Kezia Dugdale has quit and it is about time too

Kezia Dugdale has finally done the decent thing and resigned as leader of the Scottish Labour Party. 

In politics it's customary to say kind things about political rivals after their resignation, but the best anyone could seriously manage with Kez is that she wasn't quite as bad as her predecessor toxic Jim Murphy, she was apparently a likeable person according to people who met her, that she tried hard to overcome her obvious and extreme political limitations, and that she's right to realise that she's out of her depth and hand the leadership on to someone more capable.

Labour Party right-wingers will obviously try to gloss over Kezia's legacy of failure and foot-in-mouth moments by pointing out that she increased Labour's share of Westminster seats from one to seven, but this kind of blind hagiography is wrong for many reasons:

• The reason Labour lost 40 of their 41 Westminster seats in the first place was the decision to appoint the Labour Party right-winger Jim Murphy as party leader, electing another neoliberalism-lite Labour right-winger as his successor was a spectacularly bad move.

• Winning just seven Westminster seats is still the second worst performance by Scottish Labour since 1931, and by a very large distance. 

• Under Kezia's watch the Tories increased their representation in Scotland to 13 MPs, their best performance since 1983, and the first time Tories have outnumbered Labour MPs since 1955.

• Six of the twelve Tory gains in 2017 came in seats that were held by Labour until the wipe-out in 2015 (Ayr, Carrick & Cumnock, Dumfries & Galloway, East Renfrewshire, Aberdeen South, Ochil & South Perthshire, Stirling). The SNP were never going to be able to hold their high water mark of 56/59 seats, so it's massively disappointing from a Labour perspective that the Tories gained the same number of lost Labour seats as Labour did themselves.

• Dugdale was famously caught out promoting the idea of voting Tory in certain constituencies to beat the SNP, when anyone outside of the fanatical SNP-bad position would obviously promotetactical voting for the SNP (a fellow centre-left party) in order to keep the fanatically right-wing Tories out of the Westminster government.

• Things fared even worse for Kezia in the Scottish parliament where Labour slumped into 3rd position behind the Tories, a very sad demise for the party that created the Scottish parliament and led the Scottish government for the first 8 years.

Another propaganda theme being pushed hard by the bitter Labour right-wingers is that Kezia has been purged by Corbynites. This is wrong because Kezia's surprise resignation has taken everyone by surprise, even her opponents to the left of the Scottish Labour Party. Nobody forced her to go, In fact she specifically stated in her resignation statement that nobody forced her out and that it was her own decision.

Kezia walked away of her own volition saying that the best thing for the interests of the Labour Party is for her to pass the baton of leadership on, which is something that pretty much everyone apart from the bitter Anyone But Corbyn mob should be able to agree on.

Perhaps Kezia realised that her tactic of publicly attacking Jeremy Corbyn and predicting doom if he became leader had rendered her position untenable after Corbyn secured the biggest increase in the Labour vote since 1945 to prevent the Tory-UKIP Trojan Horse ploy from landing the fanatically right-wing super-majority almost everyone was expecting?

Perhaps she realised that allowing the Tories to overtake Labour as Scotland's second party in the Scottish Parliament, and in Westminster amounted to an unacceptable failure to bounce back from the damage Jim Murphy and John McTernan inflicted in 2015?

Perhaps she realised that she's such a hopelessly limited politician that she even makes the grotesquely hypocritical Tory leader Ruth Davidson look competent in comparison?

The problem with Scottish Labour is that they have operated like a cabal that only ever listens to their own rhetoric inside the party bubble, and shows no inclination to actually offer things that the Scottish public are actually crying out for. 

How else is it possible to explain the election of Jim Murphy as their leader than as a great big "fuck you" to anyone who voted for independence (45% of the Scottish electorate)?

How else is it possible to explain the fact that Kezia was allowed to continue as leader until she decided to quit, even after leading Labour into 3rd place in the Scottish Parliament and Westminster, and even urging people to vote Tory because she's so caught up in the blinkered SNP-bad mindset?

Maybe Scottish Labour will finally see some sense and elect a leader who is willing to support Jeremy Corbyn rather than attacking him at every turn, and capable of offering a left-wing opposition to the SNP government, rather than a hopelessly out-of-touch shell of a political party that refuses to change direction and exists by complacently relying on a severely diminished legacy vote, and desperately riding on Jeremy Corbyn's coat tails whilst simultaneously slagging him off.

