Back at the Beating Heart
“Scotland is back at the beating heart of my government.” Keir Starmer, Jul 7, 2024
As the Labour Party faces electoral collapse, it is doubling down on its own worst policies. Rather than changing tack on its constitutional anti-democracy, or veering away from its reactionary social policies or stopping mimicking the far-right, it is doing the opposite. Despite being promised to be ‘at the beating heart’ of government after the return of a Labour government last year, this week Scotland was faced with:
- a £1bn reduction in consequentials if Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves goes ahead with the 2p income tax rise in England.
- to lose out on millions after the UK Government confirmed that its flagship Pride in Place funding will replace existing Shared Prosperity Fund allocations. Local authorities were only informed of the change on Wednesday afternoon (the new funding settlement means the allocation to the Glasgow City Region will drop from around £33m to around £7m)
- our own Secretary of State for Scotland accused the elected Scottish Government of being a threat to national security
This all started earlier in the week, when the Scottish Conservative John Lamont asked in the HoC if the Defence Secretary, John Healy agreed “that Scottish independence would be a gift to Britain’s enemies and would put at risk the hard work of our armed forces in keeping us safe at home?”
Healy went further saying that: “the continuation of the Scottish Nationalist Government in Scotland is a threat to our security”.
It doesn’t need much unpacking to realise what a deeply strange thing this is to say. It is profoundly undemocratic and a dangerous turn for the beleaguered Labour project. But it was not a misstatement by a minister off-message and beyond his brief. The bizarre line was then repeated by the new Secretary of State for Scotland, Douglas Alexander and then repeated by David Lammy, standing in for the Prime Minister on Wednesday, who added to the weirdness by declaring that his DNA test had proved him 5% Scottish. What was that even supposed to mean?
As Adam Ramsay writes in Byline Times: “Labour cabinet ministers agreed that Scotland’s SNP Government is a threat to national security, giving between them three reasons: its desire for Scottish independence (implicitly, when Healy agreed with Lamont’s original question); its eventual decision to stop subsidising arms companies producing weapons for Israel for use in the genocide in, and its opposition to nuclear weapons.”
Ramsay concludes: “This posturing is politically telling. 1.3 million people in Scotland voted for the SNP Government in 2021. If Labour thought it could reach out to sway any of those people in May’s Holyrood election, then it wouldn’t be using a line which these voters see as preposterous. If Labour had an expansive strategy in Scotland, then Douglas Alexander – who will be in charge of overseeing the campaign – would be picking messages to reach out to the roughly half of Scots who support independence. Instead, this messaging appears to be an attempt to shore-up the hardline unionist vote in Scotland, which is currently haemorrhaging to Reform.”
Alexander has been parachuted in to conduct a campaign of ‘muscular unionism’ the like of which we have never seen before. This might exorcise his personal demons after having been humiliated by Mhairi Black, but it is likely to be utterly disastrous. Sarwar is now tied to a faltering Starmer project with a Scottish Secretary whose role is to protect the Prime Minister and attack the country he is meant to represent in Cabinet.
It’s difficult to comprehend the scale of the crisis Alexander and Sarwar are stepping into. As Gerry Hassan has written: “The scale of Labour’s collapse under Starmer is so steep & fundamental. Never has Labour’s vote deserted in such numbers in its 125 year history. Not in 1931 when Ramsay MacDonald joined the Tories; not in 1981 when four ex-Labour Cabinet ministers broke away & formed the SDP.”
This is all a very long way away from when the entire Scottish commentariat were cheerleading for the return of a Labour government last year when they safely assumed that all would be well.
Unbelievable – arrant nonsense along the lines of Trump. We are not a threat to security – if Labour want nuclear weapons, they can have them – just park them on the Thames. If Labour want to continue supporting genocide, let them, just not using weapons produced in Scotland. Interesting that the Royal Regiment of Scotland is the most used infantry regiment in the British army. Once again we are being used and abused. Roll on a vote for a republican independent Scotland with a proper Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Bill
Trumpian style pressure on the Scottish people…..also potentially outlining future threats to the SNP government if independence receives the highest electoral support .
