Departure of Scottish Labour leader preceded by forcing out of Scottish general secretary – and imposition of campaign manager by English hierarchy
Last week, the SKWAWKBOX exclusively revealed the interference of the English Labour leadership in the business of the Scottish Labour party, forcing out not only Scottish Labour’s elected leader Richard Leonard, but also its left-leaning general secretary Michael Sharpe.
But London’s meddling didn’t stop there. According to senior Labour sources in Scotland, Keir Starmer’s outfit also decided that it was entitled to control the Scottish party’s campaign in this year’s Holyrood parliamentary elections – and ‘imposed’ its preferred campaigns manager, over the head of Leonard when he was still party leader.
The manager imposed is a former ‘Head of Commercial Marketing’ in Tony Blair’s Labour – whose Linkedin profile still sports a small picture of Blair.
If Starmer was trying to kill Labour in Scotland, he could hardly go about it more effectively than imposing a series of English decisions a few months before the election of MSPs and making Scottish Labour look to the electorate like a branch of Westminster.
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This country is a cesspit, in the image of the usa. Both have gong-farmers for so-called “leaders”. I’d much rather live in Cuba.
No doubt about it. I was offered the chance to stay there but ill-health prevented me from accepting their kind offer. I love the Cubans and they love being alive and assisting those in a worse situation than themselves. If Yankee Doodle Dandy thinks that Cuba will starve or put daffodils in their rifle barrels they will be very disabused. Regards ☮️
It’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that Starmer is really a Tory-planted wrecking ball. For Scotland, the only way is out: out of Westminster and out of the (former) United Kingdom.
Yes Jon, I understand your point, but actually, the truth is Starmer and the rest of the right wing PLP gang are in fact stupid, and believe their own propaganda. It is only because most of the “Left” in the LP (I mean to the left of most of the PLP) are simply not up to understanding the nature of the Right and the extent of their asinine stupidity that they do not gather in anger and remove the useless crew.
These Tories now in power have no love of Scotland, Wales and N Ireland. If they go, as appears increasingly likely, Tories will always win in England, their very own fiefdom.
You can do better than that. Picturing Starmer with a hammer and sickle, it makes Newsnight’s photoshop hatchet-job of Corbyn look positively professional.
I don’t know who you’re trying to impress or whether you’re trying to be funny but all you’ve succeeded in doing is making yourself look pathetic.
It may have escaped your notice but Jeremy Corbyn has been writing in a communist newspaper for the last 35 years and he chose to surround himself with communists as aides and advisers.
Clearly the virus of infantile ultra-leftism is alive and well on Merseyside, so it comes as no surprise that you are a fan of Orwell, a middle-class faux socialist who ended his life handing lists of the names of socialists (and homosexuals) to the British secret services.
Your heart’s in the right place but you should think twice before continuing to insult the comrades best equipped with the science of Marxism-Leninism, without which the British left would be in even more of a trendy-leftie pickle, awash as it is with fair-weather socialists, weathercocks, believers in anglo-american exceptionalism and peddlers of the delusion that socialism will come with the tooth fairy and that we are not ruled by people who, when the chips are down, will not hesitate to crush the fingers of socialist guitar-players or throw socialist feminists into the ocean from military aircraft.
Socialists need to rid themselves of illusions and fantasies and let go of middle-class props like Orwell and heed instead the words and example provided by those who died for their creed, Fred Hampton, Che Guevara, Thomas Sankara, Ruth First and Chris Hani to name but a few.
WTF is this diatribe it’s all over the place. Oh the left can’t do this or that? BS if the left is allowed to organise we get a movement like we had with Jeremy! Before the right wing scum realised what a danger a organized and passionate left was…With the help of this cult of new Labour 2.09 we now don’t have any opposition just a bunch of Tory-lite nodding donkeys.
So don’t give me this BS we know we can organize but need a leader to organise behind and sure as crap never going to be Starmer. Heck we don’t even have a socialist party in the UK any more. I will gladly help organize and get a socialist party into government but what I won’t do is lift a finger for a BS blairite cult. Been there done that and won’t be fooled again as they say.