Kezia's resignation was unexpected, so it's going to be a while before the new candidates are known, but hopefully the leadership election will give Scottish Labour an opportunity to elect a new leader capable of leading them out of the political wilderness that Labour Party right-wingers like Jim Murphy, John McTernan and Kezia Dugdale led them into.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Ruth Davidson says you should vote against the Tories if you have a shred of human decency

When the Scottish parliament debated the despicable Tory rape clause the Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson advised the UK public to vote against the Tories if they find the rape clause abhorrent.

To get an idea of how abhorrent the Tory rape clause is, consider the fact that it even managed to unite the Scottish Labour Party and the SNP in opposition to it (getting Scottish Labour to agree with the SNP on anything is no mean feat). The Scottish Greens and the Lib-Dems also strongly opposed it.

During the debate the Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said "no woman anywhere should have to prove she's been raped in order to get tax credits for their child. I can't believe in 2017 that I'm having to stand up in the Scottish Parliament and make that argument".

The Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale called the rape clause "an absolutely sickening state of affairs" and quoted from an email from a rape victim in her condemnation of the policy.

The Lib-Dem MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton said that the policy of compelling women to provide evidence that they have been raped in order to obtain Tax Credits for their children "has no place in a civilised society".

The Green MSP Ross Greer said that "when you cut through the tank-riding, bagpipe-playing bravado, Ruth Davidson is just another cruel member of a cruel party".

The whole idea of limiting Tax Credits is abhorrent in itself, especially given the severe wage repression that UK workers have suffered since the Tories came to power in 2010. The majority families receiving tax credits these days are working families, not the unemployed.

The Tory welfare cuts that the abhorrent rape clause relates to will end up driving another 250,000 UK kids into poverty, and that's on top of the 400,000 extra kids growing up in poverty since 2010.

When the issue was voted on the only MSPs to vote against the motion to condemn the rape clause were the Tories. All of the other parties voted in favour. The motion to condemn the rape clause was passed by 91 votes to 31.

During her evasive defence of the rape clause policy (in which she evaded using the word rape) the Scottish Tory leader said that "if people across the UK do not support it, then there is an option on June the 8th to ask someone else to have a go".

In other words, if you find the rape clause abhorrent, you should vote against the Tories.

So take it from Ruth Davidson. If you have a shred of human decency, then make sure to vote against the Tories on June 8th no matter where you live.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Scottish Labour and the Tories are spouting identical rhetoric

The Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has stated her intention to seek another Scottish Independence referendum. It's beyond doubt that she has a democratic mandate to do so given the fact that the SNP manifesto states that they will seek another independence referendum "if there is a significant and material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will".

Since then David Cameron went on to lose his self-serving EU referendum gamble and now Theresa May is intent on dragging Scotland out of the EU (and the Single Market) against the will of the Scottish electorate.

The official Tory reaction to Sturgeon's announcement was astoundingly brass-necked. The party that delivered an unbelievably rushed, astoundingly dishonest and incredibly divisive EU referendum campaign has the absolute gall to try to claim that a Scottish independence referendum shouldn't happen because it would be "divisive".

The Tories won't be able to prevent the Scottish Parliament from approving an independence referendum because the SNP and the pro-independence Scottish Greens have a clear majority, so if the Westminster Tories block an official referendum, it'll clearly and undeniably be a bunch of English Tories (divisively) blocking the will of the Scottish parliament, which would be the greatest gift possible to the independence movement as they launch an advisory referendum (like the Brexit one was) and campaign with "English Tories are trying to silence Scotland and dictate our future: Vote Yes".

However brass-necked the Tory stance is, Scottish Labour seem to want to match it with pure strategic ineptitude.

The Labour Party know that aligning themselves so closely with the Tories during the 2014 independence campaign was the main causal factor in losing 40 of their 41 Scottish constituencies at the 2015 General Election. They also know that abjectly failing to differentiate their stance on Scottish independence from the Tories allowed the Tories to beat Labour down into third place in the Scottish parliament elections in 2016 by posing as the real unionist option.

Given that Scottish Labour have lost so much already by imitating the Tories so cravenly, you would have thought they'd do everything in their power to make sure they differentiate their message this time around, but no ... The Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale tweeted exactly the same rhetoric as the Westminster Tories about another Scottish independence referendum being divisive.

Dugdale's Tweet was met with an absolute hail of condemnation, but Scottish Labour clearly aren't listening. They're stuck in a self-righteous bubble of delusion that they're absolutely right, and the Scottish electorate are a bunch of idiots for rejecting them.

It seems highly unlikely that Scottish Labour will abandon their strategy of treating the Scottish electorate with utter contempt as they crudely ape the Tory party, but in my view their only remaining hope is to clearly differentiate themselves from the Tories, perhaps by doing something observably different like pushing for a devolution max option on the ballot paper.