National security is a royal prerogative. More recently, Parliamentary committees have considered aspects of national security. For partly historical-imperial and partly international-legal reasons, national security is not supposed to be a party-political variable. National security is essentially the concern of the ‘permanent government’ (or ‘deep state’), and policy is not supposed to change on mere elections (certainly who our friends or enemies are is not to be influenced by anything as vulgar as public opinion, bar the rare referendum).
This recent (August 2025) briefing, The royal prerogative and ministerial advice, covers some relevant and/or interesting topics, among them:
Labour’s Governance of Britain report from 2007
Command of the Armed Forces
“The King, as head of the state, is in supreme command of the Army and Navy for the defence of the realm.”
Crown’s right of angary (a new one to me, but could be applied to an independent, neutral Scotland, as it was to Iceland in WW2)
Emergency Powers
Right to impress men into the Royal Navy (modern slavery, still legal)
“As parens patriae, the monarch is ex officio guardian of ‘infants, idiots and lunatics’.”
“On 1 July 1999, certain prerogative powers exercised by UK Ministers of the Crown were transferred to Scottish Ministers, which is the collective name for members of the Scottish Government.”
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9877/CBP-9877.pdf
A UK Government Minister is not supposed to give ad hoc, off-the-cuff opinions on what/who is, or is not, a threat to national security. Unless, of course, the Enemy Within has already been identified at the highest levels.
Going by the lack of articles about the Scottish government, it does look like the author is an establishment SNP supporter.
More mouse droppings.
How FFS can the SNP be both part of the establishment and a threat to national security??
The Scottish Establishment.
RAF Lossiemouth would be the primary target for Russian missiles, but I presume it would be a key Nato airbase under the Scottish Establishment. I have no doubt the Scottish Establishment would loan the naval bases as well. Don’t expect anything on that from the author.
‘The Scottish establishment’ is a figment of your fevered mouse like imagination and is actually the devolved government elected by Scottish electorate under PR. Foreign policy is reserved to Westminster and the British establishment (Westminster, media and powerful UK institutions) is very anti independence because the electorate of Scotland may elect a government with policies that do not concur with Westminster and the wishes of UK establishment.
Your post is yet again nonsense and the wee mouse in my cubbyhole could make a more sensible comment.
“our own Secretary of State for Scotland accused the elected Scottish Government of being a threat to national security”
The truth or otherwise of that statement is dependent upon how “national” is defined.
If the refers to the UK then, of course, it is false.
The Scottish Government should be a threat to the realm of the UK but, of course, they aren’t. The timidity of the Scottish Government in respect of the constitutional question and the teachery of their deferral to Westminster over the sovereignty of the Scottish people amply proves this.
What Douglas Alexander – the British formal representative in Scotland – is really concerned is the 50% of the Scottish population that seek liberation from the oppressive, imperialising, pariah British state.
THAT is the real threat that aforementioned would like to bring to heel.
Many people expected Labour to be disappointing in office and consequently lose support. Most people are astounded at how quickly they have achieved these two unwanted outcomes.
What is more worrying is how under Starmer (cough McSweeney) they appear to be happy to tack to the right and be authoritarian to try and win back supporters they have lost to Reform. This has been proven to be tactically counterproductive as it is unlikely they can outbid Reform while they lose twice as many supporters to Greens/Lib Dems etc.
What is even more concerning is that they are preparing the ground for a Reform government by concentrating on and legitimising the very few issues that Reform campaigns on.
The Labour government have been happy to issue this ridiculous statement about SNP being are a threat to national security while they also misuse the Terrorism Act to proscribe Palestine Action and criminalise and delegitimise many peaceful protestors. It doesn’t take a vivid imagination to join the dots and think that a future Westminster Labour/Tory/Reform government may also be willing to proscribe independence supporting organisations (potentially criminalising and delegitimising >50% of Scottish population) in a desperate attempt to prevent independence.
This shows that our own politicians are learning from Trump. Just say and do whatever the F you want.
Once they get rid of our democracy and rights, we can look forward to the eradication of anything and everyone that they find inconvenient. The window of escape is rapidly closing. Even in an iScotland, we will need to fight tooth and nail to build and retain real democracy.
Healy, Alexander and Lammy could not be more wrong.The real threat to UK (read: English) security isn’t the SNP. It’s the serial incompetence of successive Westminster governments — and the power vacuum left festering at the heart of English politics.
