Last Thursday’s local council elections in England seems to have provided some evidence that the Conservative Party may still be twitching and not yet dead. They managed to pick up a whopping 566 seats nationwide, thus far exceeding all expectations, including my own. The Tories now control more local authorities than both Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined. I am far from convinced that this performance will reflect at parliamentary level but it does mean, for the time being at least, that Iain Duncan Smith keeps his job as party leader.
Scotland, though. Scotland is a very different and far more melancholy story. Last Thursday also saw elections to the regional assemblies in both Scotland and Wales but it was Scotland that returned the most worrying results. Even prior to last Thursday, Scottish politics is lock-down between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, both left-of-centre parties. Their main opposition comes from the Scottish Nationalist Party which is also (surprise, surprise) a left-wing operation. There are also a handful of squeaky, apologetic Scottish Conservatives who, it would seem, spend most of the time trying to keep their heads below the parapet (though, to be fair to them, they are seriously up against it).
Now one would think that the Scots had more than enough socialists to go round and keep everybody happy but, no. The biggest winner from the Thursday’s regional assembly elections were the Scottish Socialist Party, a class-war marxist outfit, who jumped from having one seat in the assembly to nine seats and a 5% share of the vote.
Apparently a growing number of Scots are getting tired of the milquetoast, watered-down version of socialism they have been getting and yearn for the real thing:
The SSP stands for the socialist transformation of society. To replace capitalism with an economic system based on democratic ownership and control of the key sectors of the economy. A system based on social need and environmental protection rather than private profit and ecological destruction.
The SSP do not control Scotland. Far from it. But they are now an electoral force to be reckoned with in that country and it means that an already left-of-centre administration is going to have to tack much further to the left to appease them and prevent their support from snowballing.
The country that gave Adam Smith and Andrew Carnegie to the world, is fast succumbing to the Endarkenment.
SSP gets record levels. Hmph. Billy Connoly will be pleased, gloating about this in between doing adverts for ING.
Bah, grumble grumble grumble. This ex-Scot is glad to be living in Australia.
JJM
How do you get from William Wallace to Karl Marx?
Well…at least the highlands are beautiful. I spent 2 years of my life in Scotland, and what they need there is not socialism – but rather something that can take them out of the misery they think socialism can solve.
Class-war is a myth. It has never existed. Only in Marx’s wet dream maybe – he created the whole bogus in his head.
“environmental protection”, cough, splutter
Yes we all fancied a dip in the Elbe, Danube, Volga, Ob, Yellow, etc. Hey what happened to all the fish?
OT
Czech TV marks May Day by mocking communist era
OT
Czech TV marks May Day by mocking communist era
What’s going on?
The frontier of the US was explored and settled by Scots. They were the inventors, tax-payers, idea-men, philanthropists, industrialists, farmers, educators, distillers, politicians who created a vibrant and liberty-loving society.
And that was in the 18th and 19th centuries.
It looks like those Scots left their weaker genes at home.
I’ll have to be careful what I say here. Having already offended Pakistanis elsewhere, I now feel compelled to take a swipe at the Scots – which is a shame as I have some Scottish blood (it’s in a bottle in the cellar).
One of the (many) things I find so damned offensive about ‘New’ Labour is the preponderance of regulation chip-on-the-shoulder Scotsmen in the cabinet – the most offensive of whom is the absurd Ian McCartney, whose miserable, whining voice is like the last bleat of a dying haggis.
It’s easy to see why Scots produce so many socialists, of course. Give people the opportunity to vote for stealing money from other people’s pockets and they will. Scotland is kept afloat not by oil or whisky but by taxation raised from the hard-pressed South of England. It’s a trick that other Scot, Gordon Brown, has pulled to help his supporters in the similarly chip-on-shoulder North, too – hence the whopping rises in Council Tax, this year.
If the much-vaunted Scottish education system isn’t sufficiently good to enable Scots to learn by observation that socialism doesn’t work, then I suggest we go one step beyond devolution – we expel them from the union. They can then find out how well their policies work when they have to pay for them themselves. And, as a corollary, they can join the Euro and continue their historical love affair with France.
And, of course, along with their country, they can take back this mendacious, devious Scottish government.
> “It looks like those Scots left their weaker genes at home.”
But this leftist trait in Scotland is fairly recent. In the 1955 general election the Tories won thirty-six Scottish seats to Labour’s thirty-four.
It seems to correlate to the spread of TV – maybe they’re more receptive to BBC propaganda up there.
There are a lot of left wingers here. BBC Scotland radio and TV has the Scottish Socialist Party people on all the time, and their opinions are allowed to be disseminated pretty much unchallenged even when they are saying stuff which is just crazy. Their election material was saying that people should “Dare to be different” or something like that, I don’t have a copy of their material because I ripped it into tiny pieces. Anyway, whatever it said exactly it didn’t make clear how dreadfully dangerous these people are.
Something I really wish is that people would see that communism is even more dangerous than Naziism, because Naziism is pretty much a spent force, but communism could come back, and communism has killed a heck of a lot more people than Nazisim did.
