Wee Ginger Dug: Murph E. Coyote’s fall heralds end of UKMay 9th, 2015 - 12:29 am Paul Kavanagh
THURSDAY’S election was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was a tale of two polities. It was the election that showed how broken Britain is. Scotland punished Labour and the Lib Dems for standing shoulder to shoulder with the Tories and preaching fear and smear.
We taught them what pandafication means, black-eyed, reduced to a rump, the backside of politics. As a result the Unionist parties are on the verge of extinction, left with just one representative each – the Three Whines Men with their gifts of scold, rank insult and besmirch.
The evil Tories have won an absolute majority. Ed Balls even blamed the SNP for Labour’s defeat in England. In Ed Balls’ unelectable universe it’s the fault of the Scots that the English voted Tory. But Labour is the agent of its own misfortune. If Labour can’t persuade enough people in England to vote for it, that’s not the fault of the SNP, that’s the fault of Labour’s rank inadequacies. The were equally complicit in the demonisation of the SNP, so only have themselves to blame for the traction that the Tories’ racist scaremongering achieved.
Now we’re told that Labour will have a period of reflection. We’ve heard all this before. It’s time the party stopped confusing “a period of reflection” with looking at itself in the mirror and thinking it is gorgeous. It’s likely that Labour will now choose a figure from the party’s right as its next leader, taking the party even further away from the Scottish side of the canyon. There’s nothing to bridge the chasm.
The Tories will now embark upon the changes to constituency boundaries denied to them by the Lib Dems in the last Parliament, and make it far easier for them to secure another absolute Tory victory in England in future. The Tories will introduce legislation to make Scottish MPs second-class representatives in Westminster. We’re facing a referendum on EU membership, and might be taken out of the EU on the back of English votes. Scotland’s membership of the United Kingdom was already highly conditional. With Thursday’s vote Scotland became semi-detached.
If anyone thought that the question of Scottish independence had been settled by last year’s indyref, Jim Murphy has got a Labour party burst balloon to sell them. He’s got a job lot of them right now.
Ed Miliband has resigned as leader of the Labour party so he can spend more time with his family. I take full responsibility, he said. Nick Clegg has resigned as leader of the Lib Dems so he can spend more time with his family. I take full responsibility, he said. Nigel Farage has resigned as leader of Ukip so he can spend more time with David Dimbleby. I take full responsibility, he said. Jim Murphy has not resigned as leader of the Labour party in Scotland, he’s staying to spend more time with a BBC Scotland studio. It’s all the fault of the SNP, he said.
Of all the party leaders who suffered defeat on Thursday, Jim’s humiliation was the most complete. Labour won’t lose a single seat to the SNP, Jim was claiming just a few short weeks ago. And he was correct. Labour didn’t lose a single seat, it was left with a single seat. We waved goodbye to Wee Dougie. I broke my neighbours’ windaes with the sonic boom of loud cheering when Magrit got her jotters. Anne McLaughlin became the Sherpa Tenzing of Scottish politics and climbed to the top of Ben Bain in Glasgow North East.
Jim claims that Labour still needs him at this difficult time – the party still has seats in the Scottish Parliament that he hasn’t lost for them yet. There’s still more damage that he can do.
Yet Jim is still hanging on. He’s not Labour’s bad apple, it’s their whole orchard that’s rotten. Jim’s a withered sour apple on a rotten apple tree. The cartoon coyote is refusing to acknowledge that he’s standing on fresh air, that there’s nothing to support him. He’s refusing to acknowledge that he’s already plunged into the canyon and there was nothing in John McTernan’s ACME catalogue to save him. He’s equally bereft of credibility, a laughing stock.
If Jim keeps those legs spinning he’s hoping they can still carry him all the way to a Reporting Scotland studio.
The leader without a seat of a party that scarcely exists any more. His leadership is now as fictional as his pre-election promises. Jim swore that he’d tell the voters of East Renfrewshire first whether he’d stand down as MP. Well they told him first. They told him his services were no longer required.
So now Jim’s saying that the party needs him to provide stability, and Labour seems to be in no rush to depose him. Partly Labour’s problem is that they had already scraped the bottom of the barrel when they elected Jim. If they ditch him now they’ve only got a few short thick planks left.
WE owe the people of Scotland a debt, he said in his “I’m clinging on for dear life” speech. And this would be true, he owes it to the people of Scotland to bugger off and crawl underneath a rock. There is no place left for discredited Jim in Scotland.
He made a last-ditch desperate plea for tactical votes, but even the Tories of the Mearns didn’t want him.
Even if every single Scot had voted Labour, we’d still be facing a Tory government. But Scotland didn’t vote SNP out of nationalism. We voted for democracy. We voted for a change. We voted for a voice that would be heard. In Scotland Labour didn’t lose for not being nationalist, it lost for not being left-wing enough, while in England the party lost for not being right-wing enough. During this election Labour described itself as the last truly British party, and like the British state, the party cannot survive this defeat in its current form.
Labour tried to bestride the chasm on the dust of the Murph E Coyote’s frantic spinning, but the people saw through it. The coyote looked down, and plunged to its doom, taking the fragile edifice of the British state with it. That’s all folks. The UK ends in cartoon farce.
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