Just What Is Labour Hame's Problem?

“Scottish” Labour is in big trouble. 

In the six months since the Scottish election they have been rudderless, visionless and desperately in need of direction.  The last time Labour were on the receiving end of such a drubbing at the polls, they elected the “dream ticket” of Kinnock and Hattersley within 4 months, before finding out how much of a mountain they had to climb to supplant Thatcher and her Tories.  There seems to be no sign of any haste or speed emanating from the red corner of Scottish politics.

Ready or not here I come...

You would have thought that there would even have been some sort of discussion on the future direction of Scottish Labour – a discussion of sorts has taken place with the UK wide party.  Nope, nada, squid, whistling Dixie on that score.  There was even some hope that with the advent of the cringetastic Labour Hame blog (Tartan cringe that name if ever there was one) that there would be a serious debate about the future direction of “Scottish” Labour – in a similar fashion to the way "The Orange Book" seemed to provoke debate within the Lib Dems 5 years ago.  Should they re-position themselves slightly to the left of the SNP, or should they try and take the SNP on in the position that they occupy – which is as close to the Scottish equivalent to New Labour as you can get.  I personally think they would get more millage from being slightly to the left of the SNP.  Has there been that debate?  No.

TINA & The Slow Death Of The Union

At the start of September, I did a post about the pro-Independence camp and the questions that they need to answer to win the Independence referendum.  Since that post, two things have happened that makes a yes vote possible.

The first is that there has now been two surveys published that show that more people support Independence that support the status quo.  The first survey was published the week that my original post appeared, on September 5.  This survey showed a lead for the pro-independence group of 1%.  Various psepologists would point to this survey as being a rogue survey, with further polling evidence required to see if this would be part of a trend.

Scotland's Greatest Album?

Listening to last weeks news coming from the Tory Party Conference was depressing and dispiriting.  Rather than write a post, which will be re-cycled again and again in the months to come, I though I would write about something else that caught my eye. Last Tuesday, STV began a search to try and find the 12 best singles/tracks produced by Scottish rock/pop artistes, which is not as easy as it sounds and has the potential to stray into controversial grounds.

Time on Cameron’s Side?

The strange thing about this years party conference season is that all of the parties do not have their troubles to seek.  While the Lib Dems suffered an electoral massacre in May’s elections, while Labour have been struggling to find a new direction post election defeat, The Tories have seen things begin to go against them.  As a result, their conference at the G-Mex in Manchester provides an ideal opportunity to re-group.

The Tories were the clear winners in the May elections, they only dropped 3 seats at Holyrood (where they are at their lowest ebb anyway) but gained 85 councillors and won 4 councils in the local elections.  The Icing on the cake was the defeat of the Lib Dems backed AV referendum.  Yet since then, the Tories have not handled things as well as they could have.  They were slow and ponderous in responding to the Phone hacking scandal and they were slow and ponderous in responding to the riots in English cities.Their reaction towards the current Euro-zone crisis shows the two stools nature of this government – they would love to say “I told you so” but saying so would not be appropriate real-politic.