If they stick with their failing tactic of imitating the Tories then they'll simply hasten their (already rapid) decline into political oblivion.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Owen Smith's hypocrisy and delusion over Scottish labour

Kezia Dugdale was the deputy leader of the Scottish Labour Party when they lost 40 of their 41 Westminster seats in 2015. She was then promoted to party leader in 2016 and went on to lead Scottish Labour to their most appalling Scottish Parliament performance in history, coming in third behind the widely despised Tories and not even winning her own constituency seat.

During a Labour leadership debate in Scotland Owen Smith tried to imply that anyone who doesn't agree that that's a "brilliant" and "fantastic" performance is an "entryist"! He then had the absolute gall to whine at the audience who laughed at his glowing appraisal of Dugdale's performance for not supporting their party leader. The absolute hypocrisy of the figurehead of the Anyone But Corbyn coup chastising other people for lack of loyalty to their party leader is absolutely astounding.

The people who laughed were laughing at the absurdity of Owen Smith's glowing appraisal of Dugdale's performance as party leader. It's not like they actually participated in a pre-planned, incredibly poorly-timed and ineptly executed coup-plot against their party leader like Owen Smith did.

It's difficult to just skip past such a searing display of hypocrisy from Owen Smith, but there is a more important issue.  Smith's comments about "entryism" just goes to show how utterly out of touch the guy is with what is going on in Scotland. He's banging on about the problem of supposedly undesirable people joining the party, when the real glaring problem is that once loyal Labour members and supporters have been deserting the party in droves.

In 1999 Labour won the first Scottish parliament election with 38.8% of the constituency vote. In 2003 they stayed as the main party in the Scottish government after securing 34.6% of the constituency vote. Fast forward to 2016 and Labour secured just 22.6% of the constituency vote and came in third behind the Tories. The performance was so bad that their own leader Kezia Dugdale failed to win a constituency seat and had to sneak in on the regional list!

The Labour Party leadership doesn't need to be angrily dismissing people as "entryists" if they refuse to accept the bizarrely rose-tinted claim that the current Scottish leader is doing a "wonderful job", they need to urgently accept that something is going terribly wrong with Scottish Labour and start thinking about what they intend to do to rectify the problem.

Pretending that everything is "wonderful" in Scottish Labour under Kezia Dugdale's leadership is very much like the behaviour of an alcoholic denying that they have a drink problem. The first step towards recovery comes when the person with the problem stops reacting angrily and defensively every time anyone alludes to it, and accepts that the problem actually exists.

Scottish Labour driving almost half of their voters away from the party in less than two decades is an incredibly serious problem. Finishing behind the Tories in the 2016 Scottish parliament elections is a clear indication of how severe the problem has now got. If things continue along this trajectory Scottish Labour is going to fade away and become a very minor player in Scottish politics, perhaps even being overtaken by the growing Scottish Green Party and the Lib-Dems (who are now flatlining, which is better than still shedding huge numbers of votes like Labour).

Owen Smith and anyone else trying to furiously defend the Scottish Labour leader when the symptoms of terrible decline are now so completely obvious is clearly living in some kind of closed ideological bubble. Reality-denying ideological bubble dwellers are a serious problem because they will obviously resist any efforts to resolve the problems, because people who are in denial tend to strenuously refuse treatment for the problems that they have deluded themselves into believing that they don't have.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Tom Blenkinsop's vitriolic Twitter tantrum

The Labour MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland Tom Blenkinsop has been having a quite extraordinary cry-bully tantrum on Twitter.

Months of anti-Corbyn drivel
 
Ever since the inept Anyone But Corbyn coup was launched Tom Blenkinsop's Twitter feed has been absolute abomination, with dozens and dozens of tweets attacking the Labour Party leadership and party members, and barely anything criticising the Tories, but over the weekend before ballot papers for the Labour leadership election were sent out he went into complete-meltdown mode.

Here's an example of Blenkinsop's anti-Corbyn drivel before his complete meltdown: "Corbyn is more wooden than a wooden spoon sitting in the wooden draw of a wooden kitchen...in the woods". The guy obviously thinks he's got some kind of searing rapier wit, but before his meltdown it was just cringeworthy babbling like that, retweeting hatchet-job articles from the likes of hard-right blogger and Murdoch stooge Guido Fawkes and repeatedly calling for Stalinist style purges of the Labour Party.

Something snapped

Over the weekend before the ballot papers were sent out something clearly snapped in Blenkinsop. He went from cringeworthy anti-Corbyn chuntering and calling for a Stalinist style purge of the Labour Party to rid it of all Corbyn supporters to repeatedly yelling "entryist" and "idiot" at anyone who dared question his ridiculous behaviour.

