As Labour struggles to make any headway in Scotland, several of their senior figures appear to have given everything up as a bad job and gone on holiday. Liz Anne Handibode, who will contest the Holyrood constituency of East Kilbride next year is currently in the Dolomites having refused to campaign for Michael McCann, pictured left, who sits for the Westminster version of the seat. At least one other senior Holyrood figure has also decided that sunning himself in Majorca is preferable to campaigning in Scotland.
What seems to be happening in East Kilbride is an internal feud between Westminster and Holyrood based factions, with more than one councillor siding with the Holyrood cohort. They all seem to hate each other more than they do the SNP, with the result that Labour's campaign in East Kilbride has pretty much ground to a halt.
None of this has anything to do with politics, but Labour in West Coast Scotland has little to do with politics, either. Traditionally the party was the political wing of the Catholic Church, and its party bosses operated in the old machine way by giving out a few goodies here and there to the voters, and rather a lot of goodies to favoured friends and local businessmen.
The problem here is that McCann by all accounts has all the warmth of a freshly embalmed corpse, and has managed to alienate the lesser bosses who now want to see him out - even if that means losing the seat to the SNP.
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