Rewind to 2013. David Cameron, to silence Tory Eurosceptics, promised an EU referendum he thought he couldn’t lose despite decades of anti-EU bile from a largely foreign owned English press. In 2016, when he lost, he scarpered.
Enter Theresa May: paralysed by her own party, pretending an advisory referendum was binding law. Three years of multiple votes, plans and delays followed as Westminster chased its own tail, until May was squeezed out.
Then came Boris Johnson, the King of the Clowns. A capricious human laundry basket. Bored by details and irritated by ethics. He finally drowned in a swamp of lies, cronyism and perceived entitlement, his sole ‘acheivement’ (cough) being a Brexit ‘deal’ that carved 5% off overall UK GDP and 6% off Scotland’s.
Then it was Liz Truss, clown out, crackpot in. A farce outlasted by a lettuce, but not before she crashed the economy. ‘Nuff said.
Tory “democracy” responded by scrapping democracy altogether, crowning the next PM without even a members’ vote. Sunak was an over-correction. A spreadsheet in a suit with no moral compass, substituting technocratic managerialism for leadership, capable only of managing its own and the country’s decline while calling it stability.
Labour were a shoe-in for the ’24 GE. Yet despite having years to prepare, Starmer’s crew look stunned to find themselves in power. They’ve brought managerialism without vision, confusing caution for leadership. The country drifts on still devoid of a moral compass and the vacuum yawns. Nigel Farage and his band of pseudo-patriots are ready to fill that void in our politics. A bunch of halfwit fantasists, currently demonstrating their inability to run even a council, but they’re still leading the polls, and Labour’s only response is to roll the pitch for them.
Scotland isn’t the threat. The real danger to UK security is years of Westminster failure. Labour’s incompetence is now the threat.
If Scottish independence forced England to re-examine its own delusions, it might just save us all.
@Ian Ibbetson, I wouldn’t characterise British foreign policy’s bent towards national insecurity as primarily incompetence, but as a way to control the domestic population (the prime target for their own nuclear weapons).
“In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.”
Thích Nhất Hạnh
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Nh%E1%BA%A5t_H%E1%BA%A1nh
Beyond that, British imperialists create (and often arm) enemies as side-effect of their use of proxies, their hierarchical racism, their perfidious habit of doing whatever is expedient (including, it must be said, efforts to cover up their own blunders and corruption), their increasingly stupid diplomacy (which is even more reliant on a privileged caste and of course always royal appointments) and essentially evil foreign policy. Obviously you are going to create more enemies by (under royal prerogative) cosying up to elites, autocrats, dictators, hereditary oppressors, religious fundamentalists, fascists, settler colonialists, corporate overlords, warlords and so forth. And more enemies mean potentially more threats to national security, although I’d guess most people just want to be left alone and not screwed over by neocolonialists, rather than demonstrating any particular desire to invade Britannia.
More than that, successive British governments seem rather to invite catastrophe, from climate change and nature-degradation to nuclear roulette and bankruptcy from the financial treason of the MoD to general corruption and corporate/foreign capture. And by post-WW2 becoming the bottom Empire to USA’s top, the British have inherited USA’s enemies without gaining much of worth in return. When the triumvirate of British conspirators tried to go their own way in 1956 with France and Israel, the USA (embarrassed by not having a morally higher ground against the Soviet invasion of Hungary) slapped them down. In the following years, Heath’s Conservatives tried to turn to Europe, but the various decolonisations and ‘end of Cold War’ recalibrations haven’t resulted in a diminution of enemies. Rather once-colonised people are recovering their own histories under British rule and comparing notes.
*Ponders*.
No-one expects the stab-in the-back. Except when it’s common sense!
The famous Dolchstoßlegende, blaming the jews and the communists, was first articulated to Prussian General Erich Ludendorff by Anglo-Scot General Sir Neill Malcolm over brandy and cigars in Berlin, 1919.
“You were stabbed in the back”, said Malcom.
Ludendorff’s eye’s bugged out.
“Exactly! We were stabbed in the back!”
Whereupon the trope spread like wildfire. This time, however, I think its an infection from US nationalist rhetoric and eagerly received, just like before.
…and if Healy is Ludendorff, I guess that makes Dougie, a (very short) Paul Hindenberg.
The author is shocked by Rachel Reeves talking about raising income tax in England and Wales to Scottish levels? Seriously?