by Les Bertrand

A Strategic Withdrawal

Jacob Rees-Mogg, once chided Jon Snow of CH4 News for using the word ‘shambles’ (at some point during those long Brexit Debate Years), informing him that the word means ’an open-air slaughterhouse’. It is no great struggle to identify a place which meets that description right now - Gaza was meant to be the subject of debate in the HoC yesterday.

Instead, the ‘shambles’ in the Commons is now revealing the extent to which the UK government is in thrall to Israeli lobbies. 

Take Michael Shanks for example. He has wasted no time getting his feet under the right table by (allegedly) joining Labour Friends of Israel. (This will be noted by more of his constituents than may be good for him - if he had joined at any other time then it may have gone without notice.) We know someone well-placed to monitor Ruglonians’ assessment of his performance as MP so far and while we cannot name names we can reveal, exclusively, that consensus involves the phrases ‘no fuckin use to anyone’ and ‘no fuckin use at all’. On the upside, Labour in Scotland now has the opportunity to prove that it is genuinely ‘Scottish’ by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and Sarwar will be considering how he can make good on his pledge to ‘stand up to Starmer’ without anyone noticing, particularly Starmer.

(Incidentally, now might be a good time for the SNP’s Westminster and Holyrood contingents to reveal the nature of their relationship with Israeli lobby groups. We’re confident that they’d be happy to do so in a spirit of transparency and would be ably assisted by Scotland’s rigorously impartial and uncompromised Fourth Estate.)

A vanishingly small  number of Scots have any substantial interest in the fate of Speaker Lindsay Hoyle. The fact that he is not as suave or sure-footed as John Bercow is neither here nor there and whether he decides to sling his own hook, hoist himself on his own petard or leave his inevitable jettisoning to others remains to be seen. But his extraordinary behaviour yesterday has at least helped to expose the hypocrisy and desperation now skewering the UK’s major political parties while affirming the contempt in which the SNP is held by the parliament’s own chief officer.

There is confusion over the SNP ‘walkout’. John Nicholson, coiffured to within an inch of his life, slipped in and out of BBC journalist mode as he attempted to explain, on Newsnight, what it was all about. If we understood him correctly, SNP members had decided to go out, en masse, to the lobbies (which, John helpfully informed us, are large rooms close to the debating chamber) so that they could have a chinwag about it all. So, whether it was a protest, a ritualised form of hokey-cokey or a strategic huddle, we may never know.

Politicking while innocent civilians are being slaughtered? Heaven forfend. Accusations are hurled back and forth while, on the international stage, the UK - yet again - coolly abstains when it comes to calling for an immediate ceasefire. 

Can the SNP now mend some of the damage self-inflicted in recent years? Popular public sentiment in Scotland regarding Gaza is plain and it’s not only hardened cynics who can see the obvious potential here for a serious turnaround in their electoral fortunes if they have the gumption and guts to capitalise on Tory/Labour disarray. 

Politicians don’t often get the opportunity to act on points of principle which are so clear-cut. The SNP in Westminster, more by accident than design, has been handed the chance to humiliate an already disgraced House of Commons as its final act before walking out for good. In doing so, it can accept reality (i.e. that it is indeed viewed as ‘irrelevant’ by Hoyle and the main parties) while pushing abstentionism front and centre of the political debate in Scotland as the next GE looms.

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