Calling for a purge of left-wing Labour Party members is bad enough, but repeatedly yelling "entryist" at anyone who dared question his attitude (including someone who clearly identified as a lifelong Labour voter) is sickening.

Stalinism

Blenkinsop followed up his bizarre calls for a Stalinist style Labour Party purge with an even more explicit call for a purge of anyone who booed Sadiq Khan's divisive attack on Jeremy Corbyn (just a few weeks after Khan had vowed to stay neutral in the Labour leadership election).

The most ridiculous thing of all is that after repeatedly calling for an ideological purge of the Labour Party, he then had the absolute gall to retweet someone who was chuntering on about Jeremy Corbyn supporters being a bunch of Stalinists.

One of the interesting things that arises from Blenkinsop's repeated calls for an anti-democratic purge of the Labour Party is that he clearly won't have a leg to stand on if Corbyn defeats the coup-plotters then decides to do the sensible thing and allow democratic re-selection of appallingly divisive and self-serving Labour MPs.

Blenkinsop wouldn't have a leg to stand on if the Labour Party allowed his local constituency Labour members to hold a democratic ballot to deselect him as their MP when he's openly and repeatedly called for an anti-democratic purge of the Labour Party.

It would obviously take a very brazen individual to object to democratic re-selection of MPs after calling for an anti-democratic purge of Labour Party left-wingers, but judging by the constant stream of divisiveness and abuse that passes for his Twitter feed, it's beyond doubt that Blenkinsop is capable of such brazenness.

Owen Jones is not an idiot

The fact that Blenkinsop calls Owen Jones an "idiot" is indicative of the guy's mentality. He's using a public platform to hurl abuse and insults at members of his own party, he writes dozens of anti-Corbyn tweets for every one he writes criticising the Tory government, and he's repeatedly called for a Stalinist style purge of the Labour Party, then his response to someone criticising his attitude is to call them an "idiot".

Personal abuse is pretty the lowest possible level of debate, and Blenkinsop's Twitter tantrum is a perfect illustration of the fact that he's a political gutter-dweller.

If you want some proof that Owen Jones isn't an idiot you could read his 9 questions for Corbyn supporters article and my response to it to see how the Labour leadership debate could have been conducted if it wasn't for people like Tom Blenkinsop who would clearly rather ruin the Labour Party completely than allow Jeremy Corbyn any chance of success.

Cry-bully tactics

Blenkinsop is clearly utilising the cry-bully tactic. The objective of which is to repeatedly insult and abuse people to the point that they respond in kind with abuse and insults of their own, then cry about the terrible abuse you're suffering. We've seen it already from the ex-Guardian hack Alex Andreou in his Acid Attack article on Jeremy Corbyn and anyone who supports him, and now we've got a classic example of an actual Labour MP using the same dirty underhand tactics.

This guy is supposed to be an intellectual!

One of the strangest things about Blenkinsop is that he's apparently got a degree in PPE and a Masters in Continental Philosophy from Warwick university, but on Twitter he comes across as having the debating skills of a petulant child having a tantrum.

Perhaps the philosophy department at Warwick University taught him that the ideal way to structure an argument is to repeatedly hurl insults at your opponents and then accuse them of things that you yourself are arguing for?

Blenkinsop is clearly acting as a very poor advert for the post graduate philosophy department Warwick University. If  an abuse-hurling intellectual lightwieght like Tom Blenkinsop is the calibre of person they churn out, then what value do their qualifications actually hold?

Blenkinsop's echo chamber

I first became aware of Blenkinsop's Twitter tantrum when someone posted a screenshot of one of his comments on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page, but when I went to check out whether such a ludicrously divisive comment could be real I discovered that he's blocked me, which is odd because I've never had any interaction with him on Twitter whatever.

It subsequently turns out that Blenkinsop has blocked pretty much every left-wing Twitter account out there, including Harry Leslie Smith, anyone who disagrees with him, a load of other people who haven't ever even interacted with him and even his own constituents!

There are only two reasons to use the Twitter block button. One is to stop people hurling abuse at you and the other is to create a closed ideology echo chamber where all views that contradict your own are silenced. Given that an awful lot of people who are blocked by Tom Blenkinsop have never even interacted with him, it's absolutely obvious what he's been doing.

I'm definitely going to consider the fact that I've been blocked by Tom Blenkinsop despite never having interacted with him as a badge of honour.

Worse than Britain First

The extreme-right hate group Britain First operate a similar kind of closed ideology echo chamber to Tom Blenkinsop, but with one crucial difference. They wait for people to actually leave dissenting comments before they hit the block button, they don't just go around randomly blocking anyone who might challenge their precious closed ideology.

