Scottish Labour Are The Absolute Worst Of The Worst Of The Absolute Worst

There's an election on, although you wouldn't really know it, there seems to be much less street campaigning going on than in previous Holyrood polls and the only leafletting round my way has been by the Greens. The postie did bring me an 'election communication' from Labour this morning though. Obviously I snatched it up from the floor with eager anticipation to find out what those great champions and leaders of the Scottish working class plan to do to resist the assault on our lives and livelihoods being perpetrated by our ancient enemies the Tories and their Liberal minions.

Well apparently nothing. There's nothing about the cuts which are destroying our public services. There's nothing about an entire generation of young people being condemned to poverty and unemployment. Nothing at all about the experiment in extremist neo-conservative economic policy being conducted at our expense.

No, Scottish Labour in their great wisdom and foresight have decided that what we really need is for more of us to go prison. In what might just be a new high-point in Labour's already illustrious history of ugly right-wing gutter politics, the leaflet focuses entirely on their plan for mandatory jail sentences for anyone caught carrying a knife. Not only that but they also try to pin the blame for the damage that knife-crime does to our communities onto the Scottish National Party.

'Knife crime wrecking lives under SNP   Carry a knife - go to jail with Labour'

Now I'm no fan of the SNP, but credit where it's due, Kenny MacAskill's period as justice secretary has shown them to be willing to put forward some at least vaguely progressive criminal justice policies rather than the usual hang'em and flog'em populism we can expect from Westminster politics. For Labour to not only characterise this as being 'soft on crime', but to suggest that a highly complex, generations old, social problem is caused by this approach shows just how low they are willing to go.

In the early days of New Labour, Tony Blair famously claimed that he would be 'tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime'. Scottish Labour haven't even bothered with that rhetorical nod towards the obvious fact that violence and crime have complex social origins. Instead they want to remove all consideration of individual circumstances from the sentencing process in a move that will likely fill our already overcrowded prisons to bursting point.

I've lived in a variety of communities right across Glasgow over the last ten years and worked, on and off, as a youth worker for six years. I'm well aware of the terrible harm done and lives destroyed by the macho culture of knife carrying which many (in the main) young men can get caught up in. But the violence in our society won't be stopped with simplistic, headline grabbing ideas like mandatory sentencing. If some wee guy decides to carry a knife, maybe with the idea of protecting himself, or even, yes, with the intention of hurting somebody, is locking him up, removing him from any stability in his life and putting him in a situation where violence can be seen as a norm really the best way to deal with it?

In the current climate of cuts and economic chaos, the poverty, hopelessness and alienation which are at the root of much of the violence in our communities are only going to get worse. There are going to be a whole lot more angry and lost people on our streets and rates of mental ill-health will soar. If we are going to help people to make the choices in life that lead them away from doing stupid things like carrying a knife about, then imaginative approaches such as community based, restorative justice or approaching knife-crime as a public health issue are needed. If we really want stop the violence though, the one thing we must do, the thing that people's lives really depend on, is to fight the cuts agenda tooth and nail, tackle the poverty and inequality in our society head on and build a world where every single one of us has a future of hope.