Alex Massie Alex Massie

Jocky Come Home: a Labour misery drama that will flop

Jeremy Corbyn is supposed to come to Scotland this week. Thursday’s visit will be his first since he became leader of the erstwhile people’s party. Then again, he’s been due to visit before only to find some better use of his time so who knows whether he can brave life beyond the wall this week?

Yesterday John McDonnell, Jezzah’s vicar, used his speech to the Labour conference to plead with Scottish voters to “come home” to the party. It was past time, he suggested, that voters understood that the SNP are no kind of socialist revolutionaries.

Which will not come as any great surprise to most Scots. That’s part of the point and one of the reasons why the nationalists have been trusted with the keys to power. They’re no-one’s idea of militant Trots. Middle Scotland – a large constituency, by the way – is just about as immune to Spartism as Middle England.

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