It's incredibly sad that there's a Labour MP out there with an even more censorious attitude than the fascist britain First hatemongers.

Bringing the Labour Party into disrepute

Labour Party politicians like Sadiq Khan and Kezia Dugdale have every right to back whichever candidate they prefer (even though their stated reasons are laughable), but what the likes of Tom Blenkinsop and Ian Austin are doing with their divisive Twitter hate campaigns is completely unacceptable.

Any other party would have launched disciplinary proceedings against such divisive and vitriolic abuse aimed at fellow party politicians and members. Could you imagine Theresa May standing for a Tory MP who has taken it upon themselves to wage a one-man Twitter war against her, her cabinet and a significant percentage of the party membership? Of course she wouldn't.

Once the leadership election is over, I'd be amazed if muck-hurling Labour MPs like Tom Blenkinsop aren't at least put up for re-selection by their constituents, which seems to be a fair guess at why he's having such a tantrum. He can see that his toys are going to be confiscated because of his bad behaviour, and he's having a screaming tantrum about it.

Sadly for Tom, he doesn't even seem to realise that resorting to screaming tantrums rarely ever result in sensible adults changing their minds.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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If anyone is an expert in "unelectability" and "preeching to the converted" it's Kezia Dugdale

The leader of the Scottish Labour Party Kezia Dugdale is the latest Labour politician to churn out an anti-Corbyn diatribe for the mainstream press in the hope of swinging the Labour leadership contest in favour of the Blairite backed Anyone But Corbyn candidate.

Yet again the crux of her argument is repetition of the endlessly recycled "unelectable" trope. If anyone in Britain has the right to call themselves an expert in unelectability then it's Kezia Dugdale who managed the incredible feat of reducing Labour to Scotland's 3rd political party in the May 2016 Scottish Parliament elections, significantly behind the widely detested Tories.

Anyone might have thought that the 2015 General Election result might have been the nadir for Scottish Labour. Losing 40 of their 41 seats was the worst political capitulation in the history of British politics, but Scottish Labour apparently exist in such a bubble of delusion that they chose Kezia Dugdale to replace the departing Jim Murphy.

After the wipe-out in 2015 anyone would have thought that the Labour leadership would do everything in their power to try to undo the damage and re-engage an electorate they've alienated, but Kezia just stuck with the woeful "SNP bad" playbook, and in so doing strongly re-affirmed people's belief that abandoning Labour was absolutely the right thing to do.

The result of this belligerence is that Labour got walloped again at the 2016 Scottish Parliament elections, where the Labour vote was reduced to a tiny hard-core of Labour Party loyalists.

Another of the bizarre things about Kezia Dugdale's attack on Jeremy Corbyn is the way she accuses him of "preaching to the converted", which is another thing she is clearly an expert in, having been a key player in the process of reducing the once powerful and seemingly unassailable Scottish Labour Party to a tiny rump of party loyalists who are now significantly outnumbered by Scottish Tories!

It's bad enough that Kezia Dugdale has clung onto her job as Scottish Labour leader after leading them into another feeble electoral capitulation, but to then go around lecturing other people on "electability" and "preaching to the converted" displays an extraordinary lack of self-awareness.

If the Scottish Labour Party are determined to allow Kezia Dugdale to continue steering the party towards electoral irrelevance, that's their prerogative, but they really should try to stop her from doing her unwitting self-parody act, because it's excruciatingly embarrassing to witness someone so hopelessly out of touch that they don't even realise that the criticisms they're slinging at other people apply a thousand times more strongly to themself.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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How a "list" vote for the Scottish Greens carries more weight

During the 2015 General Election campaign Scotland was awash with infographics advising the Scottish electorate to vote SNP in 2015, and SNP/Green/SSP in 2016. Unsurprisingly after their landslide triumph at the General Election this message of pro-independence solidarity has morphed into a "both votes for the SNP" campaign in 2016, with staggering levels of vitriol being spat by a vocal minority of SNP supporters at anyone who suggests that "list" votes might actually be better used in support of other pro-independence parties such as the Scottish Greens.

It is beyond doubt that the SNP are going to win a majority in the Scottish parliament, the only question is how big their majority is going to be. The SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon is the most popular living person in Scotland, and the SNP administration in Holyrood has been the most trusted government in the whole of Europe. The majority of polls predict that the SNP will win almost every constituency seat in Scotland, leaving the other parties to scrabble around for the regional "list" seats that top up the Scottish parliament to make it a a much more proportionally balanced chamber than the staggeringly unrepresentative House of Commons.

