Monday, July 28, 2008

Strange death of Scottish Labour

Black arm bands would not have been out of place. Something died in the Glasgow East on Thursday night, and it wasn’t just Gordon Brown’s hopes of winning the next general election. It was evident in the mournful faces of the Scottish Labour party workers as they grimly awaited their worst by election defeat in twenty years. Labour’s fifty year relationship with the Scottish voter is finally over. It’s time to move on.

The strange death of Labour Scotland has been taking place for well over a year now. In that time Labour have lost the Scottish government, two Scottish leaders, most of their councils, half their councillors and now the third safest Westminster seat in Scotland. If the Glasgow East result were to be reflected across Scotland at the next general election, Labour would be left with only one seat north of the border. And don’t think it couldn’t happen. The Scottish Conservatives remain the only party ever to have won a majority of votes and a majority of seats in a Scottish election, back in 1955. Yet in the 1997 general election they were wiped out in Scotland. When Scotland changes party it doesn’t mess about.

The trouble for Labour, and the reason for their black despondency, is that they can see no bottom to their current electoral recession. Gordon Brown is not going to go quietly, a housing slump is underway, a credit tsunami is looming and core Labour voters are suffering an unprecedented collapse in their material security. Real inflation, not the fantasy figures of the CPI, is really hurting those ‘hard working families’ Labour always talk about - just look at the latest breathtaking rise in domestic energy prices announced on polling day.

Meanwhile, Alex Salmond has forged a bond with the Scottish electorate which shows every sign of enduring. Labour hoped to wipe the smile off the SNP leader’s face in Shettleston and Easterhouse. They thought Salmond had finally overstepped himself, with his 12 pre-ballot victory tours and self-regarding declarations about Glasgow East being a battle between himself and Gordon Brown. But the Salmond smirk has got wider still. The SNP leader promised an earthquake and lo, the earth did indeed move. He can now say that no seat is safe in Scotland, and not even Labour can contradict him.

Yet, to everyone's credit, Glasgow East was a good clean fight, between able candidates, conducted without rancour, cynicism or dirty tricks. It was real honest street democracy. John Mason and Margaret Curran fought vote by vote, tenement stair by tenement stair, and while the margin of victory may have been small, only 365 votes, this was a great moral victory for the nationalists in the true sense of the word. The SNP fought a classic Labour campaign in Glasgow East, as the party of the people against the party of the establishment.

One thing Labour did get right: independence really wasn’t an issue on the doorsteps - not even after John Mason described himself in a TV interview as a “hard line nationalist”. But that is only because independence is no longer seen as a threat by Labour voters. The bogey of “separatism” is no longer enough to frighten them into the arms of Labour. The warnings about Scotland’s subsidies being cut off don’t work any more thanks to the oil price. The blindingly obvious reality is that, oil aside, London doesn’t give a damn about Scotland any more. The metropolis is another country with an increasingly alien political culture.

Gordon Brown’s determination placate this culture; to match David Cameron policy for policy in England, is killing Labour support in Scotland. The abolition of inheritance tax for the rich, the assault on incapacity benefit claimants, the ten pence tax band, the billions being handed casually to the banks. Brown tells the public sector workers to accept below-inflation increases while Network Rail bosses get six figure bonuses for ruining their own industry. John Hutton, the business secretary, tells us to praise millionaires while the living standards of Labour voters are shredded by commodity speculators in the City.

This is the fatal contradiction in the UK Labour party cannot resolve. Labour’s abandonment of social democracy in England makes it a loser in Scotland. Metropolitan political commentators in Glasgow last week just couldn’t grasp that Scotland really is different as they looked in vain for a Tory revival. And despite reports, there wasn’t one; no Cameron bounce, not even a spasm. The Tory candidate in Glasgow East, Davena Rankin, a black single mother, may have come third, but she actually managed to deliver a worse Tory share of the vote than in 2005.

Of course, Labour now try to portray the SNP as the “Tartan Tories”, and children of Thatcher, but it just doesn’t stack up, and Glasgow voters didn’t buy it. They can see that it is the SNP government which has curbed the right to buy council homes, abolished student fees, cut prescription charges, extended free personal care, frozen council tax. It is Alex Salmond who has moved to scrap PFI, end private sector involvement in NHS health care, save local hospital accident and emergency units, promote renewable energy, oppose Trident and the war in Iraq.

Meanwhile it is Gordon Brown’s Labour government which has increased taxes on people on low incomes while reducing capital gains tax paid by private equity pirates; has allowed executive pay to spiral out of control while delivering pious lectures about wage restraint. Britain has become a grossly unequal society under Labour, a haven for tax-avoiding plutocrats, a nation of property speculators and greedy celebrities who thrive in an economy which has switched from making things to making debt.

