THERE'S a drearily predictable truth about promises made by Labour.
They start off as grandiose and epoch changing, and the initial announcement is accompanied by excited commentary and reports on BBC Scotland. Then come the U-turns, the watering down, and the back-tracking, none of which ever seem to receive much attention from BBC Scotland.
The upshot is that what we get bears as much relation to the original promise as the listing photo on a cheap Chinese online marketplace does to the goods that are finally delivered.
There's a popular internet trend on TikTok,"this is what I wanted, this is what I got", in which (usually) young women post videos comparing photos of what they ordered online compared to the often comical reality. The Labour Party is the Temu of politics. But what it delivers is not funny.
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Although that's being unfair to the products of Chinese sweatshops, which are at least usually in the same general ballpark as whatever it was you thought you were buying. What is delivered by Labour is typically unrecognisable when compared to the original promise.
We saw this with Gordon Brown's infamous Vow during 2014's independence referendum which promised the closest thing possible to federalism within three years of a No vote. We all know the dismal reality that came to pass once the No vote was in the bag for the Better Together parties.
It was the same deceptive story with reform of the House of Lords.
When Gordon Brown unveiled his damp squib of a constitutional reform paper, BBC Scotland told us - with great fanfare - that the Labour Party intended to abolish the affront to democracy and replace it with a fully elected Senate of the Nations and Regions. Which, they told us, would give Scotland a powerful new voice in Westminster.
Starmer quickly distanced himself from that promise, and not that BBC Scotland was keen to publicise the U-turn, Labour have ditched any idea of abolishing the House of Lords. The power of patronage it offers is far too appealing to British Prime Ministers.
The best we are likely to get is the abolition of voting rights of the several dozen remaining hereditary peers in the Lords, although even that is not certain. It's 2024 and there are still people in the Westminster parliament who have the right to vote and influence legislation based on the fact that they inherited it from their aristocratic forebears.
Which brings us to Labour's latest "this is what I wanted, this is what I got" fail.
GB Energy
When he was elected as leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer promised to nationalise the energy companies. That promise soon fell by the wayside. Instead what we got was a promise to set up a publicly owned energy company, Great British Energy, which would produce energy from renewables and thus bring down energy bills for domestic consumers.
The promise of lower energy bills featured prominently in Labour Party publicity in the run up to the General Election. This new energy company was going to be based in Scotland, we were told.
However, shortly before the election Labour was forced to admit that the new energy company would not in fact be an energy company in the commonly understood sense of the term. GB Energy would neither produce energy nor own any energy producing infrastructure.
Instead, the company is to be an "investment vehicle" for channelling public money into privately owned and run renewable energy projects. Plus, this energy company, which is not an energy company and will only offer office and admin jobs and not highly skilled trades positions, was still going to be headquartered in Aberdeen. So that's OK then, right?
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Meanwhile Labour have refused to say by how much energy bills will come down as a result of GB Energy's operations, nor how much the average household can expect to save.
Salford is not part of Aberdeen, you may have noticed.
So just what does the claim that GB Energy will be headquartered in Aberdeen mean when the chair of the company will operate out of offices in Manchester? I can feel a "this is what I wanted, this is what I got" TikTok video coming on.
Unsurprisingly Anas Sarwar has defended this latest Labour betrayal, trying to spin criticism of the decision as "not wanting to welcome talent."
We're very happy to welcome talent Anas, it's just that we expected to be welcoming the talent to Aberdeen, not to Salford. Sarwar defended having a GB Energy boss who lives "in another part of the country." Scotland clearly doesn't qualify as a country to the branch manager, either that or he thinks Manchester is now a part of Scotland.
To be fair, Maier will be conveniently located to supervise the southern end of the new cable siphoning off Scottish renewably generated electricity and taking it to England.
The SNP’s energy spokesperson at Westminster, Dave Doogan MP, said: "To be completely plain about it, this sums UK energy policy up – command and miscontrol of Scotland's resources from hundreds of miles away."
Alba MSP Ash Regan said: “What message of commitment does it send to Scotland that absentee GB Energy chair Juergen Maier will be managing Aberdeen-based GB Energy from his home in Manchester?"
Even the Tories were unimpressed with Scottish Conservative energy spokesperson Douglas Lumsden saying it is "an insult to the north-east that the chair of GB Energy will be based hundreds of miles away".
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