Labour are still in deep trouble despite by-election win

The National

4 hours ago

FOR a man whose party had just won a by-election, it was widely expected to lose, Anas Sarwar is not at all a happy bunny. His aggressive and angrily needy behaviour while being interviewed by Martin Geissler on the BBC Scotland Sunday Show will remind fans of RuPaul's Drag Race of the iconic droll comment made by contestant Trixie Mattell when a competitor had a very public and furious temper tantrum after being put through to the next round by the judges but failing to make the top three: "I think that's a lot of emotion for safe."
For those not familiar with the show, the comment was a pointed reference to the fact that although the contestant in question had survived that particular episode, the temper tantrum was due to their awareness that they were not on track to win the contest, and as it transpired, they were eliminated not long afterwards. Likewise, the anger displayed by Anas Sarwar was due to his awareness that despite this by-election win, his party remains in deep, deep, trouble, and that trouble is largely of Labour's own creation.
Whatever you might think of the SNP's decision to focus its attacks on Reform UK during the by election campaign - and spoiler alert I think it was tactically a disaster - it's pretty rich of Anas Sarwar to go on the BBC, of all media platforms, and accuse John Swinney of running a "dishonest and disgraceful" campaign which pushed voters to Reform UK. Rarely has psychological projection been so manifest in a political interview.
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It doesn't push voters to Reform when you do as the SNP has done and complain loudly that Reform is running an overtly racist campaign. What pushes voters to Reform is when you do what the Labour party and the BBC have been doing, which is to ape Reform's policies, thus legitimising and mainstreaming them, and to give Reform's leader a platform out of all proportion to his political success. The rise of Reform has nothing to do with the SNP, and everything to do with the Labour and Conservative parties and the anti-independence British media, above all the BBC.
Of course, Anas Sarwar knows that, he's not a stupid man. He is, however, a politically dishonest man. The very last thing he can do in public is to admit the responsibility of his own party or that of a publicly owned broadcaster to which his party is linked by an umbilical cord in facilitating , encouraging and normalising racist far-right Anglo-British nationalism. Blaming far-right Anglo-British nationalism on the SNP is a new low, even by the base standards of the Labour Party in Scotland.
Talking of pandering to the far right, the BBC has revealed that it has drawn up plans to "regain the trust" of Reform UK voters. The plans reportedly include changing news and drama content in order to make the broadcaster's output more appealing to the kind of people who have no problem at all with Doctor Who being a shape shifting near immortal alien who can cross time and space while fighting all sorts of trans-dimensional alien threats and sentient dinosaurs, but who complain it becomes unbelievable when the Doctor regenerates into a woman or a gay black Scotsman.
Minutes of a meeting of the BBC's Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee in March, which has been seen by Byline Times, show that BBC News CEO Deborah Turness gave a presentation in which she discussed plans to alter 'story selection' and 'other types of output, such as drama' in order to win back the trust of Reform voters.
One of the key members of the BBC's Editorial Guidelines Committee is former GB News executive Robbie Gibb, an arch-Brextremist who was appointed to the board by Boris Johnson in 2021. In 2022, former BBC presenter Emily Maitlis described Gibb as an 'active agent of the Conservative party.' Gibb was Theresa May's Downing Street Director of Communications between 2017 and 2019.
(Image: House of Lords)
Expect more news reports on immigration and greater prominence given to uncritical coverage of Reform UK politicians. They should just go the whole hog and rebrand BBC Question Time as 'An Evening with Nigel Farage'. Gibb was also previously the director of The Jewish Chronicle. Gibb fronted a consortium of worthies who 'rescued' the paper in 2020, but who claim either not to know, or are not saying, who put up the cash. In his November 2023 BBC Declaration of Personal Interests, Gibb stated that he was the 100 per cent owner of the Jewish Chronicle. After Gibbs' departure in August 2024, the newspaper was forced to apologise for publishing a series of fabricated pro-Israeli stories about the Gaza war.
In drama, you can now look forward to cosy murders set in English country villages where everyone is white and heterosexual, and period dramas about a plucky colonial doctor, who repeatedly references how Scottish he is despite his upper class English accent, serving in one of the British Empire's African possessions, where over the course of a six episode story arc he rescues the benighted natives from their pagan superstitions and Arab slave raiders and eventually succeeds in winning the heart of a beautiful English rose, the daughter of a wealthy duke who heads a household of forelock tugging salt of the earth servants. I should stop here in case the BBC thinks this is a story pitch.
Compare and contrast, surveys have shown that the BBC has lost most public trust in Scotland, in no small measure due to the Corporation's blatantly one-sided coverage of Scotland's constitutional debate, but the BBC shows no interest in trying to win back the trust of Scotland's independence-supporting viewers and listeners. The reason for that is that, despite his constant claims to be 'anti-elite,' Farage and his ilk pose no threat at all to the British establishment, they are merely the latest iteration of that establishment's attempts to subvert and control impulses to push back against it.