Labour’s Paul Sweeney, a member of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow government, has said “all countries should be abolished” as “socialist redistribution of power and wealth… is not achieved through erection of national barriers of any kind.”
The Labour MP made the candid admission during an online spat with politicians from the Scottish National Party (SNP), which like Labour is broadly left-liberal but tends to put more emphasis on fashionable “social justice” and pro-mass migration leftism than old-fashioned socialism and trade unionism.
A crucial difference is that the SNP support breaking up the United Kingdom and leading Scotland into a form of notional independence within the confines of the European Union, while Labour wishes to keep Great Britain — although not Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in the case of Mr Corbyn and key members of the Shadow Cabinet — together.
Responding to a tweet by Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader and head of Scotland’s devolved executive — roughly analogous to a U.S. state government — pushing her agenda for another referendum on taking Scotland out of the United Kingdom, Sweeney had suggested that “Consideration would only be given to another referendum if a clear mandate was sought in 2021 and, if granted, a result to leave the UK would be subject to a confirmatory vote after negotiations.”
He followed up by explaining that his own thinking on the issue “is the opposite of narrow nationalist unionism” — meaning support for the British Union of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland — and was instead “predicated on the notion that mankind requires ever closer cooperation and mechanisms to deliver socialist redistribution of power and wealth.”
“That is not achieved through erection of national barriers of any kind,” he asserted.
This prompted Peter Grant, an SNP MP, to observe sarcastically: “Paul [Sweeney] tries to make his hatred of Scottish Independence seem logical and ends up arguing that all countries should be abolished.”
But Sweeney cheerfully embraced the charge, conceding: “I do think all countries should be abolished, as an eventual goal for human civilisation over the next few centuries.”
The Glasgow MP did go on to insist he had a “clear linkage that underpins my social and economic policy vision with a utopian end state, perhaps I’ll write a book one day if I have time” — but many social media users seemed profoundly unconvinced, with some noting the seeming contradiction between his general opposition to the nation-state and past lobbying for recognition of “the state of Palestine”.
The Labour Party is currently embroiled in an ongoing antisemitism investigation, with many members being accused of particular hostility to Israel as a Jewish homeland.
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