How Monica Lennon and 300,000 trade union voices were sideline
by To understand the terminal decline of the Scottish Labour Party, you only need to look at who they are willing to silence.
This week, the party establishment orchestrated a calculated, bureaucratic lockout to prevent Monica Lennon from standing in their leadership contest. In doing so, they didn’t just shut out a prominent female politician but slammed the door on the 300,000 Scottish members of the Unite and Unison trade unions who backed her.
For a movement that still demands to be called “the party of working people”, the optics are incredible. The trade union movement – the very people who founded today’s Labour party – spoke up, and Labour’s parliamentary elite deployed a veto to sideline their choice.
The mechanics of this exclusion reveal a party terrified of its own electorate. Lennon possessed the nominations from Scotland’s largest trade unions, giving her a clear mandate to take her vision to the membership. Instead, a coordinated blockade by Scottish Labour MPs and MSPs deliberately withheld the parliamentary endorsements required for her to even appear on the ballot paper.
Why was Lennon deemed so dangerous that the rulebook had to be weaponised against her? Her crime was simple: a willingness to respect democracy.
Lennon committed the ultimate heresy within the modern Labour hierarchy by remaining open to giving the Scottish people the right to decide their own constitutional future.
In a party dictated by Westminster’s rigid refusal to acknowledge Scottish sovereignty, Lennon’s pragmatic, democratic approach made her an intolerable threat.
Rather than debate her on the merits of Scotland’s right to choose, the party machinery opted to simply erase her from the contest.
The result is a glaringly regressive spectacle. Scottish Labour is now left with an all-male leadership face-off between Michael Marra and Joe Fagan – a contest birthed from backroom plotting and already drowning in bitter infighting.
By actively engineering the downfall of a qualified female candidate to protect the Westminster status quo, the party hierarchy has validated Lennon’s own warnings that their internal culture reeks of “misogyny and male entitlement“. It is no longer a democratic political race; it is a private members’ club pulling up the drawbridge to protect its own.
SNP MSP Collette Stevenson captured the sheer hypocrisy of the situation, noting the stark disconnect between Labour’s rhetoric and their actions:
“The Scottish Labour Party claim to be ‘the party of working people’, but they have silenced Trade Unions and used underhand tactics to keep Monica Lennon off the ballot paper. Monica Lennon was rightly open to giving the Scottish people the right to decide their own future, a simple concept of democracy that the Scottish Labour Party has once again moved to deny the Scottish people.
“Two blokes will now compete in a contest that has descended into bitter infighting and vicious attacks with 300,000 members of Unite and Unison disregarded.”
Scottish Labour has built a strategy around denying the electorate a voice on independence, but in their desperation to maintain that hardline stance, they have now started disenfranchising their own movement.
You cannot claim to champion the workers while gagging the trade unions who founded the party.
You cannot claim to represent modern Scotland while orchestrating an all-male stitch-up.
And, as the SNP has repeatedly pointed out, you cannot continually deny democracy to Scotland and ever expect to win back the trust of its people.