Bribery isn't even necessary: Labour Party members are meant to lose.

    In recent times, and for a number of reasons, I've been feeling depressed. This has been particularly so over the Labour Party's defeat in the general election last December. I still struggle to understand why the most popular and principled politician in England in 2017 was defeated in a general election just two years later when in my view he was still the most principled and popular political leader in England even though he was unjustly vilified by the media and undermined by the treachery of a minority - yet surprisingly powerful minority - of  Labour MPs and officials.
Last week I heard of a  dubious, or possibly spurious group  (set up and selected by whom? certainly not the membership) which has decided that most of the blame for the election defeat must be placed upon Mr. Corbyn. How wonderful they must feel to be "truly" free of responsibility.

    Exasperated by this I sent a letter of protest to the Labour Party leader Sir Kier Starmer, and the Deputy Leader, Angela Rayner, both of whom, (unlike many of us who put up extra funds of money we could little afford for the 2017 and 2019 campaigns), are relatively comfortably off. Neither politician replied. Then I wrote an almost identical letter to the secretary of my Constituency Labour Party here in Totnes. I have not as yet received a reply. Here is the letter.

Dear -

I sincerely appreciate all the efforts which you and others put in to keep the Totnes CLP purring along but, before the Labour Party as it currently stands (or collapses) addresses any issue, it must first deal with the matter of the corrupt “officials” in the Party who despicably & dishonestly counselled against the Party Leader, Jeremy Corbyn & his team. They also built up a spurious case which implied that all those who rejoined The Labour Party because of Jeremy Corbyn were  anti-semite. Until we have clarity, these issues are the only matters on the agenda. Unless it is sorted out we have a Party without a soul tormented by an inner cancer. Blairites and their camp followers have ripped the heart out of our Labour Party. Predictably they are all now silently smug about it. 

The Party must deal with this matter now not in some investigation in the middle distance which inevitably would end up in a whitewash.

Yours faithfully,

Charles Sharpe

https://leavingdundee.blogspot.com/2016/03/better-watch-out-for-poetry-feelings.html

I have been left feeling that many members like me carry a sense of having been "stuffed" and nobody really cares. I was reminded of a passage from The Eyrie a novel by the Australian author, Tim Winton.

"We're meant to lose ,and campaign and calculate all we like, the bulldozers still arrive, the agencies wash their hands, the media enjoys its little flash of colour and silent influence and it's back to business as usual.
Like every arm of government it's a servant of industry facilitating its ongoing prosperity. Bribery isn't even necessary. That's the real insult the system works beautifully without it". 

Language or Dialect?

         Just after the Scottish Independence referendum in 2014. I  had a conversation with a  relative of my wife at a family gathering. My wife is English as is my wife's relative. I was telling this person how pleased I was that my home city of Dundee had overwhelmingly voted for Scottish independence. My wife's relative was not impressed with my information. Neither, he said, was he impressed by Dundonians' inability to speak the English language. 

     "In fact," he said,"your dialect massacres the English Language."

     My hasty response was, "No, it is the English language that destroys Dundee Scots." We finished our conversation there. We were both in the huff with each other. On this matter I believe we still are. I calmed down but over the years I have tried to make sense of my omnipotent claim. Convincing or not, here in the following lines, are my thoughts.                                                                                                                                     

    
      Recently I read an obituary in The Guardian for Edward Kamau Brathwaite, the distinguished Caribbean poet and historian. I was interested in something he thought about dialect and language. He insisted that the language spoken by the Caribbean peoples should be regarded as a “nation language" and not as an inferior form of English or as a dialect.

      I have similar thoughts about a much older language, Scots. I would go further, I think the language spoken in any locality should be considered its language and not its dialect. To call it otherwise is to presume it is a lesser form of some notional master language.  The Queen's English is a fake language. 

     The language the people of Dundee speak is genuine. It has developed organically through its usage by the people of Dundee. While the language spoken 15 miles away in Forfar is subtly different - and at times a not so subtly - from Dundee's but it too is a genuine language.

      You may wonder why I am raising this issue and some may just wonder what exactly my issue is. To explain this I need to go back to Dundee in the early to mid-1950s. If my parents heard me playing with my friends out on the street speaking Dundee Scots, I was hauled inside the house and told speaking like that was common and would get me nowhere. I discovered later that my parents' message was propaganda. Posh English was the language of the world of power, influence, wealth and status while trying to speak it was supposedly the ordinary folk's way of unlocking the door to that world. Well that didn't work out despite the elocution lessons my parents arranged for my younger sister and me to be taught by that snooty lady who had a big house on the Ancrum Road, Lochee.
     
     I am glad that it didn't work. Dundee Scots is the language of my soul even though down here in Devon I have little opportunity to exercise it.
    
       Yet English and Scots speakers can meet together and, with comic results. In the early 1960s,  Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who lived in the nearby Castle of Mey, inspected the troops of the Queens Own Highlanders Regiment at Fort George barracks near Ardersier.

Fort George

     She walked along the line of soldiers presented for inspection and occasionally had a brief word with one or two of the men. She stopped in front of one Private and asked him if he had a family. 
   
     "Eh Ma'am, we have a hoose jist ootside the barracks"  
     
     The Queen Mother adopting her woman of the people mode continued,
    
      "And are you comfy there?"
      
     "No Ma'am," the private replied, "Eh come fae Dundee."