I wrote yesterday about Iain Gray and the Labour Party's truculent refusal to accept Nicola Sturgeon's apology over her letter in support of Abdul Rauf.
I was taken by this post by Mr MacNumpty last night which suggested that Labour may have been motivated by a desire for revenge over what happened to Wendy Alexander.
If so, this would appear to show an unpleasant and spiteful trait. I remember reading reports in the press in 2007 which suggested that Labour were being uncooperative when it came to arranging a pairing arrangement for Angela Constance MSP's maternity leave. When I put my ear to the ground, I heard whispers that this was in retaliation for the SNP playing silly beggars when Labour MSPs wanted similar arrangements in the previous parliaments.
Parliamentarians tend not to take a huge amount of tiime of on maternity leave anyway, and they're never really away from the job, but the flexibility not to have to be in Edinburgh at 5pm in the early days of motherhood is quite important for all sorts of reasons. Why on earth, when we have the technology, we can't arrange remote voting or something is beyond me anyway.
If Parliamentary business managers have ever tried to make life difficult for a pregnant MSP, then that is utterly vile. If a party ever tried to inflict difficulty on an MSP as a payback for things that she had no control over and happened at a time when she was not even in the Parliament, then that is contemptible.
There's a really nasty thread running through a lot of what we see and hear from Labour, whether it be on issues of personality or policy, from Megrahi to Sturgeon at Holyrood, from Darling's forces of Hell to the disgraceful lack of compassion of the Home Office at Westminster.
Then we have the lie that they are trying to force down our throats that this election is between Labour and the Conservatives. In Scotland? Are you having a laugh? Like their excuses about the Glasgow North East by-election, it just doesn't hold water? Scotland knows perfectly well that the Tories are irrelevant. Labour's attempts to peddle that line show contempt for people's intelligence.
2 comments:
Will's revenge-fantasy thesis is interesting. Of course, we ought to couch that in an understanding of the cramped smallness of the Scottish Labour mindset. As the wily old fraud, Talleyrand, once said of the rump of the French Bourbon monarchy, distilling its vitriol in exile in a miasma of self-pity, "They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing"...
Apt as ever.
Labour?
Unpleasant and spiteful?
I'd never believe it if I didn't know it to be true!
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