English Labour's Faustian Pact with the Neoliberal Devil

Frances McKie gave me permission to publish a letter she submitted today to The Herald. It published a similar one from her a year ago. She likens English Labour’s repudiation of any remaining socialist principles in exchange for its total subservience to Big Business (and the Israel Lobby) to a Faustian pact.

In October, 2023, Labour Heartlands published, The Faustian Pact: Labour’s Soul Bargained Away:

It should have been crystal clear to Scots that voting for English Labour would only bring more misery. Scotland’s colonial administration won’t stand up to the Corporatocracy that masquerades as the British State because, as a devolved entity, it’s part and parcel of the same fetid system, as is Scotland’s corporate-owned media.

And our media is worse than useless. Papers like The Herald and The Scotsman will print the occasional letter from people like Frances to give a veneer of “objectivity” in what is otherwise a sea of unionist garbage.

That leaves the Scottish People. Please sign the petition demanding we be given our UN political and human rights as articulated in the ICCPR. There are 5,201 signatures so far. But to get the attention of our elected representatives, we need thousands more.

Here are Frances’ letters.

February 14, 2025

Dear Sir,

Almost exactly a year ago, you kindly published a letter in which I compared Keir Starmer's craven capitulation to the City of London and to the monstrous Israeli policy of Genocide in Palestine with the nightmare tale of Dr Faustus: the legend which warns all those so greedy for power, to beware the devil's craft - false promises in sweet ambiguous words - enticing us to sign up for self-destruction.

A few months later in the June General Election, Keir Starmer played the devil himself, smoothly pouring out so many blatant, cynical lies, conning the Scottish Electorate for surely the very last time.

His murky, advance deal with his City of London masters, included handing over Scotland - our natural resources, our strategic commitment to sustainable energy and socialist belief in public services - to a long and growing list of slash-and-burn, wide-boy, carpet-bagging, billionaire profiteers currently invading communities with potentially lethal battery storage units, horrendous miles of huge pylons and sleazy offers of privatised opportunities to beat public service queues.

Grangemouth is to be destroyed. Poverty, homelessness and despair continue to grow and that shameless moribund, so-called Scottish Labour Party, from Jackie Baillie to Anas Sarwar, stands hapless and apparently mindless, silenced by their masters at Westminster.

If it wasn't clear before, it surely is now: Scotland should have no further business with London Rule. In whatever form it presents itself - Tory, Reform, Labour or LibDem - we should remember the awful Faustian consequences of being conned by devilish lies.

Yours sincerely,

Frances McKie

February 8, 2024

Dear Sir,

It is clear that Sir Keir Starmer, followed with unremitting, stolid complicity by Rachel Reeves and the rest of his Shadow Cabinet, has - some time ago - sold the soul of the Labour Party. Like Faustus and his servants, in mindless pursuit of power, they have put themselves and their policies in hock to the precise causes of UK economic, social and political failure.

He has already given a blanket assurance to the City of London that their dodgy deals, off-shore "activities", bankers' bonuses and shadowy oligarchs will continue untroubled by a Labour Westminster government;

Benjamin Netanyahu's genocidal destruction of Gaza, including hospitals, refugee camps and over 11,000 murdered children has proceeded unchallenged - and no doubt encouraged - by his desperate subservience to the "Westminster Line" on Israeli war crimes;

he has, long ago, submitted wholesale to the far-right, racist Brexit which has destroyed so many aspects of the UK economy, especially food businesses in Scotland; he has endorsed existing privatisations within vital public services like health, transport, water and energy and accepts the horrors of the privatised “Care Industry" - promising there will be no reversal of Thatcherism from Labour.

This morning, on the same day that we are told the world has now reached the crucial warming mark of 1.5 degrees Centigrade, Keir Starmer withdrew his promise of £28 billion investment in "green initiatives". Quite apart from perplexed (and flooded) Tory constituencies around the Severn and the Thames, the rest of the world, especially younger people, must be wondering who is pulling this horribly meaningless Labour "leader's" strings.

Mephistopheles did, in his own way, try to warn Faustus against grasping power by selling his soul. Like Faustus, Sir Keir doesn't get it either. Whatever he does, it's clear that now he has submitted to the banks, the hedge funds, the oil companies and the racists, all the usual Westminster corruption will still be in charge once he has conned the right wing electorate in South East England to give him and his team "power".

Like Faustus, he clearly doesn’t understand (or worse doesn’t care) that, having signed up to these other devilish masters, his attempts to exercise that "power" must be puny, pointless and, very probably, risible. He will be directed as they see fit.

I am hoping from the bottom of my heart that the Scottish electorate, particular our young people, see the danger in time.

Yours sincerely,

Frances McKie