Labour thumping victory over the SNP in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election was achieved in part by backing off from Net Zero policies, the war on the motorist and gender woo. It’s the latest signal that the Left-wing party is shifting to accommodate the inconvenient realities that the public is keenly aware of but political elites so often like to try to ignore. Iain Macwhirter has more in the Spectator.
In recent months the Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has outflanked the SNP by moving significantly to the centre Right. Indeed on key issues of tax, energy, welfare, gender and the Union Sarwar is in danger of treading on traditional Tory territory.
Scotland already has the highest taxes in the U.K. with those earning over £50,000 paying around £1,500 more than in England. Humza Yousaf is committed to increasing the burden still further. But Labour’s message to the voters of Rutherglen was that Scots are paying quite enough tax already and getting precious little in return for it. Labour now has a “presumption against tax increases”. Nor has Mr. Sarwar supported the SNP in its vehement opposition to the U.K. Government’s two child cap on benefits, what some Labour MPs used to call the “rape clause”.
On Net Zero, Scottish Labour has distanced itself from the SNP/Green slogan of keeping Scotland’s oil and gas “in the ground”. Sarwar now accepts that development of the controversial Rosebank oil and gas field off Shetland will go ahead and agrees with Rishi Sunak that fossil fuels will still be needed “for decades to come”; Labour even opposed the SNP’s low emission zone in Glasgow.
Sarwar has also disowned the Scottish Government’s Gender Reform Recognition Bill despite Labour having voted for it only last year. Sarwar now says there needs to be greater protections for women against predatory men invading their spaces by self-declaring themselves as female. And of course Labour remains a staunch defender of the Union and resolutely opposed to any repeat referendum on independence.
Worth reading in full.
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All that will be ditched if they get a WM majority.
Can’t trust a word they say ahead of an election. Any of them. Judge them on the other 4 years.
Or after.
There’s no hope for European civilisation. I think it will have to effectively die before there’s a chance it can be reborn on the right track, and by then it will be too late because we won’t have any majority European countries left, except Russia and its satellites.
Sarwar now says there needs to be greater protections for women against predatory men invading their spaces by self-declaring themselves as female.
I didn’t think that was the thing. I think they self-declare themselves to be ‘women’ and thus attempt to draw a distinction between ‘adult human female’ and ‘woman’. In this way they can also try to call out people who use the term ‘female’ as bigots.
It’s all bollocks, of course.
Women have spent the last 60 years on the equality bandwagon blurring the distinction between men and women, emasculating toxic males in the patriarch, invading men’s spaces and traditional male occupations, insisting they can compete with men physically.
Well they have done a very good job so Hurrah! congratulations and comeuppances all round.
I don’t distinguish any difference between ‘woman’ and ‘adult human female’, so if Iain Macwhirter and/or Anas Sarwar want to refer to “predatory men…self-declaring themselves as female”, I see no problem with that terminology.
SNP or Labour – how do you take your Hemlock?
The only good thing to come of the demise of the SNP is that people with half a brain won’t have the contents of their wallets turned into Euro’s. ——-But hey aren’t the Scots really just Germans anyway? Just look at the way we talk ——-“Das ist ein braw bricht moonlicht nicht die nicht”
“… Sarwar is in danger of treading on traditional Tory territory.”
Well it is currently unoccupied.
Rinse and repeat ad bloody nauseam.
When will people learn that those ‘apparently’ in power answer to a different power. There’s only one direction of travel…
It is rather sad that we have to keep repeating this Aethelred.
Reminds me of the poll Laurance Fox did, and public opinion was in favour of the policies of the Reclaim, yet, the two party stranglehold stands and people still vote for them.
Scotland till about 15 + years ago mostly voted labour. That is until they fell out of Love with Blair’s government who they seemed to think were closet tories. So they virtually overnight started to go for the only other bunch of Socialists available—The SNP. Suddenly they all wanted “Independence”, something that previously only a few quirky oddballs in Kilts had harped on about. (Like Salmond). But the party is over, if ever there really was a party. It was more like an exercise in self flagellation and pretending that if the cost of a Mars Bar went up it was all the fault of the Tories who dragged them out of the EU kicking and screaming. It is said that “People go mad in crowds and only recover their senses slowly one by one”. The size of the SNP crowd is shrinking faster than you can say “let’s pour concrete in all the gas wells”.