North of the border – the one that doesn’t really exist between England and Scotland – you might be forgiven for thinking the SNP represents the true left. With Labour obliterated in the 2015 general election, Scotland has become an elective dictatorship, but how left is it really?
Rupert Murdoch, the self-styled king and queen maker of British politics, clearly sees no threat to his empire from Nicola Sturgeon and why should he? Aside from separatism, their very basis for existence, where is the philosophy? In pure politics, they are well to the right of Tony Blair’s ‘New’ Labour.
It is laughable to suggest that the SNP has seriously sought to bring about greater equality. During the 2015 general election campaign, even the sainted Sturgeon was unable to put forward a redistributive policy that they had taken through the Scottish parliament, despite having a groaning majority at Holyrood. The SNP has improved welfare to the middle classes – i.e. the ones who vote – and essentially left everyone else alone.
The ‘comrades’ of the SNP are the friends of even bigger business too, through their close relations with the likes of Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch and Brian Souter. They have the same attitudes to Corporate Tax as George Osborne. And if you are an SNP MP you are not allowed to criticise a “group decision, policy or another member of the group”. This is not democracy in action: it is democratic centralism at work.
I remain proud of much of the work Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ did for this country, but there were some things I was far from proud about, not least his cringe-making relationship with that evil despot Rupert Murdoch. The biggest failing of New Labour was that whilst it made the country better and more equal, it failed to instil permanent change. Now, under a hard right Conservative government, the gains made under Blair have largely disappeared and now the rich are again getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. That, I would argue, was the price Blair paid for Murdoch’s continued support.
In a monumental week when the families and victims of Hillsborough finally received justice, it is breathtaking to see the front page of the Scottish Sun which shows Sturgeon and two fellow SNP men (I have no idea who they are) mocked up in Star Trek garb with ‘The Sun says’ front page editorial urging its readers to vote SNP. This says a few things to me.
Sturgeon has either been badly advised or doesn’t particularly care about the sickening role the Sun played in the Hillsborough tragedy and, later, scandalous cover-up. And at the end of this week, of all weeks, Sturgeon seems more than happy to tout for support from the proprietor of a newspaper who slandered the dead and the dying. She has put her own political ambition ahead of common decency.
I doubt that Murdoch’s intervention in the Scottish elections which have much effect on the result but his open support for the SNP is surely confirmation beyond all reasonable doubt that he is certain that the SNP poses no threat to his business interests and the political system of unfettered free market capitalism he believes in.
Without Scotland, Britain will remain Tory forever and I see no evidence that SNP rule is going to fade away anytime soon, perhaps not even in my lifetime. Of course, huge numbers of SNP supporters abhor the tyrannical nature of Rupert Murdoch business activities as much as anyone on the left, but they must surely know, as we knew when Murdoch supported Tony Blair, that it came at a price.
I don’t know what price the SNP will pay for Murdoch’s open support but its credibility as a so-called left wing party is certainly now in some doubt. Murdoch likes to back winners but more than that he likes winners who do what he tells them to do.
