Dave Anderson has accused Kezia Dugdale of ignoring him. You might think, “Well fair enough, who the hell is Dave Anderson?” He might as well be some random nutjob on Twitter for all that the rest of us know, or indeed care. But Dave Anderson isn’t just some random troll, he’s been specially appointed by Jeremy Corbyn to troll Scotland on behalf of that part of the Labour party which is still talking to Jeremy Corbyn.
Jezza appointed Dave as Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland after the Union Jack jaiketed Ian Murray left in an old guard managerialist huff. Kezia then went and appointed Ian as her shadow shadow pretendy minister for liaising with those parts of the Parliamentary Labour Party which aren’t on speaking terms with Jezza. So Ian went from being the voice of Scotland in the shadow cabinet to being the ghostly voice of a party that’s a shadow of its former self.
Since Ian was the last Labour MP standing in Scotland, Jezza’s options for a new Shadow Scottish Secretary were pretty limited. In a bold move, he gave the job to a random northern English MP because when you’re as far outside London as Tyne and Wear you’re practically in Scotland anyway. Dave got the Scottish and Northern Irish gigs on account of the fact that he went on a coach trip to Loch Ness when he was a teenager and has experience in searching for dinosaurs. This is a skill which is invaluable when any dealings with the Labour party in Scotland are necessary.
Now you know who Dave is, although I’ll be honest I’m still pretty vague myself, it becomes a bit more understandable why he’s miffed that that Kezia has been dingying him. This guy that no one in Scotland has ever heard of and who has as much expertise and knowledge about Scotland as the average person in Scotland has about Blaydon is actually our official spokesperson in the shadow cabinet. Scotland’s interests in the shadow cabinet are being represented by a guy whose knowledge and experience of Scotland is limited to the occasional trip north of Berwick. So you might think that Kezia and Ian would be extra keen to meet up with him in order to make sure that he learns a bit more about Scotland than you can discover on a day trip to Edinburgh and buying a postcard with a photie of the castle on it. But instead Kezia and Ian are dingying him.
That said, Kezia has been dingying the whole of Scotland for the past year, so Dave shouldn’t really be surprised. Dave’s organising a tour of those parts of Scotland which still have Labour representatives, so that would be Red Morningside, and had hoped to meet up with Kezia on his foray into the savage parts of North Britain only to discover that Kezia is unavailable and Ian was washing his Union fleg jaiket.
Kezia has been pretty much unavailable to everyone for the entire summer. While the UK consumes itself in a Brexit induced madness, the Tories are hell bent on taking Scotland out of the EU against its will, the Labour party gives a practical demonstration in back stabbing that would do the Roman Emperors proud and the Scottish party continued its death spiral of irrelevance, Kezia went off to America for a leadership course. Clearly what she learned was that in a time of crisis, the best policy is invisibility, then with a bit of luck people will blame someone else for the multifuckited catastrophe that’s unfolding all around.
I’m not actually sure what the policy of the Labour party in Scotland is about any of the big questions facing us. But then neither is the Labour party in Scotland. Kezia’s faction seems to be clinging to the vague hope that somehow, perhaps with the judicious use of Kezia’s magic cloak of invisibility, the whole question of Scotland being dragged out of the EU against its will can be made to go away. We don’t want to see Scotland leave either Union, say Labour bods, without any clear idea of how they’re going to achieve that. Both EU representatives and the British government have ruled out a Scotland that remains in the EU while staying a part of the UK. Kezia must have missed that because it happened when she was hiding under her invisibility cloak on her holidays. The only thing that she’s quite sure of is that Scotland can’t have another independence referendum, although sadly for her her deputy has a different opinion.
Meanwhile Dave, as Jezza’s representative, presumably adheres to his part of the party’s line that there will be no second EU referendum. Jezza’s going to take Britain out of the EU and Scotland along with it. In a speech in Wales yesterday, Corbyn said, “You have to respect the decision the people made.” Although presumably not the Scottish people. His challenger, Owen Who?, has said that he wants another referendum on the question of Britian’s EU membership, a position that Kezia may or may not support. It’s hard to tell what with her hiding under that invisibility cloak.
But despite the cloak, it’s pretty easy to see why she’s avoiding that question. It would mean that she’s got to argue on the one hand why Scotland can’t have a second independence referendum, because we all have to respect the will of the voters in 2014, but on the other hand it’s imperative to have another referendum on the EU, because the will of the voters in 2016 doesn’t have to be respected.
All that the latest episode in the self-inflicted death of Labour in Scotland proves is that the party is lost in a fantasy of its own creation. Labour doesn’t want to deal with the hand that’s been dealt to Scotland by the Unionist establishment that Labour fought to defend. They’d rather pretend that we lived in Gordie Broon’s magic land where we get the best of both worlds instead of the real world we live in where Scotland gets the worst. This mess we’re currently in is as much of Labour’s making as it is the Tories’, and the only thing we can be certain of is that Labour won’t help us to get out of it. Scotland will have to do that for itself, and that’s why another independence referendum is coming. And this time, the Unionists won’t be able to hide behind Labour’s cloak of invisibility.
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