No jam tomorrow for Grangemouth with Labour

We have become so used to the lies and betrayals of the Labour party that a term for them has entered the language, ‘jam tomorrow’. The term was first used in the Lewis Caroll novel Alice Through the Looking-Glass, published in 1871, but by the latter half of the 20th century it had come to refer to unfulfilled political promises, particularly those made by the Labour party.

However the scale and extent of the deception and betrayals peretrated by Keir Starmer since taking power in July last year have been shocking even by the standards of a Labour party for which an expectation of disappointment and betrayal is built in.

I said in this blog back before Starmer won the Westminster general election last July, but when it was clear that Labour was on track to win the election and in Scotland to make big gains at the expense of the SNP, that by the time the Scottish elections come round in May 2026, the Labour party would have blown through the goodwill all new governments receive during their honeymoon period and would have become very unpopular indeed.

But even I, with my already rock bottom low expectations of a dismal performance in government by a man who had lied his way into the leadership of the Labour party and who was set to lie his way into Number Ten, was unprepared for just how quickly and comprehensively Starmer and his Labour in name only government have blown up any public good faith in their performance.

The betrayals and disappointments started within a week of entering office, and have continued thick and fast ever since. Readers of this blog, as well as the wider public, are already familiar with Labour’s dismal litany of deceit, which is why Labour’s standing in the polls is plummeting so rapidly, so there’s no need to repeat it here.

Things have got so bad that even the Scottish media, usually enthusiastic cheer leaders for this season’s anointed Saviour of the Union, have rounded on Anas Sarwar and are no longer giving him the free pass that led to Labour’s Westminster general election victory in Scotland.

Things have to be very bad indeed for the Sunday Mail, the Sunday edition of Labour fan sheet the Daily Record, to turn on the Labour party and to splash a front page with the banner headline “£1 billion kick in the teeth for oil jobs, followed by the sub heading, Labour rapped for English football cash vow to boss who’s axing refinery.”

But worse even than that for the branch office, even BBC Scotland was attacking Sarwar and the Labour party on it’s 5.25 news bulletin for their inaction and lies regarding the closure of Grangemouth. For Labour in Scotland , that’s like being savaged by your pet lamb.

This is all the more remarkable since the BBC is now a public disservice, platforming the likes of Farage instead of standing up to him and determined to keep Scotland a part of the UK no matter how far down the gutter the UK slips.

The Sunday Mail headline comes a few days after a multi-vehicle pile up interview, interview which Anas Sarwar gave to STV News on Thursday. There was no sneery face this time. The branch manager was questioned by STV’s Colin Mackay in Holyrood after FMQs, thank God at least one Scottish broadcaster is willing to doorstep the Starmer apologist and ask him difficult questions – this is what you’re supposed to be doing, BBC Scotland. But then the BBC thinks its real job is telling us why Nigel Farage is such a marvellous chap.

The previous day, hundreds of Grangemouth workers had received redundancy notices, throwing them out of work. Only 65 of the 500 staff have been retained. The redundancies and the closure of the refinery have happened despite Sarwar asserting during a debate in June last year in the midst of the Westminster General Election campaign, that a Labour government “would step in and put our money where our mouth is and invest … and step in to save the jobs at the refinery”. Sarwar vowed: “We would put hundreds of millions of pounds behind it to make it a reality.”

We all know what happens when Labour makes a vow.

All too predictably, Labour has failed to save the refinery or the jobs, and the hundreds of millions to be put into saving the refinery have equally predictably failed to materialise. Instead, the UK government has only put up half of a £100 million pound fund, most of which was promised by the previous Tory government, with the rest coming from the Scottish Government. This money is not dedicated to saving the refinery and its jobs, it is earmarked for 11 projects across the wider area. £50 million is not hundreds of millions.

To say Sarwar’s response was unconvincing was like saying that Michael Shanks does a fine impression of a vertebrate. Sarwar claimed that because Petroineos – the joint venture between Ineos and the state-owned PetroChina which runs Grangemouth – was a “private company” the Labour government could not step in. This is apparently new information to the branch manager. Imagine his shock and horror on hearing that the redundancy notices had gone out and learning that Grangemouth was run by a private company. If only he had known. It’s probably the fault of the SNP for not telling him.

Sarwar kept repeating that Grangemouth is run by a private company as though that was going to make his weapons grade bollockery any more plausible. But seeing that Colin Mackay remained unconvinced by his pathetically ridiculous excuse, he pivoted to that trusty old Labour standard, bad boys done it and ran away, saying: “I would emphasise, Colin, that Labour has been in government for six months.

“The previous Tory government and this current SNP Government have known this was coming five years earlier, and they had no plan in place to secure a positive future.”

So Labour couldn’t do anything because Petroineos is a private company, but the Tories and the SNP ought to have done something because Petroineos only became a private company the second that Labour took power, or something. The Labour government has it in its power to nationalise the Grangemouth refinery, but that would be far too socialist for Keir Starmer.

The SNP were not the ones who were saying vote Labour to save the Grangemouth jobs, that was you, Anas.

Mackay pushed the Scottish Labour leader for more than five minutes on whether he had misled voters with pledges to step in and save jobs at Grangemouth. Sarwar looked deeply uncomfortable, his hopes of becoming First Minister had been so buoyant in the wake of last summer’s Westminster general election, but now it was looking like the Labour party in Scotland would be receiving redundancy notices of its own.

It now transpires that the same Labour government which claims it cannot save Grangemouth is giving Jim Ratcliffe, the billionaire tax exile owner of Petroineos, £1 billion for the redevelopment of Old Trafford. As well as promises to back his Old Trafford project, Ratcliffe’s firm Ineos has also been given a £600 million loan guarantee by the UK Government to build the biggest petrochemical plant in Europe in Antwerp in Belgium.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion now that the UK Government, of whatever political hue, will only invest in Scottish infrastructure when it involves the more efficient extraction of Scottish natural resources and their export south. Labour is however, quite happy to invest in the pockets of billionaires.

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