Bad Joke
Sometimes people express surprise to me when I explain the Labour Party's terrible track record on the biggest employment issue of our time - the fight for equal pay.
"Labour are better than that, surely", is a common refrain. "The party's stuffed full of officials with trade union experience, so how could they get things so wrong and not do the right thing when it comes to people's employment rights?"
Well look no further than the circumstances surrounding the sacking of Labour's Scottish general secretary, Ian Price, by Team Miliband which led to Johann Lamont's resignation as the party's Scottish leader.
The whole business beggars belief and what's even more remarkable is that people who have been behaving in a thoroughly nasty and unprofessional way towards each other, think that they should be running the country.
Now that is funny.
Lamont exit ‘catastrophe’ for Miliband
Labour fears loss of Scottish voters
Jason Allardyce and Tim Shipman - The Sunday Times
(Andrew Milligan)
ED MILIBAND is being warned that Labour faces the prospect of a “catastrophic” result in the general election following the resignation of its Scottish leader.
Johann Lamont quit on Friday evening, accusing the UK party of treating Scotland like a “branch office” and claiming Miliband had thwarted her attempts to reform the ailing party.
Labour is trailing the SNP in voting intentions for next year’s general election, placing a question mark over its 41 Scottish seats which could be crucial if Miliband is to form a government next May as the latest YouGov/Sunday Times poll puts both Labour and the Tories on 33%.
Senior Labour sources believe the party could lose up to 15 seats to the nationalists, whose membership has more than tripled since last month’s independence referendum as “yes” voters look to the SNP to extend the powers of the Scottish parliament, short of separation.
Former Labour first minister Henry McLeish said that the party faced a crisis of “historic, epic” proportions. Blaming “a suffocating atmosphere of control that Westminster has tried to put on Scotland” for Lamont’s exit, he said Labour in London “has not got a clue about the realities of Scottish politics”.
While Lamont was technically in charge of Labour’s Scottish MPs as well as MSPs, sources close to her say she was marginalised and undermined on key issues.
She spoke of an orchestrated campaign against her by Westminster colleagues.
As Scottish leader, she was not allowed a role in investigating allegations of vote-rigging in Falkirk and denied support to give the Scottish parliament full control over income tax to respond to voter demands for greater devolution, amid strong resistance from Scottish Labour MPs.
A source close to her claimed that Miliband even barred her from speaking out against the bedroom tax in Scotland for a year while he pondered what Labour’s approach to the policy should be.
While allies of Lamont accused members of Miliband’s team of plotting to oust her, the final straw came when the UK party sacked Scottish Labour general secretary Ian Price last week without her input, which she said made her position untenable. She also described some Labour MPs as “dinosaurs” who failed to recognise that “Scotland has changed forever” after the independence referendum.
Lamont added: “The Labour party must recognise that the Scottish party has to be autonomous and not just a branch office of a party based in London.”
McLeish said: “If there’s any hiccup in the number of MPs we send to Westminster in 2015 this could be catastrophic for Ed’s efforts to become prime minister.
“While we may wish to talk about who might be leader, there are more important issues to be tackled in Scotland if Labour is not only to survive the two elections coming up in 2015 and 2016, but actually survive as a social democratic party in the modern age.”
Writing in The Sunday Times, McLeish added that the party’s conduct could lead to the break-up of Britain “as Scotland is pushed further out on a limb until the branch breaks and Scotland is on its own”.
Lord McConnell, who led Scottish Labour from 2001 to 2007, said Lamont suffered “outrageous treatment” and that Miliband has questions to answer.
Labour’s best hope of reversing its fortunes could lie with a big beast becoming its seventh Scottish leader in 15 years. Jim Murphy, the shadow international development secretary, is a frontrunner and some of his supporters have been briefing for weeks that he should replace Lamont.
ED MILIBAND is being warned that Labour faces the prospect of a “catastrophic” result in the general election following the resignation of its Scottish leader.
Johann Lamont quit on Friday evening, accusing the UK party of treating Scotland like a “branch office” and claiming Miliband had thwarted her attempts to reform the ailing party.
Labour is trailing the SNP in voting intentions for next year’s general election, placing a question mark over its 41 Scottish seats which could be crucial if Miliband is to form a government next May as the latest YouGov/Sunday Times poll puts both Labour and the Tories on 33%.
Senior Labour sources believe the party could lose up to 15 seats to the nationalists, whose membership has more than tripled since last month’s independence referendum as “yes” voters look to the SNP to extend the powers of the Scottish parliament, short of separation.
