On the Devolution Commission from the Labour Party. The much-trumpeted power to raise the top tax rate above the general UK level, would, it is estimated, affect fewer than 13,000 taxpayers across Scotland; and would therefore have no impact at all on Scotland’s ability to address substantial issues of economic inequality. And even more worryingly for the No camp, the language used by the report in its general defence of the Union – and often repeated by Johann Lamont herself – seems in complete denial about the radical shifted the ground of UK politics over the last generation. To talk about the UK as a “sharing union” dedicated to ensuring social justice might have made reasonable sense at any time between 1945 and 1974. Forty years on, though, it seems almost politically illiterate to launch a proposal for the future of the UK which does not even acknowledge, never mind tackle, the grotesque and worsening structural inequalities that disfigure our national life, after a generation of neoliberal consensus at Westminster; or the democratic deficit caused by UK Labour’s historic shift to the centre-right, including its acceptance of the present UK government’s flawed austerity narrative. Joyce McMillan The Scotsman 21st March 2014 Dirty Lying Scoundrels... Chris Law (Same Day)
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 00:21:00 +0000
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