Miliband confident whoever wins Scottish Labour leadership can defeat the SNP
Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? We wouldn’t expect Ed Miliband to come right out and acknowledge his despair at what is happening to the Scottish branch of British Labour and his dread of what is to come in the 2015 UK general election.
What might be a best-case scenario from Miliband’s perspective? Firstly, of course, he will be hoping that Jim Murphy gets the branch office manager’s job. He is, after all, London’s man. The British establishment’s man. A safe pair of hands. And Miliband doubtless believes the British Labour spin which portrays Murphy as “The Hammer of the Nats”. When Murphy’s name is mentioned it is to a rousing background chorus of,
May he sedition hush,
And like a torrent rush
Rebellious Scots to crush!
God save the British state!
All a tad overblown as, even if he should win, Murphy won’t be in a position to directly confront the SNP before the 2015 election. To do this, he will have to win a Holyrood seat in 2016. And it is by no means certain that he can do this. For the Westminster election campaign, he’ll pretty much have to content himself with spewing his lies and smears via the columns and airwaves of the British media while he alienates everybody in British Labour’s Scottish branch office with his thoroughly obnoxious personality.
And what weapons does he have to wield against the SNP in any case. Nought but loud-mouthed bluster and a notoriously casual attitude to honesty. Supposing he were in Holyrood for FMQ, he really wouldn’t amount to much more than a taller, louder and, perhaps, marginally more articulate version of his predecessor.
Miliband will also be praying that the SNP don’t take quite as many seats as the 48 that some pundits are predicting. If the SNP only take half that number, thereby quadrupling its representation at Westminster, the British parties and their friends in the media can portray this as a “disaster” for the party.
Oblivious to the fact that he has done so, Miliband has articulated precisely the problem with British Labour in Scotland. It has ceased to stand FOR anything. Rotted from within by an evidently incurable sense of denied entitlement and consumed by hatred of the party to which the people of Scotland have turned having been failed by British Labour, the Scottish branch has become no more than the anti-SNP party.
People are sick of the pettiness, negativity and disputatious contrariness which has come to characterise British Labour is Scotland. London’s answer is to send in one of their most petty, negative and wantonly aggressive operatives.
See on heraldscotland.com
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