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Wednesday 31 October 2018

Beating a grouse

Yesterday a huge argument blew up about a blogpost by Grousebeater in which he examines the role of the GMB and Rhea Wolfson in the recent strike by female employees of Glasgow City Council in pursuit of their claim for equal pay.  The controversial passage was this:
In Part 1 of Mein Kampf Hitler attacks unions over an over again. Unions are fascism’s Public Enemy Number 1. He went further. He accused ‘The Jew’ of gradually assuming leadership of the trade union movement. Hitler wanted a blindly obedient fighting force loyal only to the national leader of government.
As it turns out Ms Wolfson is of Jewish heritage and apparently interpreted 'The Jew' as being a reference to this, despite the fact it is a direct quote from Mein Kampf illustrating how trade unions have been viewed unfavourably by Fascists in the past. This led to a complaint being made to the SNP (of which Grousebeater is a member) of antisemitism, which led to Grousebeater being suspended from the party pending investigation.  This has not gone down well with many party members, with some saying that they will consider their membership status over this.

I myself had similar thoughts, since the SNP have not covered themselves in glory by their handling of it, especially when they said that 'the blog should not have been shared by any SNP member'.  Indeed it was evident that some MSPs were commenting unfavourably on the blogpost without actually having read it.  On reflection, however, I will adopt a wait-and-see attitude.  Of course, being an SNP member and having shared the blogpost in question, this decision may well be taken out of my hands.

What people have to ask themselves is what do Labour have to gain from this?

The main players in the complaint are Rhea Wolfson and Neil Findlay, both of whom are of the Corbyn faction of the Labour party who are desperate to see their man in Downing Street after the next General Election.  (Bear in mind also that Ms Wolfson herself is a failed MP candidate from the last General Election). The party's Brexit 'strategy' is to let the Conservatives make a mess of Brexit on the basis that this will surely see them win the next General Election, at which point they can fix all of the problems that have been created.  One might think that it would be better to prevent the problems from occurring in the first place, but it must be borne in mind that Mr Corbyn is a Eurosceptic too, although for different reasons to most Conservatives.

Currently the polls are not in their favour.  They are in opposition to one of the most inept governments in living memory, whose handling of Brexit has been laughable, and they should therefore be out in front by a country mile in any polls on Westminster voting intentions.  Instead the two parties are pretty much tied, suggesting that the next election will see a hung parliament again.

Labour north of the border have never got over seeing Scotland as their private fiefdom in which they were entitled to Scottish votes in perpetuity and therefore see the SNP as a party which has 'stolen' their rightful votes.  In their view, in order to win a General Election, they need to get back all of the seats they lost in the recent past if Mr Corbyn is to stand any chance of winning the next General Election.  They therefore need some means of discrediting the SNP in order to try and win back those seats.  It is evident they will use any means possible to try to do this.  Indeed, one might think that the recent strikes are also part of this strategy.

The Labour party itself has recently had to deal with accusations of antisemitism, which have been quite damaging.  It is coincidence, I'm sure, that they are now using similar accusations against the party they see as their bitterest enemy in Scotland.

The fly in the ointment, however, is that even if the SNP loses some members over this, it does not necessarily mean that the voters will flock back to Labour.  Independence is the lynchpin of Scottish politics at the moment and Labour, being a Unionist party, is not going to pick up votes from those who support independence.

Was the blogpost antisemitic?  I don't think it was.  The reference to Hitler and his views was always going to be controversial, and could probably have been omitted without detracting from the point he was trying to make.  However, there is, as yet, no law against expressing your views, even if those views may be distasteful to some.  Let's hope we never become the sort of society where controversial views can no longer be expressed.