Breaking: Kezia Dugdale steps down as Scottish Labour leader

[Ken Burch]

20. I can see a case for voting SNP in Holyrood elections.

Looking at it as an outsider, it's harder to see what voting SNP achieves in Westminster elections.

It may have been useful between 1976 and 1979, when there was a minority Labour

And I think that, while left-wing Scots have ample reason to dislike what UK Labour has often done on Scottish issues since 1974, Labour, virtually every working class or poor voter in Britain has one long-standing reason to distrust or resent the SNP:

The party's decision to support the Tory-introduced no-confidence motion against the Callaghan government in 1979.

That no-confidence motion, which passed by one vote as a result of SNP support, forced a general election at a time when the only possible result was a solid parliamentary majority for Margaret Thatcher(and also cost the SNP 7 of their 10 seats). That majority created the conditions for the dismantling of much of the welfare state, the crushing of the unions, and the manifest injustice of the Poll Tax-an injustice visited on Scotland before any other part of the UK. And it set back the Scottish independence cause by at least two decades. The SNP knew there was no way forcing an election at that point would do anything to advance any of their goals and would hurt Scots more than anyone else.

Voters with humane, progressive values and those not billionaires have just as much right to be angry about that as you have to be about anything Labour has done, Denzil. It would help a lot if Nicola Sturgeon-a person I quite admire, for the record-would acknowledge that the Nats made a disastrous choice in '79.

I realize that a lot of the kind of voters who back Corbyn in England and Wales threw their support to the SNP in Scottish constituencies in 2015. I'm not sure how praising the SNP government would achieve anything.


And I also believe that, once it was certain that that would happen-as it was as soon as the campaign was underway-Labour under Ed Miliband should have announced their willingness to work with the SNP in a minority parliament. Ed knew Labour had no chance of winning a majority and would be lucky to even be the largest party; in ruling out any cooperation with the Nats at all, Labour essentially promised to lose.