So wake me up when we have a socialist party and leader that can lead you may cast aspersions on Jeremy but without the BS attacks from the blairite cult we whould be in government, with socialist policies and a socialist government.
Now we have this Tory moron factory of chinless wonders that will be in power for at least the next 10 years. So no I have bugger all illusions and see this scummy country for what it really is.I can also see the dammage this cult of new Labour is doing to Labour movement. More and more of us have given up because we can’t fight this right wing cancer with our hands endlessly tied. By these scumbags hiding in the back rooms and committees within Labour operating like a cancer destroying anything socialist and just leaving this cults members.
New Labour 2.0 will never get elected and if my a huge f’ up by the Torys sees them in power all we will get is more of the same policies but a different colour ribbon. So what’s your big idea how to solve this problem?
I couldn’t care less what class he was, the grassing up of gay people is new to me, but is being anti-Orwell a thing among lefties now? How alternative! What a shame Hampton, Guevara, Sankara, First & Hani had absolutely zero to say about impending totalitarianism via surveillance and propaganda, or we wouldn’t be in this mess!
Orwell’s attitude towards gays can be found in KTAF.
labrebisgalloise, SB’s image couldn’t be mistaken for anything but satire – Newsnight’s alteration to Corbyn’s cap was intended to work on a more subliminal level. Apples and oranges.
The BBC has a graphics department dedicated to that – it launched itself on Twitter with a treemap (rectangular pie chart for the pokemon generation) of Corbyn’s parliamentary questions meant to convince the herd that Corbyn had so little interest in business matters that the word ‘business’ wouldn’t even fit on the chart.
Marxism-Leninism – politically sound – maybe a bit lacking in sales appeal?
Oh – and labrebisgalloise, would you be kind enough to explain to this wrinkly old political ingénue what exactly the main points of contention between the virus of infantile ultra-leftism and the science of Marxism-Leninism?
I’m interested in policy of course, not abstruse philosophical differences.
Just a couple of policy differences relevant to the modern world will do.
Thanks so much.
Name please.
Find out whose side the members and unions are on, what is the back of a fag packet calculation
Methinks the attacks on CLP’s and broken promises will have tipped it decisively in favour of a left wing challenger
It really does not matter who the leader is, cleaning out Red Tories once and for all, is a two year job
For the attention of those who come on here who wanted the second EU referendum; shat on democracy by backing stammer, knowing full well it would lead to an end of Corbyn’s leadership of the party AND a catastrophic, humiliting defeat in the polls AND a purge of socialists and socialism within the party…
We all know who YOU are, and YOU know who YOU are.
So don’t you fucking dare come on here complaining about the labour party being pissed on in Scotland and how it will, in all probability, lead to the dissolution of the British UNION, you miserable, rancorous, contemptible little twerps.
You saw to it we were lumbered with stammer; don’t be pouring your buyer’s regret and blame upon those who repeatedly warned you about him.
Everything that has happened since 13/12/2019 is YOUR doing.
The only way some sort of rehabilitation of Scottish labour can now take place is to push an anti-austerity agenda and hope for the best that it takes seats off the SNP.
….But stammer almost immediately put the kybosh on all notion of anti-austerity, so there’s that one out the fucking window, too.
Nice one, dickheads.
I agree but nothing will happen from this right wing labour party, in my opinion Labour is dead, people are desperate for something clean and new! A unifying force.
When did we get to the point where being so called English or Scottish was a basis for division and why have we allowed our soulless politicians to take advantage like this? I was brought up to think Britain was one country.
Please add regardless of the shyster in the palace.
The nominations deadline was at noon yesterday (19/01). Anas Sarwar and Monica Lennon are the only candidates to have put themselves forward in the Scottish Labour leadership race, both of them have won the nominations required to secure their places on the ballot.The Scottish Labour hustings period is now open along with supporting nominations by affiliated and local parties. Sarwar, MSP for Glasgow, gained the support of 16 MSPs and the only Labour MP in Scotland, Ian Murray. He was also endorsed by more than a quarter of Labour councillors in Scotland, who signed a letter saying the candidate has “the positive ambition for an alternative vision”, and party-affiliated trade union Usdaw.
Lennon, MSP for Central Scotland, was nominated by five MSPs.