TUC general secretary PAUL NOWAK speaks to the Morning Star’s Berny Torre about the increasing frustration the trade union movement feels at a government that promised change, but has been too slow to bring it about

IT IS a difficult time for the left in the Labour Party, in Scotland as everywhere else. There is no need, for the readers of this paper, to list the examples of back sliding mendacity from Keir Starmer and acolytes, nor the Labour leadership’s collusion in distorting or abandoning democratic practice in order to ensure absolute loyalty to our dear leader from prospective parliamentary candidates. Scotland has not been exempted from this.
We can neither ignore it, nor adopt the approach of the ultra-left which seems to have come straight out of Blackadder Goes Forth — a mad assault on enemy positions over open ground in the certainty of mass slaughter.
Perhaps those advocating such an approach do so on the assumption that a new workers’ party is about to bring salvation to abandoned socialists, so that expelled Campaign Group members could represent “a real socialist party” for a year before losing their seats in the 2024 election.

VINCE MILLS charts the disintegration of the Starmer faction’s platform and the gulf between it and Labour members

VINCE MILLS says Scottish Labour has adopted better positions than its Westminster counterpart — but unless it starts to fight for them that will count for nothing

VINCE MILLS cautions over the perils and pitfalls of ‘a new left party’

VINCE MILLS says politicians of various parties are interpreting the result in self-serving ways, but it contains little comfort for the left