What sickens me about Labour

Back in September, one of the reasons I gave for wanting to re-start the Scottish Blogging Roundup was the fact that it was difficult to find any SNP supporters. Of course, since then I’ve discovered absolutely loads, and I’ve been more aware of the fact that there are hardly any Labour supporting blogs.

So I was quite pleased when I found out about Ridiculous Politics. Unfortunately — and I find that this is a theme with Labour blogs — it mentions almost nothing about Labour. It’s always, “Ho ho, look at what the SNP did! Aren’t the Lib Dems idiots! Look at those awful Tories!” And never, ever, anything that actually talks about Labour policy. I wonder why!

If you don’t believe me, here is a breakdown of the current stories on the front page of Ridiculous Politics:

  • Conservatives — 18½
  • Lib Dems — 4½
  • SNP — 4½
  • Plaid Cymru — 1
  • Labour — 1
  • UKIP — ½

Yes, this Ridiculous Politics is such a fan of Labour that it saw fit to write about the Labour party once over the course of its past thirty posts. And even then, it wasn’t so much a celebration of goverment policy as a report of some anti-BBC comments made by famous Blairite Dennis Skinner. Meanwhile, the obsession with the Conservatives is quite striking. (Incidentally, half marks were awarded for those instances where Ridiculous Politics managed to attack two parties in one post!)

This is what usually upsets me most about Labour supporters. All to often their only strongly held conviction is that they support Labour (often re-stated as “At least I’m not a Tory!” or “At least I’m not a Lib Dem!” or “At least I’m not a nationalist!”). Just look at, for instance, Councillor Terry Kelly, or Councillor Bob Piper who was often evasive when it came to actual Labour policy.

For a lot of these people, Labour could probably set up a gulag and they would justify it by saying, “Well the Tories had the Poll Tax.” I mean, just look at what Labour has done over the past decade. Iraq, ID cards, tuition fees, foundation hospitals, all the rest of it. You can bet your house that if a Conservative government had done all this, these same Labour supporters would have gone on a rabid rampage. But because the government that did all this happens to wear a red rosette, it — often literally — gets away with murder.

I wish more Labour supporters would just tell us what their principles actually were (apart from the principle of supporting Labour of course). Because all they ever express is some kind of holier-than-thou “at least I’m not a Tory” nonsense.

7 comments

  1. Labour’s in power. That means they’ve got the problem that if there’s anything wrong, they have to apologise, support awfulness, or ignore.

    Attacking the opposition is much easier; in the US, more blogs, and more good blogs, are Democrat, they’re in opposition. Fortunately, when you’re a minority party, you’re always in opposition, so blogging is easy.

    I mean, 90% of my posts on current affairs are attacking the Govt. Can you imagine actually supporting most Govt policies? What do you write? “Oh, isn’t Milibland a nice bloke?”

    Meh. Back online in my new place! Sorry…

  4. Ridiculous politics is great! Surely you must be amused at the attempts at humour when the bigger story is somewhat closer to its political home and oddly ignored?

  5. I agree with MatGB. Bloggers are anti-establishment. In the US, the one’s that matter are Democratic. Here they seem to be Conservative. Because the whole political system in America is way more right-wing than here, Democrats and Tories seem to be on a similar position on the political spectrum. The bloggers are probably the same in both countries, it’s just the politics that are different.

  7. I’d like to think that over the course of the past two years I’ve managed to write a fair few posts actually discussing Labour policies, including on Iraq, and why I support them. Of course, I do a lot of Tory/Lib Dem bashing too, but that’s kind of the nature of the beast …