COMMENTS PUT ANOTHER NAIL IN HER PARTY’S COFFIN

ANALYSIS

THOSE who left Scotland and the UK to fight fascism in Spain’s civil war must be spinning in their graves after Lisa Nandy’s ill-judged remarks on the issue of Catalan separatism.

The Labour leadership hopeful argued that a “social justice agenda” could overcome “divisive nationalism” as in

BY ANNIE BROWN

Catalonia, failing to mention those beaten by police for the “crime” of exercising a right to vote in a referendum.

Nine political prisoners rot in

Spanish jails serving sentences totalling almost a century and hundreds of ordinary people have been arrested and brutalised. In Scotland, we have a political fugitive, Clara Ponsati, from “democratic” Spain exiled to our doorstep.

Political persecution is not “social justice” but an outrage which should not have slipped Nandy’s mind.

She also failed to mention the police batons unleashed only three months ago by the current “socialist” Spanish government on those protesting the sentencing of the Catalan separatist leaders.

Yesterday, Nandy put another nail in the coffin of the corpse that is Labour in Scotland because, regardless of their views on independence, Scots recognise that civic nationalism here is driven by a sense of being disenfranchised and a desire for social justice.

There is not the fascist connotations she infers. If

Nandy really wants to decry pernicious nationalism, she should condemn the Spanish state and the blinkered refusal of the unionist movement to grant IndyRef2.

Scots recognise democratic movements of any hue can be disagreed with but should not, as Nandy implied, be quashed.