Alan Rusbridger, by royal appointment destroyer of hard drives, astonishingly has yet again given space to Gordon Brown’s witterings on Scottish Independence. That is at least twelve articles puffing Brown in the last month.
This one is quite probably the most stupid yet. Brown opines that Scotland will not be a more equal or progressive society after independence. It is a great shame that these Cassandra like powers of predicting the future were not working when his own policies of creating an economic bubble, based on massive boosting of irresponsive speculation in the City of London, led to a crash which has impoverished us all for generations.
Brown’s prognostication is based on his analysis that Alex Salmond’s policies are not progressive. The evidence that the SNP is to the left of the Labour Party is overwhelming. Leaving that aside, Brown makes the presumption that the SNP will be the government in an independent Scotland. It is much more probable that, independence settled, there will be a realignment of Scottish party politics. It will certainly not be a one party state. Pretty well the one thing we can be sure of is that a Conservative government is unlikely – and as that is what the UK is heading for in 2015, I think we can expect an independent Scotland to be at any rate less regressive.
Tuition fees, Academy schools, PFI, NHS prescriptions, bedroom tax – these are all areas where Gordon Brown and New Labour advance the full neo-con agenda and which have been stoutly resisted by the Scottish government. Genuinely left parties and the Greens have consistent representation in the Scottish parliament and are listened to, not openly mocked and abused as Caroline Lucas is when she speaks in parliament.
This nonsense from Gordon Brown is perhaps to be expected. But why on earth does the Guardian keep publishing it?