Couldn't organise a piss-up...

Yesterday we hear that a member of the Labour Party has had their membership revoked for saying on social media that they were going to vote for the Scottish Nationalist Party (whoever they are).  The letter emanated from one Jane Shaw, who is apparently a Compliance Officer for UK Labour, since the address on the letter is in London.  Like many people I was unaware that Labour had such a thing as a Compliance Officer, which sounds pretty scary.  No wonder Labour seem to be quite in favour of the surveillance society, if this is how they treat their members.

Given the current dire straits that Labour find themselves in in Scotland, sacking a member for saying they were voting for another party seems to be quite the wrong approach.  Surely it would have been better to have a meeting with the member in question, to ask them why they weren't going to be voting for the party of which they were a member? 

Then there is the matter of the tactical voting campaigns in the recent General Election, where Labour members were encouraging members to vote for other parties in some constituencies if the other party in question was deemed to have a better chance of winning against the SNP.  Indeed in at least one constituency (Perth I'm told) there were even some Labour members helping out with canvassing for the Tory candidate.  No doubt there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for why these people are not being expelled, possibly because to do so would be to reduce the small numbers of Labour members in Scotland even further.

On a completely different note, Neil Findlay has been on the attack against Angela Constance, demanding to know why she has done nothing about the crisis in teacher numbers in West Lothian, her own constituency.  Now there are issues within the education system in Scotland, and Ms Constance is the Education Secretary within the Scottish government.  Something will need to be done about this.  However, with regard to the teacher numbers in West Lothian, this comes under the control of West Lothian Council, who set the budgets fo education in the country. And what Mr Findlay fails to mention is that West Lothian Council is run by...Labour.  D'oh!