Given the allagations surrounding George Galloway, an MP in Glasgow, isn’t it interesting that Tommy Sheridan, the leader of the SSP honneymooned in Cuba. Isn’t it interesting that he described Cuba as the “Island where socialism is at its best”. Isn’t it interesting that he met with Cuban goverment officials. Isn’t it interesting that a representitive of the Cuban goverment attended the SSP national conference. Isn’t it interesting that the star that the Scottish Socialist use looks very similar to and uses exactly the same jaunty angle as the star on the Cuban flag?
A Weekly Worker reporter said it best: “The wording of the motion and the enthusiasm of comrade Sheridan, certainly had me wondering whether or not the SSP leadership, or key sections of it, had entered into some secret diplomatic internationalist pact with the Cuban government.”
Maybe we should send Rush Limbaugh over there for a few years, and stick him on a Scottish radio channel. He is almost single-handedly responsible for the rise of conservative/libertarian media in the US, starting back in the early 90s. Now, radio here is dominated by conservatives/libertarians, cable TV news is clearly following suit, and liberals are pulling their hair out and blaming the 2000 and 2002 elections on it. It took Rush & Co. 10 years, but their perseverence paid off. Maybe it’s time reverse export some ideaology back to our motherland.
David: The SSP won 6 not 9 seats. Until Thursday, the media here expected the SSP to get more seats than the Tories who actually achieved 18. As Phil Jackson said, in 1955 the Tories beat Labour in seats, but the Tories are also the only party to win more than 50% of Scottish VOTES since WWII.
With the end of empire and entry into the EEC/EU, people here feel much more Scottish while remaining British. In the 1979 referendum campaign, Alec Douglas Hume, ex-PM and probably Scotland’s most respected politician, advised Scots to vote against devolution on the grounds that the next Tory government would offer a better and more devolutionary settlement than was proposed by Labour. As soon as Maggie got in, devolution was abandoned and Tory support here collapsed.
The Tories continued to oppose devolution in 1999 and suffered accordingly. The SNP has been the main beneficiary in small-town and rural Scotland. The Tories have now accepted devolution and are on their way back. There is a fair chance that the pro-business element of the SNP will form some sort of alliance with the Tories in favour of a fiscally autonomous Scotland within the UK.
“566 seats nationwide”
As an American who makes a stab at following British politics, I’m wondering if 566 is a huge success or just a middling success.
While I hope Mr. Farrer is correct, there seems to be a lot of regressive behavior going on all over Europe and Scotland has caught its fair share of the fever. It is my recollection that the Scots were happy to cozy up to whomever was England’s enemy of the century for financial but rarely military support. (I am not sure the Scots ever figured out the deal was for the Scots to fight the English and die to take the heat off the enemy of the century.) This is what makes me willing to believe that Della may well be correct. But Mr. Cooper’s opinion should be voiced more clearly in the devolved English parliament…oh, they didn’t get one? Perhaps that’s the problem.
Um, thanks for the outpouring of response to my question (see above) about the election. A little research in my 2 May issue of The Economist has cleared things up for me, to a certain degree.
George
See British Spin for a pretty good analysis of the election result:
http://britishspin.blogspot.com/
Rush Limbaugh in Scotland? If we could just teach him to speak in Glaswegian, the possibilities are simply delicious…
“Nae, dinna tell ya’s so, lads? Dinna tell ya’s?”
It was interesting to read in Guardian that Labour thinks the Tories are imploding. Judging from the Tory dominance at the local level, I’d say there is a grass roots uprising afoot. National Tory leadership may be bankrupt, but when you see this kind of turnover based on local, bread and butter issues…
As a Yank, I’m curious about what issues actually matter in local British politics, that could cause such a swing. I’m also curious to know if there are any coordinating groups that organize political parties on a grass roots level. Here in the states, we have a few national level agitators – like Limbaugh, or G. Gordon Liddy. But the serious political work at the precinct level is driven by the Republican National Committee and its state correspondents, as well as some “issue”-oriented groups, which have fewer but more focused resources. There is also a network of national and state-level think tanks which share information and generally trenchant and scholarly criticism of the status quo.
Very, very sad.
My Scots relatives must be rolling over in their graves!! (In Scotland, Canada, and the US.)
What has happened to the Scots? Nothing in their history, that I’ve seen, suggest they would ever
think of having anything to do with the likes of Marx
and class war.
Where’s the Scots’ Pride gone? Have the genes been diluted or something?
Omnibus Bill writes:
“As a Yank, I’m curious about what issues actually matter in local British politics, that could cause such a swing.”
I may be wrong but I’ve always had the impression that local issues only rarely have much of a bearing on local elections in the UK.
If a local hospital plan is an issue, or schools, or the decision to site a chemical works in a housaing area comes into play then, yes, local issues can have an influence. But, in general, people here tend to vote depending on their feelings about the inumbent government.
How this works for the Lib-Dems is that Tory voters who are disenchanted with a Labour government (Birmingham’s Muslims, for example) will switch to Lib-Dems, but so will shires Tories if they don’t like a Tory governmment or opposition.
This is why, on that basis, this week’s results, though satisfactory, are hardly thrilling. To unseat Blair, IDS needs signs of a far greater reaction against ‘New’ Labour. Which is not to say, of course, that this won’t happen, though it seems sadly unlikely.
I am still scratching my head along with Pete. As a Yank the generally socialist nature of Scotland has been a revelation to me. The stereotypes that I and most Americans have of the scottish are of a cantankerous, cheap, and most of all liberty-loving people. What the hell happened?