by Rab Bruce’s Spider

The one thing you can say that is positive about Scottish Labour is that they can issue any sort of Press release in the certain knowledge that it positively won’t receive any scrutiny whatsoever from the Scottish media.

Their latest plan for a post-Brexit Scotland makes it clear that they do not regard the Brexit vote as warranting a second IndieRef. Scotland, it seems, must be kept under Westminster’s control no matter what happens.

Scottish Labour seem to inhabit a very different world to the rest of us. They insist that the Scottish Government must find a way to protect the status of EU citizens working in Scotland, must protect Human and Workers’ Rights and even to establish a Brexit fund to provide help for people who might suffer as a result of the UK leaving the EU.

What seems to escape them completely is that there is only one way to protect those various rights. Unless Theresa May takes the enormous gamble of not proceeding with Brexit, the UK is leaving and Scottish Labour’s principal demand is that Scotland leaves with it. If that happens, there is no way the Scottish Government can do anything about the various rights Scottish Labour want protected.

As for the Brexit fund, it is a laudable idea but Scottish Labour don’t even have a Plan A as to where the money is to come from, let alone a Plan B. Presumably they want some other services cut so that they can shout "SNPBad!" when the money is set aside for the Brexit fund. They also casually ignore the fact that it should really be the UK Government who set up any such fund. Why should money be taken out of Scotland’s ever-dwindling budget to cater for things inflicted on us by the UK? Oh, wait, that’s normal, isn’t it?

All in all, this latest bizarre call from Scottish Labour merely confirms their decline into irrelevance. They cannot bring themselves to support Scotland as a viable, independent country yet they demand that the Scottish Government take steps it could only take if Scotland were independent. They seem to be stuck in this "Best of Both Worlds" mindset but haven’t realised that the two worlds they want to have the best of are mutually incompatible. They will soon need to choose one or the other and they surely must realise that choosing the UK will sound their final death knell because the Ruth Davidson ("We’re not really Tories, vote for Ruth") Party have got the Unionist vote sewn up. Labour never seem to have learned that you can’t out-Tory the Tories and trying to portray yourselves as saviours of the Union when Ruth and her buddies have grabbed all the Union flags is a complete waste of time.

All of this seems very obvious but it would have been nice to hear some Scottish media voices pointing out these major inconsistencies in Scottish Labour’s muddled proposals. Still, some things never change.