The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 31st May 2019
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 31st May 2019
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 31st May 2019
IT COULD be claimed that the major victor in the unnecessary Euro election in Scotland was the New Communist Party (NCP), whose call for a boycott of the proceedings was heeded by over 60 per cent of the Scottish electorate. The Brexit Party, nationalists and the Liberal Democrats have made similar claims on their own behalf, so we should not be left out.
With less than 40 per cent of the electorate cent of the electorate actually going to the polls it was appropriate that on Monday the Presiding Officer at Holyrood announced that the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Scottish parliament would be celebrated by taking himself on a tour of every parliamentary region in Scotland with the explicit purpose of countering the “growing cynicism towards politics and politicians”. An interesting commentary on the level of regard in which Holyrood is held.
The final results were only declared on Monday because votes could not be counted in the Western Isles on the Lord’s Day. As was to be expected, the result was different from the rest of Britain. No tea leaves were required to predict that the Scottish National Party (SNP) would come first. Their 37.8 per cent of the voted netted them half of the six seats. The Brexit Party got its seat with 15.8 per cent, and the Liberal Democrats earned the bronze and a seat with 13.9 per cent.
slumped
The Tories got their seat with 11.6 per cent of the vote. Labour slumped from two seats to nil, coming fifth with 9.3 per cent, no doubt rejoicing that they hammered the Greens on 8.2 per cent in to sixth place. So almost everyone a got a prize, despite the winners being disliked by 62.2 to 88.4 per cent of those who bothered to turn out. For Labour this was the first time since 1910 that they came behind both the Liberals and the Tories, a measure of the decline of class consciousness amongst the working class.
Before the election the SNP said that the vote had nothing to do with independence so that Unionists who disliked the European Union (EU) could safely vote for the SNP. But on Monday that was forgotten about when its leader announced that legislation for a second independence referendum would be tabled at Holyrood. Ironically the announcement was made in Ireland, where she added that the UK Government had treated Scotland with “utter contempt” whilst the EU had shown Ireland “solidarity and support”, which suggests that her knowledge of contemporary history requires some work.
The calmer sort of nationalist will have noted that 37.7 is not a referendum-winning percentage, even when they add the Green’s percentage to the nationalist total, and that a recent poll showed that only a fifth of the electorate wanted one.
The results were very good for ethnic diversity and inclusivity: the successful Brexit MEP is care home owner Louis Stedman-Bruce who is a gay black man, and the Tory Party is represented by Baroness Nosheena Mobarik CBE who is of Pakistani descent. She has already sat in the European parliament thanks to her being a friend of the Scottish Tory leader who pushed her up the party list when a vacancy occurred, when the incumbent resigned to take a proper government job at Westminster.
Sturgeon gave the V sign to the third of her supporters who are opposed to the EU when after the election she asserted that the result was “a very clear anti-Brexit vote”. One wonders how long it will be until people notice a contradiction between claims that it would be economically disastrous to leave the EU and claims that Scotland must leave the UK.
David Martin, the losing right-wing Labour MEP, lamented that his defeat was because of Labour “sitting on the fence on Brexit”, a view shared by former Scots leader Kezia Dugdale who demanded that Labour should start “backing a People’s Vote unequivocally and committing wholeheartedly to remain”. It is only as a result of his defeat that Martin came to public attention. He sat in the European parliament for 35 years but sitting was almost all that he ever did. He should, however, be given credit for the Seal Regulation of 2009, which means that cuddly Canadian seals are more likely to be eaten by sharks and polar bears than be shot at.