‘Brown’ Sugar, and other euphemisms.

Southern voters might be surprised to learn that the Labour heartlands are not the romanticised ‘green valleys’  surrounding the far from romantic pit villages of the Rhonda Valley that the wind-bag Neil Kinnock liked to promote as the seat of Labour Power.

Nor are they the teeming back alleys of Liverpool surrounding the now redundant Mersey docks, as Derek Hatton would have you believe.

The real seat of Labour’s brutal half nelson on the levers of power is within hailing distance of the birthplace of their very first MP, Keir Hardie.

It is on Clydeside, where both Gordon Brown and Michael Martin, the mendacious Prime Minister and equally mendacious ex-Speaker, acquired their safe seats, voted into power by a collection of gangsters, hoodlums, drug barons, religious fanatics, and professional criminals who would have felt at home in Al Capone’s Chicago.

In the South, we have been indoctrinated to believe that ‘the Scots’ are all dour, prudent, trustworthy, serious minded individuals, who travel the world building bridges and canals, asking only that the occasional haggis be thrown their way on Burn’s night in return. So successful has this branding been, that for years, any television advertisement urging you to part with your cash to a bank, insurance company or pension plan would be dutifully intoned by a heavy Scottish accent – believed to impart the sub-conscious message that your money was ‘as safe as houses’. Part of the success of the Royal Bank of Scotland was that, well, they were Scottish.

Hailing from a proud Scottish family myself – I count Mungo Park amongst my ancestors and a famous family of publishers – I had bought into this image as much as any less informed Southerner. Indeed, as a ‘transported to Liverpool’ family, we stressed our Scottish ancestry, or at least my father did, as a way of marking himself out from what he saw as the common or garden hoi polloi of Liverpool. He spent a small fortune ironing out my Liverpool accent, and teaching me Scottish dancing, before finally persuading most of the family to change their name to a double barrelled version, believing it to impart ‘Scottish respectability’. Ho hum.

Steven Purcell’s spectacular fall from grace has finally exposed this vision of respectability for what it is – a vision of national unity as unrealistic as the idea that the honest Idaho farmer is the consummate American, and we need delve no further into matters of the Chicago Mafia, or Los Angeles gangsters.

It is a tragedy for the ordinary, respectable Scot.

Long before the death of John Smith, Glasgow politics was embroiled in seamy dealings. The Monklands Inquiry, headed by  William Nimo Smith QC exposed a world of sectarian skulduggery, where the mainly Catholic councillors had diverted funds towards predominately Catholic Coatbridge, rather than neighbouring Airdrie. No less than 70 significant appointments had been made to relatives of Labour Party members.

The Labour Party had barely managed to pull the antimacassar over that squawking parrot, than Irene Adams MP for Paisley North piped up that her constituency committee had been infiltrated by drug dealers and gangster. She went on the record to name drug dealer and enforcer Stewart Boyd as the source of death threats she received whilst campaigning against drug dealing. Boyd was killed in an inexplicable car accident on the Marbella coast road, so ferocious that it led police to believe that Semtex had been present in one of the cars.

The first time that Southerners really registered the goings-on in Glasgow was when Mohammed Sarwar became the first Muslim MP in the UK, standing for Glasgow Govan. His election was quickly followed by allegations of vote rigging and bribes. Initially suspended from taking office, he was later acquitted when he claimed that the £5,000 he was known to have handed to an opponent was in fact a loan….. (as you do)

He is not standing in the 2010 election, but guess what? –  his son Anas has been nominated as the prospective parliamentary candidate. That is Anas, not Athif, his other son who has recently been convicted of £850,000 worth of money laundering….

Still the Southern media took little interest in these goings on, I have exhumed most of them from Scottish newspapers or the BBCs Scottish editions. It seems that they felt we would not be interested in the endemic culture of corruption surrounding the area from which our Prime Minister would emerge.

It was not only the drug mafia and the crime mafia that we were protected from news of but the gay mafia too. We were told that the suicide of Gordon McMaster MP was ‘not suspicious’ and may have been because he was suffering from Gulf War Syndrome.

The Scottish press, presuming their readers to be of sterner stuff to we squishy southerners, were leaking tales of a suicide note naming a fellow MP, a darkly gay lifestyle of pubs where casual sex was available on the premises, and suggestions that what ailed him might have been Aids.

Little wonder then that with so many scandals on his constituency doorstep, even the ambitious Gordon Brown was persuaded that perhaps Tony Blair should head the Labour Party unopposed when John Smith died. By transferring the focus to Blair, the full horror of political life in Glasgow was kept on the back burner.

We were bemused when Michael Martin appeared in the Speaker’s chair; the man seemed barely able to read his speech. We were shocked when Jim Devine stumbled his way through an interview regarding his expenses. How could such a man become an MP was the common remark.

Quite easily on Clydeside, is the answer. Devine and Martin are the cream of the Glasgow School of political greasy pole climbing. The nepotism and corruption of local elections has meant that many who might have been doomed to spend a life on the dole, insufficiently educated to do any more than apply for the dwindling number of manual labour jobs available in the area, have been able to secure local council positions, and by assiduously protecting the backs of the strongest, work their way up into the higher echelons of the Labour Party.

Steven Purcell, ex-leader of Glasgow City Council navigated his way through this morass, but despite being interviewed by the Serious Crime Squad over his links with major criminals in the area, despite his cocaine habit causing him to fall victim to an underworld cocaine blackmail plot, was still considered as recently as the past two weeks, to be a suitable person to be dinning with the Prime Minister of the UK.

His background, his behaviour, his contacts, simply didn’t seem unusual to anyone steeped in Glasgow politics. No alarm bells rung.

It was not until Purcell also had to contend with his young male friend Danus McKinley, who was apparently ‘devoted to him’ being found dying on the steps of City Hall shortly after Purcell had fled screaming from a drug rehabilitation centre, that anybody south of the border wondered seriously how this man had risen so high in the Labour Party.

We must now ask the same question of Gordon Brown, Nick Brown and all the rest of the Glasgow mafia who have been so comfortably ensconced in the ‘Mother of all Parliaments’.

Did the Glasgow voters act out of character? Did they suddenly decide to elect names that hadn’t been suggested to them via the local mafia. Did they ignore the cronyism, nepotism, threats, blackmail, and extortion carried out by the gangs, and say to themselves ‘ we will resist all that and only vote for men we know to be good, honest and true’.

How exactly did Gordon Brown rise to the top of this political sewer and get to take tea with the Queen every Tuesday afternoon?

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Tagged as: al capone, glasgow, Gordon Brown, govan, labour, Labour Party, Michael Martin, mohammad sarwar, politics of the united kingdom, prime minister, steven purcell