At last, a good news story. Labour gained – that is, won from another party – a seat in the Edinburgh Council bye-election yesterday. We had an excellent candidate, and we did a lot of hard work on the streets and on the doors and on the phones, for a good few weeks; and it paid off.
At a conference today we discussed the sheer opportunism and duplicity of the SNP. They have no real interest in local government, regarding it as a seed-bed that generates a voting habit in pursuit of their single aim: separating Scotland from the UK. They don’t believe in devolution – if they did they would have unfrozen the Council tax long ago, or better still they would never have frozen it. We call for double-devolution, making councillors responsible and accountable for their policies. When an issue comes up that is too difficult for them they have their hotline to HQ and get the party line. Unacceptable.
And we saw the announcement that Jeremy Corbyn is the new UK party leader. I didn’t vote for him, but we have to grateful to him for invigorating the party. We don’t know where this is taking us, but it has to be somewhere different from the stale same-old, same-old.