Are Scottish Labour actually bullying Richard Leonard? Or is that just the rot that’s in Scottish Labour?

Personally, I have no time nor the slightest support for Labour (Scottish or otherwise), an ironic statement since I’m writing about them.

 

There’s a point at which one really must wonder, how after six pretty comprehensive doings from Nicola Sturgeon during First Ministers’ Questions over a pretty short time, such well-deserved savaging’s have not prompted either Leonard or his team to add clarification of devolved or reserved issues to their FMQ’s prep?

 

Pensions; all welfare powers; immigration; banking regulation; employment law; Network Rail, have all met with the same response from our FM, they’re either reserved or mostly reserved.

 

Now at his first FMQ’s Leonard could perhaps be forgiven for the odd slip up and one could be generous and forgive at his second. However; we’ve now reached a point where his attendance at FMQs puts me in mind of a blood sport, where a compassionate presiding officer may well have been thanked for throwing the towel in on Leonard’s behalf.

 

Could it be, Slab has so little original topics to bring to FMQ’s outwith their somewhat tedious sound bites; they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel without checking the validity of their findings? Or is Leonard being set up to fail?

 

Being set up to fail, is a common form of bullying in the workplace, as some of us may have experienced. As a union officer I saw many an occasion where workers essentially set others up to fail, by simply not passing on the expertise and information their victim’s success depended on. The usual result was their victim was managed out of the business.

 

My observations of Leonard at FMQ’s are often distracted by the pained expressions of his colleagues as he speaks. Of course, those grimaces could be related to new shoes or even a stray pea in the upholstery, non-the-less such nonverbal displays are want to influence the viewers perception.

 

It defies belief given Leonards’ slavish reliance on scripts for FMQ’s that his is the only input. On the Network Rail question, would not a prudent politician had sought the counsel of Iain Grey who of course sat on the Smith Commission? (but supported Anas Sarwar in the leadership contest) Or even given the former Slab MSP Gregg McClymont a call? Moreover; if he does share his scripts with colleagues before FMQs, how is it that week after painful week we see his hangdog expression as the FM pulls the rug from under him?

 

There’s of course the thought that although Leonard won both the trade union affiliates vote by a resounding 77% to 23% and the membership vote by 52% to 48%, he was supported by just 9 MSPs, MPs and MEPs out of a possible 32 and just 85 out of a possible 250 supporting nominations from Scottish Labour Party councillors’, do the party actually resent him the leadership?

 

It’s been our experience that in Scotland the Labour party take scant notice of voters once their vote is cast. Indeed, their application of the Bain principle tends to the suggestion they’ll undermine positive SNP policies that benefit their electorate, rather than see folk benefit from such developments, and of course they’re in the repugnant habit of sharing the Tories bed, as they did in 2015 by refusing to vote against more Tory austerity.

 

Could it be their somewhat cavalier view of the Slab electorate in general, is the same view they take of the Leadership vote? Are they wanting yet another Leadership contest?  Are they setting Leonard up to fail so as to facilitate such a contest?

 

Or is this behaviour simply symptomatic of the rot that’s set into Scottish Labour, the rot that’s evident in it’s plethora of racists, the rot that evident in it’s sex offenders i.e. Sean Morton and Leonards’ own election agent David Fagan to name but two?

 

When in secure tenure Scottish Labour lost sight of the party’s raison d’etre, leaving behind a legacy of debt that’ll shackle Scotland’s social progress for generations and I’d aver that’s when the rot set in, when they denied women equal wages 37 years after the Equal Wages Act, that was a symptom of the rot.

 

Indeed, when their then communications officer confirmed in court she used the phrase “You don’t look disabled to me” that’s a symptom of the rot.

 

Their contemptuousness attitude to their electorate; their aim and roots, to me means Scottish Labour are a party on borrowed time, given the rot has reached their foundations.