Starmer’s failure is Scotland’s opportunity
Speymouth
What exactly is the point of Starmer’s supposedly Labour government? Just a few days after we learned that Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves are considering tax cuts for billionaire tech oligarchs, we discover that Labour ministers are ruling out the abolition of the two child benefit cap on the grounds of cost, even though its sole function is to act as the most efficient engine for creating child poverty that the UK has witnessed in the modern era. This same Labour government has also turned its back on introducing a wealth tax on the very richest, a 2% annual tax on wealth worth over £10 million, even though it is estimated that such a tax would affect a mere 0.04% of the population and would raise as much as £24 billion annually.
If the Labour party – let me repeat that, the LABOUR party – is not only not in favour of the redistribution of wealth but is willing to consider tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals on the planet while cutting benefits for disabled people and refusing to adopt the single measure which would do more than any other to help tackle child poverty, then what’s the point of the Labour party? Back in the 1980s the Labour leadership cracked down on what they called Trotskyite entryists trying to take over the Labour party, fast forward forty years later and the Labour party has been well and truly captured by entryists who have remade the Labour party in their own image, that image is of centre right lobbyists for corporations and private healthcare companies.
I’ve never witnessed a new government, moreover one elected with a landslide majority in the Commons, become so unpopular so quickly. It’s as though Starmer set out deliberately to alienate everyone who voted Labour in July 2024 in the hope of getting change from the Tories. He’s alienated pensioners, low income families with more than two kids, Waspi women, the disabled, Remain voters, opponents of the genocide in Gaza, those concerned about the climate, anyone who pays a gas and electricity bill, Trump haters, and now the LGBT community. This is a man who is spectacularly bad at politics. The only people he’s not pissed off are the toolmakers he keeps telling us his dad was one of, and that is just a matter of time.
All this is apparently so that Labour can chase the people defecting to Reform, but as time passes Reform is still performing strongly in the polls, so Labour decides it needs to be more like Reform and publishes videos of migrants being detained. But as the saying goes, you should never wrestle with a pig, you just get dirty and the pig likes it. So having legitimised Nigel Farage’s talking points, and in the process turned off its original voter base, Reform UK is still getting ever stronger and gaining even more momentum, so Labour decides it has to double down and become ever more like Reform. So we get the Home Office announcing it will publish the nationalities of foreign citizens and migrants convicted of crimes, a policy which will inevitably lead to league tables for racists showing which nationalities are more associated with particular crimes. This policy is blatant scapegoating and pandering to racists which could lead to outbreaks of violence against particular communities.
Fizza Qureshi, the chief executive of the Migrants’ Rights Network, pointed out: “The criminal justice system, policing and immigration systems are infamously racist and disproportionately impact racialised people.
“Attempts to manufacture a link between nationalities and criminality only serves to deepen prejudice and discrimination towards migrants from certain countries. Linking the nationality, ethnicity and immigration status with crime is nothing more than dog-whistle politics, which is incredibly irresponsible in the aftermath of last summer’s racist riots.”
Not only is this strategy of chasing after Reform dangerous, immoral, and reprehensible, it is manifestly a failure. Nigel Farage’s billionaire funded self pitying racists continue to gain strength at the expense of both Labour and the Tories. All that Starmer is doing is to entrench the far right even deeper into British politics.
It is now not at all unusual for an opinion poll to put Reform UK in leading position. Due to the unfair and distorting voting system used in Westminster elections, a party can win a large majority of Commons seats on a minority of votes cast. Starmer himself won his landslide Commons majority on a mere 33.7% of votes cast.
You might have thought that having won an election without winning the country Starmer would have strived to build a coalition of support by taking the UK into the customs union and single market and undoing some of the damage of Brexit. Sure the right would have screamed in protest but they were never going to support a Labour government anyway, but on the other hand Starmer would have successfully got Remain and Rejoin supporters on board and would have given himself a better chance of promoting that economic growth which he constantly bangs on about. Instead he’s delivered the worst of all worlds both politically and economically.
The UK’s first past the post election system leaves the UK uniquely vulnerable to a hostile take over by the far right, and the self-inflicted wound of Brexit leaves the UK uniquely exposed to the capricious whims of the man-baby in the White House. Rather than aligning the UK more closely with the EU, which is what a clear majority in the UK want, Starmer abases himself by pandering to Trump in the hope of some minor improvements to a trade deal which would see chlorinated chicken and beef pumped full of hormones on our supermarket shelves, the NHS opened up to American healthcare companies, and the UK forced to repeal legislation protecting women and minorities from abuse. The UK would be converted into a vassal state of Trump’s America.
For Scotland the answer is clear. At the next Holyrood election in May next year and at the Westminster election due in 2029, it is imperative to return strong pro-independence majorities elected on a mandate for independence, not with a mandate to ask Starmer for an independence referendum or to devolve the power to hold an independence referendum to Holyrood, mandates which he will Brit-splain away as not ‘really’ being mandates for a referendum at all. Holyrood and then a large as possible majority of Scotland’s Westminster MPs must have a mandate for independence itself and if it is ignored must be willing to use this mandate to walk away from Westminster and act as though Scotland were already independent, ensuring that Westminster’s writ no longer runs in Scotland. This won’t be easy, it will require political courage to stand up to a nakedly English nationalist far right British Government, but it can be done. Starmer’s failure will deliver Scotland to independence.
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