[Robin McAlpine Blog] Oh, hacks, surely you know Sarwar is right?

[ALBA-Bot]

Oh, hacks, surely you know Sarwar is right?

A Labour canvasser knocks on the door of a former council house at the Holyrood Election. A woman in her 50s answers. "Are you going to vote for us?" asks the canvasser. "Nope" answers the woman. "Oh dear, why?" asks the canvasser.

"Well," says the woman "I wasn’t happy with Sarwar badmouthing Keir Starmer". The canvasser is one of the stooges brought in by Morgan McSweeney to push actual Labour activists out of the party so our canvasser is delighted. "But don’t worry – Keir is still our leader!" cries the canvasser.

"Oh, I absolutely despise Keir Starmer" says the woman. The canvasser is confused; "so why aren’t you happy at Sarwar calling for him to go?" "You see" replies the woman "he called for Starmer to resign but he didn’t check with various backbench Labour MPs like say Imogen Walker before he did it and that means it was a bit untidy and rather mistimed so I’m voting Reform".

And this utter drivel is what Scotland’s commentator class has decided has just happened. There seems to be a widespread view that Sarwar’s gamble hasn’t paid off because his own MPs weren’t on board. This is to misunderstand more or less everything.

It misunderstands the Labour MPs. This entire generation was part of McSweeney coup. Seat by seat, the Labour Together project was to put in the kind of people who thought Mandelson was the supreme politician of our era.

There was a time when Scottish Labour was united in its desire to get rid of the SNP. Now half of them would sacrifice Holyrood to save the McSweeney/Starmer/Mandelson project – and do it without a second thought. So let’s be clear; they plan to drag Sarwar to the sacrificial alter the second the Holyrood campaign is over. They will claim the failure is his, not Starmer’s.

It misunderstands the public too. What I’m trying to get across is how little any of this shit has anything to do with anyone other than a handful of Mandelsonites and a smattering of media commentators who seem never to tire of calling everything incorrectly. As I was pointing out on Monday, they are pattern recognition machines and in their pattern a chaotic announcement is always a failure. That’s why Reform has no chance. Oh…

If you’re glued to the least popular Prime Minister of all time then the second best time to call for him to go is this week

Let me try and spell this out one more time for you; the political court is held in contempt by virtually everyone now. All of them – politicians, staffers, lobby hacks, people who write op-eds in papers owned by billionaires, people who go on late night political television shows, lobbyists, PR firms – they’re all despised.

To help you understand (if by any chance you’re in that bubble); think of a load of people in frilly wigs, faces painted white with little black beauty spots, elaborate frock coats brushing their pantalooned knees. Now imagine you’re starving. Now imagine that what you hear from them is ‘oh no, disaster! The second Earl of Bollockstowe was dancing a madrigal and he turned left when he should have turned right! He’ll be reshuffled any minute! So embarrassing!".

Now let me instead give you a sense of what I genuinely think the sweet spot for Scottish Labour would be going into this election. On polling day, Keir Starmer would be history – but the party wouldn’t have elected anyone else to lead it yet. I’m not kidding; strategically speaking I’m pretty sure that right now Scottish Labour would do better if UK Labour was leaderless.

I know the political classes can see the polling. I’m, sure they even believe it; Keir Starmer is hated to an inordinate degree. But they seem incapable of behaving like they believe it. Again, it’s that pattern recognition system going wrong. Every one of them says ‘but Starmer is a good man, honest, doing his best’.

But what if Keir Starmer is a vile figure who blocked payments to starving children in Britain, encouraged a medieval siege on the blameless population of Gaza, acts with contempt towards people with an interest in social justice, tolerated racism, humiliated the nation grovelling to Trump and made a speech in which he called immigration ‘squalid’?

What if the four things he is really known for are being really bad at politics, being an obsequious creep to the powerful, telling lies and doing U-turns because of the other things? Oh, and free luxury spectacles. All of that is what I see. Apparently you have to know Starmer personally to intuit his goodness. Well good luck with that as an electoral strategy.

Two years ago Scottish Labour was set to oust the dismal SNP from government in Holyrood. Now it is dead on its feet and it is 100 per cent because of Starmer. What exactly is it the political classes have to see before they conclude that this has been a disaster? I swear, see if so much as one of these commentators write a post-election opinion piece suggesting Sarwar’s mistake was not breaking with London earlier, I’ll scream.

You know that saying about the second best time to plant a tree being today? Well if you’re glued to the least popular Prime Minister of all time then the second best time to call for him to go is this week. Strategically-speaking, the only thing Scottish Labour could sensibly have done was to have put much more distance between it and London Labour an awful lot earlier.

If people who talk about politics continue to have no real understanding of what is going on in the nation, they’re very much part of the problem

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Sarwar’s gambit is likely to work, not because Alan Gemmell or Tracy Gilbert aren’t on board with it (you’ll need to look them up like everyone else) but because by leaving it so late and not taking a more critical position earlier it looks like what it is – desperation.

As of Monday this week I think it was undoubtedly Sarwar’s best shout and that remains true whether a group of uber-McBlairites are grumbling or not. At least Sarwar can now stand up and say ‘Starmer has failed and isn’t good enough and the country needs new leadership’. That has the undoubted merit of being the view of almost everyone who gets to vote. Surely a good thing, no?

And he also gets half a shot at doing so alone. If you think being stranded on this shore while the rest of Labour is stuck on the other shore with Starmer, Mandelson and McSweeney is a weakness then I think you’re needing to sit down in a darkened room. Sarwar might just about be able to make himself look strong, bold and at least a bit decisive if he plays this right.

The main problem he faces comes from voters whose memory goes back further than the weekend. It is hard to project strength having revelled in weakness for a year. Sarwar must have known Starmer was ruining his career for quite a long time. It took a particular kind of weakness to suck that up.

But my main point here isn’t that the reheated corpse of the New Labour project has finally, utterly disintegrated, nor that Sarwar has got the right position, nor that he got there too late, nor that the Labour backbenchers couldn’t care less about Holyrood. My point is that if people who talk about politics continue to have no real understanding of what is going on in the nation, they’re very much part of the problem.

One in three parents has skipped meals to feed their children. Again, I know the commentator class knows this, but they appear to have no empathetic capacity to understand it or feel it. They still think we’ll quiet our rumbling stomachs long enough to think long and hard about Euan Stainbank’s position on a press conference someone held.

Like a plaidie tae the angry airt they hold up their op-eds about procedures and bond markets, hoping it will shelter them from the overwhelming rage of the public. They would be much better at their jobs if they were actually, truly to understand that rage. If they did they’d realise that what they’ve been writing this week is embarrassing. Again.

Source: Oh, hacks, surely you know Sarwar is right?