Breaking: Kezia Dugdale steps down as Scottish Labour leader

[Denzil_DC]

18. Well, yes to all that, T_i_B.

It really depends, in a Scottish context, what you mean by "Corbyn's politics". Up here, they seem to amount to airy promises of delicious pie in the sky when we've already got much of the pie he's offering already on our table, but he doesn't like the cook, so it turns to ashes in his mouth and he strongly discourages others from appreciating it.

Corbyn's bound by party policy, though message discipline from him and others in the UK Shadow Cabinet is often lacking - not least about Brexit! That problem is even more apparent when you throw the Scottish branch office and its motley crew into the mix.

So Corbyn at the moment, even to those who want to project the most favourable interpretation onto his politics, is a creature of contradiction, and whether you give him a pass for that depends on how on board the Corbyn train you are.

He favours nuclear disarmament, but the party's policy is to retain Trident and press ahead with its replacement with a successor system (albeit in some watered-down form that makes even less sense than the full replacement).

He rails against austerity, but Labour's last manifesto projected major continued cuts of the sort he'd slam the SNP for enacting.

I could go on, but I imagine you get my drift, and the article I posted a while back, "Reassessing Corbynism: success, contradictions and a difficult path ahead", covers these sorts of issues and triangulations and convenient obfuscations very well.

One of the main policy tensions between Scottish Labour and the SNP in power has been the question of universal provision of benefits etc. versus means testing. For instance, we have universal free prescriptions, universal free school dinners, etc. ("free" at the point of delivery, of course, as there's no such thing as a free lunch!).

The arguments for universal provision are that they're a lot cheaper and simpler to administer, they avoid stigmatization, and they mean that those who're being asked to contribute more of their taxes to the public pot see something concrete for their money, enhancing social cohesion and reducing resentment at the idea of others getting "something for nothing" (it's not so long ago, after all, that a UK Labour spokesperson was adamant in public that Labour was the party of working families, not dole scroungers). Scottish Labour's main argument seems to boil down to that those who have larger incomes should be penalized.

I'd argue that Scotland's an extreme case of the political fragmentation that afflicts the whole UK. Regions all have different needs and different priorities, and the question is how to cater for those when the bulk of the population and political power is concentrated in the South East.

Some form of federalism is an obvious answer, but our experience and that of Wales and Northern Ireland of devolution hasn't been positive in terms of conflict with both Labour and the Tories' strong centralizing instincts. And the chaos of Brexit means that any such large-scale constitutional changes (probably involving more referendums - aaaaargh!) are going to be punted a long way down the road.

I can't see that preference for centralization improving under Corbyn, not least because he's so obviously and shamelessly out of touch with the situation in Scotland, and I've seen no evidence his grasp of the specific issues in the rest of the UK outside London is much better.