Patricia Gibson MP
‘THE IMPORTANCE OF PRINCIPLE IN POLITICS’
TO be relevant, parties must evolve. Circumstances change and so parties too must change.
Policies once deemed essential can lose their relevance or be overtaken by events.
Nevertheless, the fundamentals should remain. For example, the
SNP believes that Scotland should be independent because decisions made by people who live and work here will be better than decisions made for us elsewhere.
Fairness, equality and a willingness to work in partnership with other nations have always been part of our political chemistry.
For most of the 20th century and into this one, Labour was Scotland’s dominant political party, and also had principles. There was always tension between the socialist and social democratic wings but, like the SNP, it was a broad church.
It’s different now. Labour has abandoned principle altogether.
Sir Keir Starmer, Labour’s UK leader since 2020, made 10 public pledges, from reinstating the cap on bankers’ bonuses and abolishing Universal Credit to public ownership of rail, mail, energy and water. He has now ditched every single pledge to win power in England.
Government must do everything possible to protect children from poverty. The SNP Government lifted 100,000 Scottish children out of poverty by using its limited powers to introduce the Scottish Child Payment, now £26.70 per week, per child for the parents of 327,000 Scottish children. Labour refuses to follow suit across the UK if it wins the General Election.
Labour in Scotland previously campaigned to have a Scottish income tax rate of 50 per cent for earnings over £100,000. Yet Labour opposed the SNP’s budget, to which it submitted not a single amendment, when the SNP froze the council tax, whilst increasing income tax on the top five per cent of earners.
Meanwhile, Labour in Scotland hints that free university tuition, £9,000 a year in Labour-run Wales, and free prescriptions, £9.90 per item in the rest of the UK from May 1, will end.
No commitment was made, whatsoever, to compensate WASPI women.
Perhaps most chilling is Labour shadow health secretary, Wes
Streeting MP, vowing to “hold the door wide open” to the NHS for the private sector. This will have a direct impact on Scotland’s NHS and patients.
We all know the importance of an NHS free at the point of use and have witnessed the consequences of privatising vital public assets, from Ardrossan harbour to England’s sewage-polluted rivers.
Labour even abstained on the Tory government’s March 6 budget vote, which imposed £18,000,000 of cuts across the UK, criticising Scotland’s government for cuts whilst defending the Labour government in Wales for implementing them. The dishonesty is staggering.
The words of former Labour Leader Neil Kinnock, describing the Thatcher Tory Government, seem apt for an incoming Labour government. “I warn you not to be ordinary,” he said. “I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old.”
Scotland needs SNP MPs as a bulwark against a huge majority in England for a Labour party which, by its own admission, has abandoned progressive policies. Our future depends on it.