Facing the Truth
Lesley Riddoch had an opinion piece in The Scotsman the other day which included this damning quote from Andy Kerr, a former Labour finance and health minister in the Scottish Parliament.
"Some extraordinary things have been said by men best known for saying very little at all. Former Labour finance minister Andy Kerr told a rejuvenated BBC Radio Scotland Crossfire programme:
“If I was a dinosaur I’d be quite offended to be compared to some of these [Scottish Labour] MPs. Dinosaurs left the planet and there was some hope for life afterwards. These people are not going to leave any hope for life in the Scottish Labour Party. [Their] line is to gloss this over and elect someone quickly. But if you don’t sort out the problem of who runs the party in Scotland, we’re not going to get anywhere. My campaign [for the Scottish Labour leadership] was very forceful on the powers of the leader of the Scottish Labour Party – not unsurprisingly, when you put that kind of pitch to MPs, you don’t get elected, and that’s what happened to me. I believe the SNP finance minister got a better deal out of the Labour government than I did. Scottish Labour created the Scottish Parliament and since then has tried to strangle it.”
And it's all the more powerful coming from someone who has been out of front line politics since Labour lost the 2011 Scottish elections decisively to the SNP.
If you ask me it's a bit like the analogy used by the former Conservative Chancellor, and Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Howe, who resigned from the Government but in doing so made a devastating attack on the Prime Minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, using a cricketing analogy in which he said:
"It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only for them to find, as the first balls are being bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain". He called on others to "consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long".
