The revolving door

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

George Orwell, Animal Farm.

Two council by elections are due in Glasgow. This is not in itself earth shattering political news, council by elections happen all the time due to councillors resigning, or passing away. However two of the council by elections which are due in Glasgow are particularly interesting for what they tell us about the state of the Conservative and Labour parties in Scotland, or, you might say, the Conslabourtive party.

In the Partick East and Kelvindale ward, the Conservative candidate is Faten Hameed, who was the Labour candidate for Glasgow Central in two General Elections, firstly in 2017 and then in 2019. She left Labour in 2020, claiming that “Labour have given up on defending Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom.” That sentence alone is enough to tell you that Hameed doesn’t pay a great deal of attention to politics, otherwise she’d know that the Labour party in Scotland has been entirely captured by über-Unionists who don’t hesitate to deny the outcome of Scottish elections when the people of Scotland have the temerity to vote for a Scottish Parliament with a majority of MSPs in favour of holding another independence referendum. Either that or Hameed was just telling Tory party figures what they wanted to hear in an effort to ingratiate herself with them just as she presumably told Labour party figures what they wanted to hear in an effort to ingratiate herself with them.

She’ll now tell Tory voters in Partick East and Kelvindale what she thinks they want to hear in order to get herself elected. What she really believes only she knows, or maybe she doesn’t. Mind you it’s a safe bet that she firmly believes she wants a career in politics and she will say whatever it takes to get one.

Meanwhile over in the Drumchapel and Anniesland ward, Labour has selected Davena Rankin as its candidate. Rankin was the Conservative candidate in the Glasgow East Westminster by-election in 2008, campaigning with then party leader David Cameron. The previous year Rankin had stood for the Tories in the Holyrood Cathcart constituency in that year’s Scottish elections. She left the Conservatives in 2011 after saying that she could not support the cuts being forced on families by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition which took power in 2010. Despite this, she’s standing for a party which voted to keep the two child capon benefits and axe the universal entitlement for pensioners to the winter fuel allowance. But then everyone is welcome in the Labour party under Keir Starmer, apart from socialists and people who oppose the genocide in Gaza.

What applies to Faten Hameed applies equally to Davina Rankin, her only real political belief is that she wants a career in politics and she will say whatever she thinks will get herself in the good books of those who can get her one.

Vote Tory, get Labour. Vote Labour, get Tory. They’re not even hiding it now. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised if a member of Labour’s Tory Tribute Act leaves to join the official Tory Party. Neither should it surprise us that a former Tory candidate feels very comfortable in a Labour party which has shifted considerably to the right under Keir Starmer and now occupies the same political ground that the Conservatives did under John Major in the 1990s. Although on the issue of Brexit Starmer’s Labour party is nakedly Anglo-British nationalist and beyond the pale of even John Major’s Tories.

But this revolving door between Labour and the Conservatives tells us far more than it does about the careerism of these two particular candidates. It also tells us that these two parties are far more like one another than either of them would care to admit. On the crucial constitutional issue which is the cornerstone of Scottish politics they are both singing from the same Rule Britannia song sheet. They are also in broad agreement on economic issues. Starmer’s government is a Labour Government continuing with the same broken, discredited ideas of the right-wing think-tanks and Rishi Sunak.

No wonder former Tory candidates are so comfortable in the Labour party and no wonder former Labour candidates are so comfortable in the Conservative party. Flipping from one to the other requires no rethinking of the same centre right political nostrums. Both offer private sector involvement in public services, protecting the wealth of the rich at the expense of the poor and uncritical support for Israel no matter what war crimes or breaches of international law the far right government of Benjamin Netanyahu commits.

The policies espoused by both Labour and the Conservatives kill. They don’t just kill by enabling Israel’s brutal and wildly disproportionate retribution in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, they also kill much closer to home. Pre-pandemic research by health experts has come to the conclusion that the most important cause of the stalling of life expectancy in Scotland was the austerity policies that were brought in by the UK Government in 2010. Research into the effect of those austerity policies on people’s health showed that the inequalities created by cuts in government services and social security spending had a significant effect on the poorest groups of people.

Life expectancy in Scotland peaked in 2012-2014 but then plateaued until 2017-2019 where it fell thereafter. Research over the last decade has shown that life expectancy has been getting worse for the poorest areas in Scotland, which equates to roughly 1.5 million people. Dr Margaret Douglas, a consultant for Public Health Scotland (PHS), said: “Life expectancy in the most disadvantaged 30% or 20% of areas has actually been going down, and that’s really shocking.”

None of this will change as long as Scotland remains under the control of Labour Tweedledee and Tory Tweedledum. The revolving door between those parties benefits only political opportunists and careerists. It’s a door that’s firmly shut to a better future for ordinary people in Scotland while the Conslabourtive party continues to syphon off Scotland’s natural wealth and resources in order to benefit the big businesses and corporate interests which fund British politicians and gives them loads of free stuff, stuff that the rest of us pay the ultimate price of.

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