scottish independence may or may not be a good idea – but it will require a full generation of concerted and unbroken effort to turn the idea into a workable reality; and as far as I can see, work hasn’t begun yet on any of the necessary groundwork.
If we’ve done it before, we can do it again – and if we can, we should.
Philip Andrews
Unst
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