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The Herald Scotland

Does Labour have the guts to ditch the trans activism and Gaza-ology?

Mr Swinney seems a bright chap, but even he seems to have been dulled by daily proximity to his cabinet. Responding to the SNP's loss of the seat, he'd wisely declared that supporters of Reform UK in Scotland were not racist. It's just that ordinary people had opted for them out of their concerns about Brexit, he claimed. If this is the quality of the advice he's getting from his battalion of spin merchants then he needs to start culling them now. The loathing that his party and some prominent independence activists have for working class communities was also on display in the immediate aftermath of the by-election. What intensified their fury was that their votes were more or less evenly split between a Labour candidate whom they associated with Scotland's white Protestant working class and a Reform candidate who also appealed to this community. In diverse, progressive and enlightened Scotland there can be many cultures but some are less equal than others. Read more One tweet from a high profile independence activist characterised the loathing for working class Scots that has been evident in nationalist circles recently. 'Congratulations to all the loyalist North Britons who voted Labour, Tory, Libdem & Reform yesterday for Scotland to remain a provincial backwater. Well done. The bigots will have even more of a swagger on their orange marches led by an MSP as ignorant as themselves. No Surrender!' And nor was this a sudden burst of intemperate fury. The SNP's revulsion for every-day, working-class Scots has been building for years throughout the Sturgeon/Yousaf/Swinney era. It's been visible in their callous attitudes to Scotland's annual addiction mortality rates and their Hate Speech legislation. In the last week or so, I've spent time in Edinburgh's Wester Hailes neighbourhood; walked the streets of Larkhall and chatted to students at Glasgow University. In Wester Hailes High School, the head teacher and his staff are working closely with community groups to secure real jobs and careers for pupils, many of whose families are menaced daily by health inequality and in-work poverty. In Larkhall, working-class people who come from a sound Labour and trade union background never mentioned Brexit or immigration. They had simply begun to realise how much Scotland's so-called progressive, left-wing elite actually despises them. In Glasgow University I listened to a young student journalist, among the best of his generation, talk about how working-class Glaswegians on campus are often viewed with class contempt. The new fraudulent Left who have hollowed out the independence movement; the Labour Party and trade union activism have abandoned these people. They have contrived a suite of no-risk, arms-length credos by which they judge whether you can be admitted to their platinum lounges. In no particular order they are trans activism, climatism and Gaza-ology. A Stop The War coalition march against the war in Gaza at Queen's Park in Glasgow (Image: Gordon Terris) None of them entail anything more than proclaiming slogans on social media, some flag-waving on marches and assembling the odd firing squad to harass those not deemed to be true believers. Lately, a little dose of good, old-fashioned anti-Semitism has been added to the mix. Ordinary Scots recoil at authentic transphobia and want to be kind to the environment. They are not racists and they're appalled at the death and destruction in Gaza. However, despite being dismissed as ill-educated by the salonistas of the Scottish Left, they deploy nuance to these debates. They also wonder why, after 25 years in which Scotland's devolved government has been solely in the hands of left-wing parties we still have a housing crisis, stubbornly high child poverty rates and the worst drugs deaths figures in Europe. The communities who appeared at the top of the first Multi-Deprivation Index still stubbornly cling to their places nearly two decades later. In the endless struggle against workplace inequality and profiteering they would normally expect the trade union movement to be their champions. You can forget about that, though. The STUC is currently led by an international property tycoon with five homes across Scotland and Spain and a recently-purchased £100k plot of land. As long as Roz Foyer remains in place anything the unions say about homelessness or redistribution of wealth is rendered meaningless. Ms Foyer was also a panellist earlier this month in an anti-racism event to stop Reform. It also featured one campaigner whose inchoate rant featured the word scum a lot and a London-based activist who was shouting so loudly all through her infantile diatribe that the permanent residents of the nearby Ramshorn kirk-yard were in danger of being roused from their eternal slumbers. Read more In almost two hours of this the only rational contribution was from a working-class Labour councillor who reminded the audience that 25 years of class-shaming by Scotland's political establishment were driving multitudes to Reform. In Hamilton last week, one senior Labour activist, though jubilant at Davy Russell's triumph, was refusing to get carried away by it. 'What's been really interesting is that there's been stuff around class and elitism on the doorsteps,' he said. It's been evident the massive disconnect between these people and the groups they've traditionally relied upon to fight for them. 'All the parties of the Left have lost their ability to communicate with everyday people. They're all focusing on identity politics and other issues that are of no concern to working people. Labour especially needs to do some deep thinking about what we stand for and what it means to be on the Left.' Until recently, the election of a man like Davy Russell in the West of Scotland would have passed unremarked. It's just that we've grown so accustomed to a Holyrood dominated by shallow chancers reading from scripts prepared by their £1.7m spin section that the victory of someone who doesn't fit that mould seemed so startling. Kevin McKenna is a Herald writer and columnist. He is Features Writer of the Year and writes regularly about the working-class people and communities of Scotland.