Labour faces oblivion without radical changes

A HOUSE of Commons briefing paper, Membership of UK Political Parties, states Labour has

485,000 members. Five per cent of those members (24,250) are in Scotland. The SNP has 125,534 members. That outnumbers Scottish Labour by five to one.

The SNP puts its leader and best politicians into Edinburgh. Scottish Labour puts its best politicians up for election to Westminster. The SNP’S first team is up against Labour’s second team in Holyrood.

Labour has fewer activists, and inferior politicians in Scotland. At Westminster there are 48 SNP

MPS to Labour’s solitary MP. Many English people mistakenly think the SNP speaks for all of Scotland.

Corbyn’s leadership was supposed to reassert Labour dominance in Scotland. This didn’t happen. Blairism can’t win back Scotland for Labour because it was Blair’s fault that Scottish separatism gained such a hold.

If Labour rejected both social and economic liberalism, and political correctness, it might do better in the whole of the UK, provided that the rejection was real, and not cosmetic. Labour should warmly embrace British independence from the EU and promote the British nation state as the best largest unit for democratic representation, then people might respond at election time.

If Labour accepted that the UK needs firm immigration controls, then voters across the UK might respond favourably to that.

Labour should promote itself as a unionist party. But only if it honestly means it. Labour politicians in the Scottish parliament and the Welsh assembly, and Westminster, should make it crystal clear that the UK must remain intact.

Labour needs to build much better relations with unionist parties in Northern Ireland and should end any affiliation with groups that want Northern Ireland to join the Irish Republic.

We hear much talk about “One Nation Conservatism”, so let us start hearing Labour talking about “One Nation Socialism”.

Is any of this likely to happen? Labour would need a radical overhaul. It would need to become a different kind of party. Labour might be destined for eventual oblivion, but if it continues as it is now, then it probably deserves that.