Labour must think hard about where it has all gone wrong

IT is of course little surprise that Andy Stenton’s recent brave letter (May 10) arguing for Labour to support independence should be critically received as it was on your Letters Pages today (May

11). For one thing, as John

Gilligan points out, “Labour is a UK party”, and so it is, but does this mean it always has to be so?

It was Tony Blair who said: “Power without principle is barren, but principle without power is futile”. Mr Gilligan might do well to bear in mind the distinction between a political party and its voters. At the 2010 General Election in Scotland, 1,035,528 voted Labour, but by the 2019 vote that had halved to 511,838. The Labour Party in Scotland might have had a “good” local authority election last week, but let’s put it into context. Ten years ago would the leader of the UK party really have come up, all the way from London, to celebrate winning West Dunbartonshire Council? I not only live there but grew up there and the collapse of the Labour vote, the idea that Clydebank no longer has a Labour MP, still feels to me a bit like an offence against some sort of natural law. That is a measure of how far the Labour Party in Scotland has fallen, and while power without principle is to be condemned, without power a political party is neutered.

Just where do some of your correspondents think, in less than 10 years, half a million votes, from 42 per cent of the popular vote and most MPS to 18 per cent and a single MP (less than the Liberal Democrats), have gone? Not one confronts the issue of this precipitate and disastrous decline of Labour in Scotland.

It is sadly true that “children living in Nicola Sturgeon’s constituency are the poorest in the UK” as William Loneskie points out, but he might want to consider that poverty in Glasgow is about as old as Scotland voting Labour, and much good in terms of that problem it did us. The quote that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” is attributed to Einstein. Perhaps, the realisation that voting Labour was no longer producing a different result is the problem for the Labour Party.

Alasdair Galloway, Dumbarton.

NOW that the dust is beginning to settle after the latest council elections, it is increasingly puzzling that the Labour Party is opposing forming formal coalitions with the Tories or SNP, despite such arrangements existing in the last term.

The election resulted in a total of 27 out of 32 councils with no overall control, with the SNP and Labour each securing a majority in one and independents forming a majority in three.

This nonsensical “no coalition” pledge is most recently being played out in Edinburgh, where it is clear that Labour’s leader on the council wants to continue its partnership with the SNP, but Labour HQ has overruled this.

Labour accuses the SNP of not valuing councils and undermining local democracy, yet it clearly does not trust council colleagues to decide what is best for their own areas.

Despite making moderate advances at the election the irony is that Labour, which aspires to form the Scottish Government, will inevitability be in administration in considerably fewer councils than previously. Alex Orr, Edinburgh.