Parties fight to be heir of Thatcher
As is often the case nowadays, the latest bout of Tory infighting has sparked yet more speculation about when the next UK General Election might be.
And while the Prime Minister might be adamant it won’t be May, given he and his party’s relationship with the truth, you’ll forgive me for being ever so slightly sceptical about taking his word for it.
Although, given the way things are going, it might not be his decision to take for very much longer.
But, whenever the big day might be, I’ve been out on the doorsteps around the constituency and finding that despite what some sections of the media might want you to think, support for the SNP is still strong and still enthusiastic, even after a year that, at times, might have been best forgotten.
Ultimately the decision will be for you – between two Westminster parties fighting each other to be the true heirs of Thatcher, or for a strong team of voices from Scotland standing up for a different sort of politics and better set of values.
As we’ve seen with the appalling – but in no way surprising – decision to keep hold of £15 million of donations from an out and out racist who reckons it’s perfectly fine to think certain MPs should be “shot”, the Tories are already at the bottom of the barrel.
Voters down south face a desperate choice, between the extremism and degeneration of the Tories, or a Labour Party too afraid of their own shadow to stand for anything except the status quo.
This week we were treated to the Labour Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves declaring that Thatcher and her reign of power “delivered a decade of national renewal” – an analysis that will be news to the millions of Scots who well remember the destruction and despair her governments unleashed on our country.
The Thatcher years saw the Scottish economy butchered, manufacturing destroyed, workers under continual attack, public services slashed, taxes on the rich cut while the poor suffered. It is a period we are still seeing the after-effects of.
For a senior Labour minister to hold Thatcher up as some kind of role model for the kind of government she wants to play a role in shows exactly the kind of administration we can expect after the election if the polls are right and UK Labour secure a majority in parliament.
I give credit to the likes of Richard Leonard, the former Scottish Labour leader brutally knifed in the back by Sir Keir Starmer, for telling the truth about what Thatcher did to our country.
He was clear: “No rewriting of history. Thatcher didn’t renew the economy, she broke it.”
Would his colleagues down the road at Westminster, and those hoping to join them, have that kind of honesty?
But the sad truth is that Labour’s candidates are only those deemed acceptable to the leadership elite – in other words the kind of people who also think Thatcher “delivered a decade of national renewal” for the UK economy.
At least here in Scotland we have a different choice and a different kind of politics to chose from.
“It’s up to us to use that choice and make sure Westminster knows what we in Scotland think of those who want to make themselves the heirs of Thatcher.