The people of Glasgow East are clearly sick of it - homeowners and benefit claimants alike. This long-suffering Labour community has been dismayed by the cynicism and sleaze of the Labour establishment. The machine politicians who are more interested in soliciting loans from tax exile businessmen than in promoting the interests of their constituents; who harvest hundreds of thousands in parliamentary allowances while turning their constituency homes into multiple occupancy business parks. The former Labour MP, David Marshall’s, parliamentary expenses did not become the dominant issue in Glasgow East in part because of the natural reluctance of politicians to throw the first stone. But the people of Glasgow East aren’t stupid; they know fine well what’s been going on.

For too long a London-dominated Labour Party has treated its core voters in places like Glasgow East as election fodder - to be graced by the occasional ministerial visit before polling day, and then forgotten for the next four years. They treat their own voters with contempt, thinking their quaint egalitarianism to be the anachronistic product of simple minds. But as this columnist has tried to argue, voters in Glasgow think and care very deeply about their politics: it is a question of moral propriety. People in Glasgow don’t vote on their pocket books, but on their consciences, and they have had it with Labour - at least in its present form.

For, the good news is that Glasgow East could be a kind of catharsis for Labour in Scotland. Labourites know now that they must change or die; that they cannot continue as a unionist tail to the London dog. Labour will have to reinvent itself in Scotland if it wants to restore its privileged position as Scotland’s national party, a role it occupied for five decades. This doesn’t mean becoming a national-IST party, at least not in the separatist sense, but it does mean restoring Labour to the moral mainstream of Scottish political opinion.


Labour has used by-elections before to change tack. After Winnie Ewing took Hamilton 1967, Harold Wilson set up the Royal Commission on the Constitution. After Margo MacDonald won Govan in 1973, Labour abandoned its opposition to devolution in the Dalintober St. Declaration. After Jim Sillars took Govan by-in 1988, Labour threw its weight behind the Scottish Constitutional Convention making the Scottish Parliament inevitable. Now, after Glasgow East, Labour must find it within itself the will to change again: to make itself an explicitly Scottish party, with its own constitution and leadership, committed to an autonomous Scotland with full tax and economic powers within a reformed, federal United Kingdom.

Wendy was right: there really is no alternative. Even the 39 Scottish Labour MPs, as they finger their collars this weekend, must realise that the game is up in Scotland. Many will be dreading the belated publication next month by the Westminster authorities of details of their parliamentary expenses. Their faith in Brown is long gone. The next general election in Westminster already is already lost, which means that they will be facing a Tory administration in London for the next decade.

Instead of sitting back and allowing the SNP to take-over their home territory, Labour MPs should be moving to merge with the Labour MSPa in Holyrood to form a new Scottish political organisation, a new cohesive political formation. The election of the replacement for Wendy Alexander should be turned into the election of a fully fledged Scottish leadership with functional autonomy from Westminster. The new Scottish Labour Party could then formally disengage from the UK policy-making process and cease automatically to take the Labour whip in the Commons. The Tories are anyway going to curb Labour’s voting rights in Westminster as their answer to the West Lothian Question, so might as well beat them to it.

Has Labour the will and the energy to make the change? I don’t know. None of the leadership candidates so far shows much sign of recognising the nature of the task ahead. But it is the only sure way of persuading Scottish voters that the Labour party, the party they have supported for the last half century, deserves to win their votes again. It is the only way that Labour can re-emerge from the grave they have dug themselves. Yes, there is life after Glasgow East, but not as Labour currently knows it.

10 comments:

topher said...

I note this article was posted at 3.20 am. You are fairly burning the midnight oil Iain.
You've worked out what Scottish Labour has to do to be reborn. So has Brian Taylor. When will the penny drop with Scottish Labour? Your article in the Herald today is exactly right, they need to split from British Labour.

The picture is this: they are standing on an ice floe and a crack has started. It's only an inch wide. Do they (a) ignore it and carry on, (b) try to pull it together by standing one leg either side of it, or (c) work out which side of it to stand before it widens and becomes a national frontier?

My wife and I drove down from Ullapool to Glasgow East the last weekend of the by-election to do some leafletting for the SNP and had a great time.Everyone in the party was optimistic and happy. The organisation was terrific and so was the food. I really think the SNP is in good shape.

Though I'm a member of the SNP I am beginning to worry about the labour party being such crap opposition. For one thing they used to be a party with principles and a genuine mission to help working people, and their supporters need them to do that. The other problem is that on current form they are going to sleepwalk right into independence and people are going to complain that there wasn't a decent debate. I want independence when people have properly considered, and rejected, the union.

Keep up your thoughtful and non-aligned comments, Iain.

Anonymous said...

"The SNP fought a classic Labour campaign in Glasgow East, as the party of the people against the party of the establishment. "

very good .

Unknown said...