Former Labour first minister Henry McLeish said that the party faced a crisis of “historic, epic” proportions. Blaming “a suffocating atmosphere of control that Westminster has tried to put on Scotland” for Lamont’s exit, he said Labour in London “has not got a clue about the realities of Scottish politics”.
While Lamont was technically in charge of Labour’s Scottish MPs as well as MSPs, sources close to her say she was marginalised and undermined on key issues.
She spoke of an orchestrated campaign against her by Westminster colleagues.
As Scottish leader, she was not allowed a role in investigating allegations of vote-rigging in Falkirk and denied support to give the Scottish parliament full control over income tax to respond to voter demands for greater devolution, amid strong resistance from Scottish Labour MPs.
A source close to her claimed that Miliband even barred her from speaking out against the bedroom tax in Scotland for a year while he pondered what Labour’s approach to the policy should be.
While allies of Lamont accused members of Miliband’s team of plotting to oust her, the final straw came when the UK party sacked Scottish Labour general secretary Ian Price last week without her input, which she said made her position untenable. She also described some Labour MPs as “dinosaurs” who failed to recognise that “Scotland has changed forever” after the independence referendum.
Lamont added: “The Labour party must recognise that the Scottish party has to be autonomous and not just a branch office of a party based in London.”
McLeish said: “If there’s any hiccup in the number of MPs we send to Westminster in 2015 this could be catastrophic for Ed’s efforts to become prime minister.
“While we may wish to talk about who might be leader, there are more important issues to be tackled in Scotland if Labour is not only to survive the two elections coming up in 2015 and 2016, but actually survive as a social democratic party in the modern age.”
Writing in The Sunday Times, McLeish added that the party’s conduct could lead to the break-up of Britain “as Scotland is pushed further out on a limb until the branch breaks and Scotland is on its own”.
Lord McConnell, who led Scottish Labour from 2001 to 2007, said Lamont suffered “outrageous treatment” and that Miliband has questions to answer.
“We’re off our heads if we don’t pick Jim,” said one, who believes Murphy is one of the few Scottish Labour figures capable of besting Nicola Sturgeon, who takes over next month as first minister.
Murphy is said to have fallen out of favour with Miliband, but it is not clear whether he wants the job and there is some resistance among Labour MSPs.
Gordon Brown is understood to have ruled out a bid while another possibility is MP Anas Sarwar, who was Lamont’s deputy and has become interim leader, although he is perceived as being too close to the party in London, which could count against him.
Miliband’s relationship with Lamont became more strained during the referendum campaign as it became clear the party was struggling to persuade working-class Labour supporters to vote against independence.
Sources close to Lamont claim Miliband’s office was also offended when she pressed for Gordon Brown to have a bigger public role than the UK leader in the “no” campaign given the former prime minister’s greater popularity in Scotland.
Margaret Curran, Miliband’s shadow Scottish secretary, was not available for comment yesterday but a source close to her denied claims from Lamont’s camp that she had urged members of Labour’s Scottish executive committee to oust the leader.
Lamont signalled after the referendum that she had considered standing down but decided to stay and try once more to put her stamp on the party.
Late last month, she won support from the executive committee for a wide-ranging review of Scottish Labour’s relationship with the UK party which would consider devolving control of MPs’ selection contests to Scotland, a move that infuriated some Westminster colleagues and played badly in Miliband’s office.
After Price’s sacking, Lamont’s office told Miliband’s team it had made her position untenable.
While Miliband’s aides insisted all week they did not wish her to resign, a friend said she decided on Thursday night after discussions with family that she “wasn’t going to be humiliated” by staying on.
Lamont’s departure casts fresh doubt over Scotland’s constitutional future because Labour remains torn over how much more power to give Holyrood. A backlash from MPs led Lamont’s devolution review to dump plans to give MSPs full control over income tax, an idea backed by the Tories, Lib Dems and SNP.
A source close to her claimed Miliband’s office had failed to discuss the issue ahead of cross-party talks for the Smith commission on more powers last week, and there is concern the party may emerge badly damaged from the process by appearing less enthusiastic than rivals.
“The trouble is there’s no one in Ed’s office who understands Scotland. They see everything though a Westminster prism and the 35% strategy of getting core votes and they don’t see anything else,” the source said.
But a senior Westminster ally of Miliband criticised Lamont’s leadership, citing a lack of Scottish policy and the failure to persuade traditional Labour supporters to oppose independence even in her own Glasgow constituency.
