The Viceroy's English Labour is making life harder for working people, the disabled, pensioners and children in Scotland

Published in The Edinburgh Evening News, May 5, 2025.

In his latest propaganda piece, the Viceroy proclaims May 1 is the first day of summer and predicts a “sunny future for working people across Scotland.”

The Viceroy is wrong on both counts. The first day of summer, June 21, is more than seven weeks away and his optimistic economic forecast for “working people across Scotland” is completely detached from reality.

He ignores Rachel Reeves’ nonsensical employer national insurance hike that kicked in last month and has further depressed an anaemic jobs market.

If there’s any good news for Scottish workers, it’s not thanks to the Viceroy and his Westminster overseers.

First, let’s compare the lowest paid working people in Scotland vs rUK. The Living Wage is an independently calculated rate based on living costs that employers voluntarily pay workers over the age of 18. It’s £12.60/hour in Scotland and worth £2,262 more per year for a full-time worker than the UK National Living Wage (£11.44/hour), which is paid to those over 21.

Scotland has five times more accredited real Living Wage employers than rUK and nearly 90% of workers over 18 receive the real Living Wage or above – the highest percentage in the UK.

Next, let’s examine public sector pay. Scottish public sector workers are 22% of the workforce. They received a 5% real pay increase between 2019 and 2024 vs 0% for public workers in the UK as a whole. Newly qualified teachers in Scotland make 6.1% more than their English counterparts (£33,594 vs £31,650), while nurses get 6.4% more (£31,892 vs £29,970). And the Scottish public sector has greater staff retention than in England. Think there’s a connection?

Private sector workers aren’t faring as well. 430 Grangemouth workers have lost their jobs but contractors and supply chain businesses will also shed jobs. It’s expected that more than 3000 jobs will vanish as a result of the refinery’s closure.

Not even a year ago, Anus Sarwar and the Viceroy vowed to save the Grangemouth jobs. Not only did English Labour allow Ineos’ Jim Ratcliffe to close it, but they’re giving him £600m for a petrochemical plant in Antwerp. Adding insult to injury, English Labour MSPs in Scotland recently voted AGAINST giving Grangemouth and the English steel plant at Scunthorpe equal support. Their loyalties don’t lie with Scotland.

The Viceroy adheres to the newly scripted line that English Labour is the “party of working people,” not the “working class,” and not of those who can’t work through illness, injury or who have caring responsibilities.

Nor is English Labour the party of pensioners who can’t afford warm homes in the UK’s coldest nation thanks to Rachel Reeves’ axing the Winter Fuel Allowance. And despite English Labour’s promise to reduce bills, they’re still rising because Starmer ignored the 2023 party conference vote to nationalise energy and refuses to ditch the marginal pricing model, where prices are based on the highest-cost energy source, which is gas.

Nor is English Labour the party of poor children. All 37 English Labour MPs in Scotland voted to keep the two child benefit limit, leaving the Scottish Administration on a shrinking budget to mitigate the cruel policy through its Child Payment.

Scotland is the only part of the UK where child poverty is not set to rise, according to new research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. But we shouldn’t be proud of the fact that nearly a quarter of Scottish children live in poverty.

Scots must be sick of being lied to, demeaned, oppressed and impoverished by a bunch of neoliberal idiots like the Viceroy with fat salaries and gold-plated pensions who sit in another nation’s parliament telling them they’ve never had it so good.

Their own devolved parliament, which Westminster keeps on a short leash, is full of career politicians with little real life or work experience and no incentive to extricate Scotland from the failing UK.

If they want to free their nation, the Scottish People will have to organise and do it themselves.