I voted yes in the hope that an independent Scotland might become a hothouse of creatively radical ideas to counter the prevailing orthodoxy of greedTo observe the acquiescent wing of the Labour party expressing more dismay at the election of a genuine leftwinger as leader than approximately Tory proposals to scrap the Human Rights Act (HRA) tells you why they are in retreat factual across the party. As one SNP insider said to me final week: “All the mild left luvvies are descending on our conference in Aberdeen because they are scared of getting kicked around their own house this autumn.”In the run-up to the independence referendum and to May’s general election,Conservative unionists and their allies within Labour attempted to blacken the SNP’s liberal credentials by association. Their trick was to elaborate the astonishing surge in support for the SNP by linking it with the rise of “extremism” across the globe, including Donald Trump’s tilt at the White House and the rise of the factual in Belgium. It’s a geo-political St Elmos fire which has everything to enact with the politics of the mob and nothing to enact with ethics or policies.In Scotland we are currently engaged in debate as to just how radical the SNP actually isContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com