"List" seats

The way the proportional "list" seats are calculated means that if the SNP win the huge majority of constituency seats they are predicted to, they are going to lose an awful lot of their "list" seats. The largely pro-SNP Wings Over Scotland site predicts that as a result of the SNP looking set to win so many constituency seats they will likely lose some 11 of their 16 list seats. The SNP will still have enough MSPs to form a majority government, but significantly more of their MSPs will have constituency seats and fewer will be list MSPs.

The Wings Over Scotland analysis shows that in most of the Scottish regions the SNP will win zero "list" seats despite taking vast numbers of "list" votes. This happens because the number of list votes is divided by the number of seats already won plus one, so in a region like Mid Scotland and Fife where the SNP look likely to win all nine constituency MSPs, their list vote will be divided by 10. This means that a list vote for any other party would carry ten times as much weight as a list vote for the SNP.

The Wings Over Scotland analysis shows that the vast majority of constituency seats will go to the SNP, while the "list" seats look set to be split between Labour, the Tories and the Scottish Greens.

Constituency seats

SNP 69 (+16)
Lib-Dem 2 (=)
Conservative 2 (-1)
Labour 0 (-15)
Green 0

"List" seats

Labour 24 (+2) 
Conservative 17 (+5) 
Green 9 (+7) 
SNP 5 (-11) 
Lib-Dem 1 (-2) 
Independent 0 (-1)

It is of course impossible to predict with any certainty whether such a huge SNP landslide victory in the constituency seats will happen, or whether Labour, the Lib-Dems and the Tories will unexpectedly scrape a few extra constituency seats. However what is certain is that "list" votes for the Green Party are far more likely to return additional pro-independence MSPs than "list" votes for the SNP.

A Pro-Independence parliament

Given that it is inevitable that the SNP are going to lose a lot of their list seats as a result of winning even more handsomely in the constituency seats, it makes sense for pro-Independence voters to lend their "list" vote to the Scottish Greens in order to prevent as many "list" seats as possible from being soaked up by the anti-Independence parties.

It's beyond doubt that the SNP will form the next Scottish government, but the balance of pro-independence and anti-independence MSPs is still at play. An SNP majority plus ten Green MSPs would have a much stronger pro-independence platform than an SNP majority plus two Green MSPs.

Limited opposition

Whatever happens in the Scottish elections, opposition to the SNP is going to be limited and divided.

Scottish Labour are in an absolute mess, and look likely to lose all, or almost all of their constituency MSPs. They really should have learned that cosying up to the Tory party during the independence referendum was a catastrophic mistake, and that the Scottish electorate are completely sick of centre-right Blairism, however somehow they saw fit to elect Kezia Dugdale as their leader, making a Labour resurgence in Scotland look about as likely as Irn Bru suddenly becoming the national drink of England.

The Lib-Dems used to do pretty well in Scotland, but they've screwed themselves even worse than Labour with their double dose of collusion with the Tories. Not only did the Lib-Dems cosy up to the Tories in the Independence debate, they also spent five years propping up David Cameron's malicious Westminster regime. If the Lib-Dems somehow manage to hang onto the five Scottish parliament seats they have it'll be a massive triumph for them.

One of the most shocking aspects of the collapse in support for Labour and the Lib-Dems due to their dalliance with the Tories is that the Tories look set to be one of the two main beneficiaries in the Scottish parliament elections, picking up a few extra list seats as a result of the D'Hondt proportional election method.

The only other party with realistic ambitions of taking more than a single seat in the Scottish election are the Scottish Greens. Anyone who would like to see a pro-independence opposition party pulling the SNP towards the left should seriously consider giving their "list" vote to the Scottish Greens. It's unlikely that they will win enough seats to overtake Labour and the Tories to become the official opposition, but just a few tens of thousands of votes extra could help them win four or five times as many MSPs as they currently have.

Conclusion

I'm not in the habit of telling people how to vote, so I'm certainly not going to insist that voting Green with your "list" vote is a better idea than voting SNP or even giving Labour the benefit of the doubt because things look different under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. However, barring a spectacularly improbable collapse in 1st vote support for the SNP, it is unquestionable that the majority of "list" seats looks set to be carved up between Labour, the Tories and the Scottish Greens, so a "list" vote for one of those parties is certain to carry much more weight than a "list" vote for the SNP because of the way "list" votes are divided according to the D'Hondt method. To argue against that is to argue against maths.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Jeremy Corbyn: The more they attack him, the stronger he becomes

One of the most pivotal moments of the General Election in 2015 came when Ed Miliband made the utterly bizarre assertion during the leaders' debate that he'd rather see the Tories form the next government than try to form a progressive alliance with the SNP.