Interesting article Iain, but the reality is Labour started to lose Scotland when it joyfully embraced the Thatcher vision under Blair and his payroller Brown. At a local level, Labour in Scotland has always been a hotbed of corruption and cronyism. Council jobs, contracts etc. were only available to the "right" sort. This sort of behaviour breeds a contempt for those outside the magic circle and while Labour has been mouthing the platitudes to placate the natives, the reality is they have never given a damn about the working class. As an entity, they deserve to wither and die. Unfortunately, the many party hacks, who made their fortunes fleecing the very public they swore to serve, will not have to face judgement, at least on this earth, for all their wrongdoing.

I would conclude that they sold out, but that's not true - they never had any principles to sell. Growing up in Glasgow in the 60's and 70's proved that all too clearly for me. Hell mend them!

Anonymous said...

I haven't seen your blog before, but I like your analysis of Scottish politics, so I'll be back to get your take on whether the leadership (s)election does unify (or more probably tears apart Labour.

In England Labour has no reason for existence. They dropped the last of their Socialism, and all that left them with was their intense centralisation. If Labour in Scotland can't cut the ties that bind, those ties will hang them.

Anonymous said...

The blindingly obvious reality is that, oil aside, London doesn’t give a damn about Scotland any more"

A good article, Iain-apart from the bit I have highlighted above. London NEVER give a damn about Scotland, nor Wales nor NI-Ever! London only existed to fleece the rest of the UK of ALL its wealth! We were forever "cannon fodder" and to think that it has taken (most of) us soooo long to discover this! More fools us!

Anonymous said...

This "the Tories won over half the votes and seats at the 1955 Election" is a little bit of a myth which gets a lot of mileage. 6 of the returned 36 'Tory' MPs in 1955 actually stood as either 'Liberal Unionist' or 'National Liberal' candidates. More importantly, the Scottish Conservatives were called Unionists then anyway - the other 30 MPs were elected in Scotland as Unionists, not Conservatives in 1955. Politically they operated more like the Northern Ireland Unionists, and correspondingly got most of the working-class Orange vote.

Anonymous said...

Labour in Scotland never used to speak about the Union per se preferring to stress instead the natural unity of working people across the UK which they purported to represent.

That changed over the years when they started to proclaim their support for the Union quite stridently and unambiguously and to attempted to denigrate, and destroy through policy, placement and the media Scottish culture and institutions - the final solution to the Scottish question. In short they have become to perceived, quite rightly as being anti-Scottish and the true inheritors of Thatcher's legacy in Scotland.

Broon has recently described the upsurge of support for the SNP as a phase. That somehow the people are wrong in supporting them and they will come to their senses. This view demonstrates the arrogance of Labour in that they still consider themselves to know better than the people what is best for them. They are in for a shock. Labour have ceased to demonstrate any kind of wisdom or capability. The people that placed their trust in them have seen the light and will exact a terrible revenge. As Labour dies in Scotland so will the Union.

Anonymous said...

I realise there is a name taken by the UK Labour party on the electoral commission's webite of "Scottish Labour" but maybe it would be more accurate to say that this was the death of Uk Labour in Scotland.

"Scottish Labour Party" is relatively new as a name for the party in slogan but it is a branch designation and not a party as such.

Maybe it wasn't so much the death of "Scottish Labour" but part of the long difficult birth of a truly Scottish Labour party.

www.oilofscotland.org said...

Dear Iain

The problem Scottish Labour has is the same problem that Scotland has and that is Scotland discovered oil. Since 1974 the powers that be in Westminster have deliberately disguised the truth of Scotland’s vast oil wealth from the Scottish public.

In conjunction with oppressing the people of Scotland to stop them reacting - this is the reason that deprivation and poverty throughout Scotland has not improved very much in 30 years.

Scotland should have been Europe’s third richest Country.

The Scottish Pound should have been worth a minimum of £1.20 to the English £1.00

The poverty in Scotland should have been wiped out years ago

Since then a generation has grown up and they do not even know that Scotland is Europe’s largest
producer of oil, indeed a bigger oil producer than Kuwait.

A generation that does not realise that Scotland’s Oil (worth £12 billion per annum, 32million a day,
£11.574 a second) has been used to bail out Northern Rock and is currently being used to finance the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The web site www.oilofscotland.org contains the TOP SECRET report into Scotland Oil Rich Economy and the recommendations to lie and deceive the Scottish People, as the extract from the report Westminster does not want you to read, below explains...

The full significance of North Sea oil was not immediately apparent and it still remains in large measure disguised from the Scottish public by the DTI...

If the people of Scotland vote in favour of the Scottish Government they could over turn the WRONGS THAT HAVE BEEN DONE TO SCOTLAND for example.

6,000 MILES OF SCOTLAND'S SEA WAS STOLEN IN 1999

In 1999 Westminster moved Scotland's Marine Boundaries from Berwick-upon-Tweed to Carnoustie. Illegally making 6000 miles of Scotland's waters English.

The list of Injustices is endless
but they are on the website listed below.

Please help your fellow Scot understand the truth. http://www.oilofscotland.org

Truth Teller
info@www.oilofscotland.org

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