Allan Gemmell OBE is the Labour candidate for the Central Ayrshire constituency, his suitability to fully represent the constituents is cast into serious doubt by emerging facts.

Gemmell was born in the constituency, and much is being made of that, but since that time he has been identified much more strongly with the Johnson Conservative UK Government’s interests and those of the British Council in India. Regardless of birth, he is a classic ‘helicoptered-in’ candidate, imposed on local Labour members and at the expense of two local and respected alternatives, by a now fully right-wing Labour leadership, in a tradition running from Blair, through Brown, to Sir Keir Starmer.

However, this is not the worst of it.

Today we hear of Tata Steel’s decision to close blast furnaces in Wales with the loss of 2 800 jobs, ‘to cut carbon emissions’, at the same time as they open a huge new blast furnace in India. This clear hypocrisy and evidence of a lack of any real loyalty to its UK workers, is both hypocritical and deeply ungrateful, in the light of £1.25 billion of grants to Tata steel promised by the UK Government in December 2023, to help with decarbonisation.

The GMB union has angrily rejected Tata Steels plans.

What has this to do with Gemmell?

In addition to proudly declaring himself a ‘proud GMB member’ in social media and with his campaign clearly supported in published material, and presumably funded to some extent by them, Gemmell has a history of uncritically working to promote economic activity by India corporations in the UK.

From 2020 until May 2023, Gemmell was the His Majesty’s Trade Commissioner for South Asia and the British Deputy High Commissioner for Western India, appointed by Johnson (?). He was awarded OBE in the 2016 New Year’s Honours list ‘for services to arts and science.’

While in this role, he often supported trade missions by business groups from the UK, ‘on the ground’ in India, to meet with leading Indian businesses including Tata Group.

In 2018, when Gemmell was Director India of the British Council, Tata funded his entry in the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.

After Brexit, Gemmell played a major role in facilitating a trade deal with India, trumpeting the Tory myth of the ‘UK now being free to create its own trade policies’, which has now been exposed by the job losses in Wales as spectacularly unsuccessful, from a UK point of view. He even enthused about the opportunities for the UK in India’s defence sector.

The Indian Airforce flies no UK-built Typhoon fighter jets but does have thousands of French and Russian models. The Indian Navy has one or two older Russian or French submarines but has built all of the hundreds of other vessels in India!

To finish, when Gemmell became His Majesty’s Trade Commissioner for South Asia in 2020, he should have known how things would go with Tata, post-Brexit. In 2016, Tata, with its major market for steel in the EU, had already announced plans to shut all UK steel operations.

A loyal representative of the Conservative Government and placeman for Sir Keir.