If he thought that taking such a viscerally anti-SNP stance was going to help Scottish Labour avoid a catastrophic defeat, he was utterly wrong (they lost 40 of their 41 seats to the SNP), and if he thought that such a stance would play well with the English electorate, he was wrong again because it simply reinforced the right-wing media narrative that the SNP are far too evil and dangerous to be allowed any authority in Westminster, which massively bolstered the Tory election campaign. It's inconceivable that taking such a visible anti-progressive stance attracted anyone to the Labour Party, and in all likelihood it drove hundreds of thousands of progressive people away.

The sad thing is that many in the Labour Party don't seem to have learned any lessons whatever from their defeat. In fact Tony Blair even repeated Miliband's absurd stance when he said he'd prefer the Tories to win in 2020 than see a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn.

Another thing that so many Labour Party politicians have utterly failed to understand is that offering a watered down version of Tory ideological austerity cost them dear too. I mean how many people other than die-hard Labour Party tribalists could have been enthused by the policy of promoting exactly the same failing pseudo-economic ideology as the Tories, just not quite as nasty about it?

The fact that so many Labour Party politicians are incapable of understanding where they went wrong is abundantly clear from the way that so many of them have queued up to slag off Jeremy Corbyn, and provide the Tories and the right-wing press with a huge supply of ammunition should he actually win the contest (which seems likely given that he's the only one who isn't bitterly slagging off his opponents and sticking instead to clearly explaining his policies and offering a message of party unity).

It's absolutely clear from the terrified rambling of so many right-wing Labour Party politicians that they really rather would see the Tories win in 2020 than be part of a government led by Jeremy Corbyn.

Here are just some of the most egregious examples of these kinds of self-destructive attacks on one of their own MPs.

Liz Kendall (Labour leadership candidate): "[A Jeremy Corbyn win] would be disastrous for the party and disastrous for the country and we would be out of power for a generation" - Not only has she attacked the potential future leader of her party as unelectable, she's also stated that she wouldn't serve in his cabinet.

Yvette Cooper (Labour leadership candidate): "[If Jeremy Corbyn wins] we will be condemning our world to a Tory future."  - Yvette Cooper predicts a win for the Tories if Jeremy Corbyn is elected Labour leader and she too has declared that she wouldn't serve in his cabinet.

Andy Burnham (Labour leadership candidate): "[If Jeremy Corbyn wins] there's a real risk that the party could split." - The bizarre thing about this claim is that just a few days after talking up the prospect of the Labour Party disintegrating if Corbyn wins, Burnham then tried to rephrase his own fearmongering rhetoric about the future of the party as an accusation against Jeremy Corbyn's supporters! To his credit though, he's the only one of Corbyn's rivals not to have ruled out serving in the cabinet should Corbyn win.

Tony Blair (Former Labour Party leader, alleged war criminal): "Let me be absolutely clear: I wouldn't want to win on an old-fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn't take it." - An explicit admission that he would rather see the Tories win in 2020 than a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn. If this isn't evidence that Tony Blair is an enemy of the Labour movement, I don't know what is.

Chuka Umunna (the kind of toxic self-serving careerist that has completely infested Westminster politics): Accused the Labour Party of  "petulance" and"screaming at the electorate" then went on to arrogantly presuppose the intentions of the electorate by describing Corbyn's policies as "not a politics that can win". As I said at the time, if anyone is guilty of petulance it's clearly Chuka Umunna as he throws his toys out of his pram as he sees his career prospects dwindle by the day (unless he crosses the floor to join the Tories of course). Another one to rule themself out of serving in a Corbyn led Labour cabinet.

Jack Straw (Corrupt "cash for access" guy and Blair's biggest cheerleader for the invasion and occupation of Iraq): "Overall his policies are not policies that can conceivably win an election." -  Yet another arrogant presupposition of what the electorate might or might not want. Who knows what the political landscape will look like in 2020? Jack Straw may consider himself a great futurologist, but given how he utterly failed to predict the sectarian violence culminating in the rise of ISIS that came about as a result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq that he pushed for so vehemently, I'll be taking his futurological predictions with a massive heap of salt.

Chris Leslie (Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer and the guy who helped formulate Ed Miliband's woeful austerity-lite economic policy and then took over as Shadow Chancellor after Ed Balls lost his seat) - decided to launch a furious attack on Jeremy Corbyn's economic policy of using quantitative easing to fund infrastructure investment and public services, instead of using it to prop up the insolvent financial sector and enrich the wealthiest people in society (as was the case with the £375 billion in QE that's already been done). Chris Leslie's argument that investing in infrastructure and services is bad because it would cause inflation is laughable, as is his petulant decision to say that he'd refuse to serve as a minister in a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn.

