02 December 2007

Wendy: the woman who has destroyed Labour?

She's not going. She said she regretted any damage done to the Labour Party but that she didn't mean to do wrong.

Unfortunately for her, she has still broken the law. She was supposed to check the donations were legal. They weren't. She knew that they weren't. If she had simply dropped the ball and been unaware of what was going on, she could just muddle through. But she knew, the letter to Paul Green, and her admission that she was responsible for it and addressed it to him, proves it. So she broke the law, by accepting the donation, by not checking that it was legal, and by knowing that the donor was not a UK registered voter. Therefore, she has done wrong, and she knew she was doing wrong. Either she doesn't know the campaign laws brought in by her own Party, or she has just told a whopper.

And now she faces a drip-drip of allegations, with leak following revelation, and likely investigations by the Electoral Commission and Strathclyde Police, constantly dragging her and her Party through the mud. She's damaging Labour by continuing to lead it. And yet still she continues.

If she does really regret any damage to the Party, she doesn't regret it enough. If she did, Cathy Jamieson would be Acting Leader now.

The odds are that the order has come from Brown: stay on, or everyone has to go.

But the voters will see that they all go soon enough.

3 comments:

Marco Biagi said...

Personally this time around I have more faith in Strathclyde Police and the Scottish legal establishment than I do in the voters. They're the ones who'll get the next bite at her and with any luck they will swallow her whole.

Anonymous said...

I'm just wholly dismayed that Wendy Alexander, having got herself and her party into this mess, is now seemingly going to hang on in there. Is there no personal dignity or self-respect on her part over all this?

The dogs in the street know that she and Glasgow boy Gordon have stooped low... very, very low, in their outright deceit and criminality over funding. But to compound all that by now hanging on in some grubby compliance to Gordon Brown's self-serving dictates, and in the teeth of what the public at large now knows?

It is all just so naff and disreputable. It demeans and damages all of us in Scotland, not just Labour and their voters. It does so in the same way that her brother’s shenanigans over the Scottish General Election did.

When she became leader I defended Wendy Alexander on some other sites because I sincerely believed she was someone who would 'raise the bar' in Scottish politics. Now I can only say - Show some decency Alexanders et al; depart the scene.

You might at least then be a catalyst for the rest of Scottish Labour to start, and they have not even started, to come to terms with the reality of what happened at the last Scottish election and the reality that the Labour hegemony in Scotland is over.

To spend the dying days of that hegemony in squandering all decency and respect in a futile effort to delay the inevitable at London for Westminster Labour is no legacy to leave to those who will have to come forward to re-build Labour in Scotland.

Anonymous said...

The preceding posting that starts, "I'm just wholly dismayed..." was posted by me Ted Harvey.

Just thought I should at least try for my own litle bit of blog tranparency in all this grubiness.