The craven idiocy of Sarwar and Starmer

Regular readers of this blog will be well aware that I have a very low opinion of Labour’s branch manager in Scotland, the current – but soon to be former – claimant to the throne of Saviour of the Union, and by throne I mean the kind that every home possesses in the smallest room in the house. Yet Sarwar has failed to live up to the very low standards by which I held him. Over the weekend Sarwar published an opinion piece in The Times which was hidden behind a paywall presumably in the hope that as few people as possible would see it and realise just how craven and idiotic he really is.

Sarwar’s big pitch to the people of Scotland is that we need to bend the knee and kiss Trump’s ring, which ring exactly is best left unmentioned. Sarwar is one of those delusional idiots who believes that Trump supposedly has an affinity and affection for Scotland on the basis that his mother was born in Lewis – even though by all accounts she was a cold and emotionally distant woman who never gave her sons much love, resulting in the oldest one becoming an alcoholic who drank himself into an early grave, and the younger one becoming the narcissistic sociopathic fraudster currently occupying the White House. The amount of love his emotionally damaged mother gave him is the amount of love that Trump has for Scotland.

Trump’s dealings are purely transactional and based in what is in it for him. His interest in Scotland begins and ends in what he can extract from us. Yet this is the man that Sarwar wants us to cosy up to, a man who will not hesitate to interfere in Scottish politics if it’s not as cruel and planet destroying as he’d like. Trump is a dangerous bully without a conscience or a shred of empathy, and like all bullies he understands appeasement as weakness and a green light to double down on his bullying. Inviting Trump into Scotland is like inviting the proverbial face eating leopard into your home while hoping that your face will not be next on the menu.

In making this call, Sarwar is showing how hopelessly out of touch he is with broader Scottish opinion. An opinion poll carried out by Ipsos last month – before Trump single-handedly threw the global economy into recession with his indiscriminate and nonsensical trade tariffs – found that 71% of the Scottish public hold an unfavourable opinion of Trump. Just 18% hold a favourable opinion of him. These findings show that Trump is considerably less popular in Scotland than he is in the rest of the UK, and he’s none too popular there either. In the rest of the UK 57% have an unfavourable opinion of Trump and only 25% view him positively.

This is not the first time Sarwar has called for a closer alignment with the American MAGA far right, earlier this year he called for an Elon Musk style Department of Government Efficiency in Scotland, a call which was received in stunned silence even by the tame audience at the Labour party’s Scottish conference.

Sarwar has only survived as long as he has because the anti-independence media in Scotland, which is to say almost all the Scottish media, has a vested interest in not exposing his political mediocrity.

Sarwar does have something important in common with Donald Trump, both are talentless nepo-babies who owe their current prominence to the influence and wealth of their daddies. America made the mistake of letting Trump get into office, Scotland can still return Sarwar to the obscurity where he rightfully belongs.

In his delusional article, Sarwar claimed that Keir Starmer had ensured that the UK had got the “best possible” trade deal with the US, after Trump had imposed 10% tariffs on most UK imports into the US, and 25% on cars and car parts. These are the same tariffs that are being imposed on the Taliban run Afghanistan, as well as Iran, Ukraine, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, Turkey, Colombia, Argentina, El Salvador, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, as well as the penguins of the McDonald and Heard Islands.

The “best possible” tariffs were imposed on Trump’s dictator besties in Putin’s Russia, North Korea, and Belarus, which were exempted from this new tariff regime. Starmer negotiated so well that he got the UK treated the same as Afghanistan and worse than Russia and Belarus. All that Trump has proven is that he doesn’t care about the havoc he wreaks and that you can’t spell tariffs without FFS.

Starmer gave his own response to Trump’s destruction of global trade on Monday. The need to drive economic growth in the sluggish British economy has been the over-riding priority of Starmer’s administration, even though economic growth without significant reform of the tax system – which Starmer was never proposing – merely puts more money in the pockets of the rich.

But economic growth now looks like a distant prospect as the world stares at the prospect of a global recession and a trade war created by the idiocy and greed of one vain and selfish man.

Yet even now Starmer still refuses to countenance the one thing that could do more than any other to boost the faltering growth of the British economy, to rejoin the European single market and customs union. The UK is isolated and exposed and Starmer still clings to the sacred cow of the Tories’ hard Brexit. He cares far more about chasing after right wing voters who will never vote for him than he cares about standing up to the threats we all now face. I follow Spanish politics closely, regular readers may recall I used to live there for many years and speak the language well. Spain’s broad-left government has managed to resist the rise of the far right. The root of its success is giving workers material benefits that bring them out to vote. Starmer’s policies are only benefiting the wealthy while alienating Labour’s traditional base.

There will never be a time when it’s politically easier to rejoin the single market and customs union, but even as the American poster boy for the far right blows up the world’s economy, Starmer is still too afraid of the right to do it.

At times like this a country needs a strong and principled leader who has the courage to stand up to a bully and to form strong alliances with others who are in a similar position, there is strength in numbers. In Starmer and his mini-me wannabe in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, we have craven opportunistic idiots who want to entreat Trump individually, bereft of the bargaining power that comes from being part of a larger bloc. An independent Scotland that was part of the EU would have much more clout in its dealings with Trump than we currently do, bending the knee in Brexit isolation.

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