John Woodcock (Labour MP and Liz Kendall supporter): "If you want to have a debate, it is absolutely essential that if you don’t agree with the ideas that he’s putting forward then you say why and you say why they wouldn’t work and why your alternative is better" - This is a quite extraordinary assertion from the MP for Barrow and Furness in defence of his decision to publicly attack Jeremy Corbyn's economic policies. It's extraordinary because it shows that he understands the importance of not accepting your opponents proposition, yet in January 2015 John Woodcock actually voted in favour of the continuation of George Osborne's socially and economically destructive ideological austerity agenda. This shows that John Woodcock clearly considers George Osborne more of an ally than Jeremy Corbyn when it comes to economic matters. Maybe he should just cross the floor and join the conservatives?

John McTernan (The electoral strategist who oversaw Labour losing 40 of their 41 Scottish MPs): This guy should be an absolute laughing stock after overseeing the most catastrophic collapse in support in UK political history, yet the mainstream press tend to treat him as some kind of sage expert on Labour Party politics (presumably because he comes out with the furious anti-Corbyn bile they want him to). Not only is McTernan so delusional that he thinks Labour can actually win in 2020 with his prescription of even more Blairite Tory-lite rubbish that has lost two consecutive General Elections and completely annihilated the traditional Labour heartland of Scotland (because the SNP outflanked them on the left with a clear anti-Tory anti-austerity narrative), he also thinks it's acceptable to go around publicly declaring people "morons" for supporting Jeremy Corbyn (as if mental health based slurs are an acceptable form of political discourse).

Kezia Dugdale (The favourite to take the poisoned chalice of leading Scottish Labour into another catastrophic defeat in the 2016 Scottish Parliament elections): Yet another Labour politician to presuppose what the electorate want by declaring Jeremy Corbyn would be unelectable and leave Labour "carping from the sidelines". Not only is this kind of attack on a potential future leader of the Labour Party really counter-productive, it's also an illustration of how crazily out of touch the Scottish Labour Party are with their own electorate. One of the most oft repeated messages I've heard from people on the Scottish left is that Jeremy Corbyn is Labour's only hope of trying to win back some of the 300,000+ supporters they've lost over the last five years. Her comments would also carry more weight if she hadn't been such an appallingly ineffective deputy leader of Scottish Labour, and not had her own "carping from the sidelines" embarrassingly torn to shreds by Nicola Sturgeon so often in the Scottish parliament.

If only they attacked the Tories with such gusto

It is astonishing to see so many Labour politicians launching such visceral attacks on one of their own. Where was this passion in the last five years? Why didn't these people attack the malice and incompetence of the Tory led coalition government with such determination.

The only answer seems to be that these people are ideologically much closer to the likes of David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne, Michael Gove and Theresa May, than they are to Jeremy Corbyn and the huge number of grass roots Labour supporters who are backing his campaign to become the next Labour Party leader.

The fact that so many of these people have said they would refuse to participate as ministers in a Corbyn government is a good thing. Yet another reason for people to get behind Jeremy Corbyn's leadership bis is that his Labour front bench would definitely not feature people like Liz Kendall (the most right-wing labour leadership candidate ever), Yvette Cooper (horribly tainted by her association with Blairism, her pompous fool of a husband and the bizarre expenses scams they concocted together), Chuka Umunna (the living embodiment of the self-serving career politician) and Chris Leslie (one of the guys who helped devise Ed Miliband's inept election losing "austerity-lite" policy).

David Cameron's useful idiots

The Daily Mirror columnist Kevin Maguire referred to the Labour Party politicians making these attacks as "David Cameron's useful idiots" and he's absolutely right. Every piece of fearmongering rhetoric about Corbyn now will be ammunition for the Tories to use against him for the next five years should he actually win. Instead of confronting Corbyn with arguments about why their favoured candidate might be better, they've gone for the kind of feamongering muck-raking political attacks that can only harm the Labour Party in the long-run.

It's easy to imagine Darth Blair saying "your powers are weak old man", to which Obi Wan Corbyn replies "You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine".

Corbyn the anti-politician

There is a case to be made that attacks on Corbyn from despised and discredited individuals like Tony Blair, Ed Balls and Jack Straw actually come across as ringing endorsements in the ears of millions of people who are utterly sick of the unprincipled, expenses scamming, cash-for-access offering, self-serving careerist class of politician who have come to completely dominate Westminster politics.

It seems likely that the more of these despised people who come out of the woodwork to condemn Jeremy Corbyn's brand of conviction politics, the more everyday people are going to see him as the anti-politician who is going to ride in and rescue us from the self-serving careerists who have ruined politics with their greed and self-interest.

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