Don't Separate, Don't Split, Don't Think, Just Trust Labour

We're not to vote to govern ourselves now because, you see, it's all OK. 

Labour, the munificent fount of all that is great about the benevolence of the British government are going to look after us. They'll see us alright. It'll all be grand. 

If we trust Labour, they'll give us extra powers. 

Notwithstanding the inalienable fact, of course, that the last time we trusted Labour enough not to deliver a resounding Yes vote to Home Rule, we didn't get more powers, but eighteen years of vicious Tory rule. 

In 1979, the clear majority of those who voted (1.230.937 to 1.153.500) voted Yes. Only - only - because the Labour Party made a conscious, malicious and vindictive decision to count the votes of those who died or did not vote as No votes did Scotland fail to achieve Home Rule then. It was a model that a young Robert Mugabe, then a dissident leader in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, retained for future reference.

Enough people trusted Labour and their fellow members of the Establishment to vote No that we couldn't outweigh the "votes" of the dead. Labour told us then that we ought to vote No to Home Rule because they would deliver more powers to us with a No vote than a Yes vote would. 

Sound familiar?

The chairman of one of the "grassroots No campaign branches" in that referendum was one Johann McDougal Lamont. 

Sound familiar?

Johann Lamont opposed Home Rule then. She tells us anew today, as she opposes today's move to Home Rule, the same lies as she told in 1979: that a vote to be run from London gives us more powers than Home Rule by the people who live and work here. 

Johann Lamont is opposed to devolution. Why on earth would you even begin to trust her, particularly with the events of 1979 fresh in your mind, to deliver more powers to Scotland if we give away our only leverage against the British Establishment? I wouldn't trust Johann Lamont to deliver a note to my ma, never mind deliver extra powers to the people of Scotland. 

And even if you were to trust that her heart was true and she genuinely intended to deliver extra powers, how on earth could she? She isn't the leader of her party, merely the person who selects the front bench out of that deep, wide pool of Scotland's brightest and best minds, sitting eagerly on the Labour Party benches at Holyrood. Her party is an irrelevance, constitutionally, in power neither in London nor in Edinburgh. The Scottish Labour politican with the most political power anywhere in the world today is the mayor of Tower Hamlets. 

The last time we trusted No-hann Lamont that a No vote would deliver more powers, she instead delivered two decades of Thatcherism. 

It reminds me of the tale Archbishop Desmond Tutu tells of European settlement in Africa. "We had the land, and they came with Bibles", he would say, "and they told us to close our eyes and pray. And we opened our eyes, and we had the Bible, and they had the land". 

Scotland had shipyards, it had manufacturing, it had industry, it had coalmines, it had Ravenscraig, it had Linwood. 

And then Johann got her No vote. 

And what were the extra powers we got? 

The power to sit and watch impotently as the shipyards were closed - by the British government. As our industry was devastated - by the British government. As our manufacturing disappeared - at the hands of the British government. As our coalmines were mothballed - by the British government. As Ravenscraig fell in a cloud of dust and tears - thanks to the British government. As Linwood moved seamlessly from pride of the Scottish motor industry to the capital city of the Republic of Unemployment. 

We're gradually recovering from eighteen years of Thatcherism. 

And now, Johann Lamont comes, once again, to spit her hate of Scotland, to bare her teeth at anyone who dares to "dream different dreams". To abuse those who dare to jeopardise her ultimate ambition of a seat in the Commons, followed in short order by the sussuration of ermine being draped around her shoulders.

We trusted her in 1979 and look what we got. 

If we trust her in 2014, we know what we'll get. George Osborne has made it clear: Scottish Old Age Pensioners will be stripped of their paltry winter fuel allowance (whilst filth like Margaret Curran have their fingers in the till to the tune of £600 to heat the sumptious villa which serves as her second home and to which none of her consituents can ever aspire). Scottish grannies will have the bus pass torn from their gnarled hands and forced to walk to the doctors surgery, which will charge them £10 and then give them a prescription they can't use anyway, because they can't afford the charges Lamont is on record as wanting to introduce. 

The Labour Party, particularly in Scotland, tell us "don't be silly and govern yourselves. Let Labour do it for you. Haven't we been so good to you?"

And haven't they indeed.

We are to trust that the Labour Party - which has managed to govern for a mere 33 of the 307 years of the UK - will not only manage to win power with the goonish, incompetent Ed Miliband as their candidate for prime minister, but will do things for us which are worth throwing away our right to govern ourselves. 

Out of that cumulative 33 years, I can only think of three massive, society-changing things they've done for Scots:

1) The minimum wage

2) The National Health Service

3) The Welfare State

We know that George Osborne and Ian Duncan Smith are currently dismantling the Welfare State - with the support of Labour's Johann Lamont, who would rather divert money from such undeserving causes as working mothers to people who really need it like Alistair Darling (who systematically defrauded the public out of £70.000 over a period of years). 

We also know that the Tories are privatising the NHS in England - and that our NHS is only safe from privatisation precisely  because it is separate. We know, further, that Labour desire to abolish the independence of NHS Scotland in order to have a unified, UK-wide health system. And do we think that this means investment in the UK NHS will rise to match Scottish levels; or will it mean that investment in the Scottish NHS will fall to match UK levels? I think I need not waste time in answering, in this time of neo-Thatcherism and Lamontism.

So we're left with the minimum wage. 

That's it.

That's Labour's big pitch. We've to trust Labour because they've been so good to us. 

Fall for Lamont's lies, again. Vote No, again. And we'll be rewarded by a minimum wage which is 20% less than the minimum sum needed to live on. And we might even get to keep it. As long as both of these variables hold true for all time: 

i) The Tories aren't in power and decide to axe it; and

ii) The Labour Party don't completely abrogate any sense of socialist principles by - as they've done for thirteen out of their thirty-three cumulative years in office (or FORTY PER CENT of their total time in office) - choosing to adhere to the Tory spending plans.

Yeah, sounds like a good deal, doesn't it?