LISA WHO?
There's a Labour Party leadership contest going on down south. It feels so irrelevant in this country, where Labour is a near spent force and there's the increasing feeling that we will get ourselves out of this broken UK long before they have a further chance of power in Westminster. If they have a chance. The evidently authoritarian nature of the new UK government is looking to engineer the political landscape in a way that could keep progressive political views out of power in England for the foreseeable future. If you thought the EU referendum was based on a gerrymandered electorate you ain't seen nothing yet...
Almost as if she was trying to add further pressure to the widening political gap between the two countries, one of those leadership candidates, Lisa Nandy, alienated a large section of Scottish opinion with her chilling remarks to Andrew Neil -
"We should look outwards to other countries and other parts of the world where they have had to deal with divisive nationalism and seek to discover the lessons where, in these brief moments in history in places like Catalonia (my italics) and Quebec, we have managed to go and beat narrow divisive nationalism with a social justice agenda."
Quebec? There might be some truth in that. Might. But Catalunya? This is fantasy politics. As in Scotland, the Catalonians pushing for independence from an increasingly right wing state are the dominant voices of the progressive left in their country. The traditional socialists, like Labour in relation to the SNP and Greens, have lost influence through their inability to look beyond the status quo to a more outward looking and international way of looking at the world. It is not the nationalist parties who are being divisive here.
But the events in Catalunya which generate the greatest antipathy to Nandy's crass statement surrounded the brutal oppression of the democratic process by the Spanish state. Anyone who has seen the documentary And With a Smile, The Revolution (ironically a Quebecois film) cannot forget the images of the baton wielding thugs of the Guardia Civil attacking people for exercising their democratic right to vote, nor the subsequent arrest and detention of elected politicians. If Nandy didn't intend to invoke those images then why hasn't she already apologised, not just to Scots, but to the offence she has also given to Catalonians?
Nandy has turned herself into the latest in a long line of ignorant English politicians as an effective recruiting officer for the SNP and the wider Indy movement. So at least her stupidity has one silver lining. Sorry, Lisa, but we won't be 'knowing our place' just for the likes of you.
As for my above reference to 'authoritarian' in relation to the Doris Johnson government, I wonder how his apologist can turned blind eyes to the onrushing sewer of evidence. A Prime Minister that seeks to avoid parliamentary and media scrutiny, a pathological liar with no moral compass, an associate of one of the world's most notoriously repugnant white supremacists, that allows Greenpeace to be put in the same category as far right hate groups, who appears willing to use 3 million EU27 citizens as bargaining chips (thankfully it looks like the EU will be resolute in dealing with that abomination), and who thought water cannon was the answer to a question nobody was asking (unless you're the Guardia Civil). How much more do you want?
And if EU27 citizens are the first target, who's next. The Tory record of Islamophobia might contain a clue...
Niemoller's famous verse is all too prescient a warning in the current situation :
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
