Scottish Labour should take heart from events in London

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/03/scottish-labour-should-take-heart-from-london

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When addressing the wretched state of the Labour party in Scotland it still seems far too early to be discussing when we might begin to observe the first signs of recovery.

Too many of its members, it seems, remain in a state of blind ignorance about the root causes of the fall to be talking just yet about a recovery. Even so, the claim last week by one of its more talented former MPs that the party is on the verge of extinction doesn’t really bear close scrutiny.

Tom Harris was the MP for Glasgow South until he lost his seat last May in the harrowing of Labour at the hands of the SNP. Only one of Labour’s candidates made it back home on the night of 7 May and now Harris, a transport minister under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, thinks that the party is at the “edge of irrelevance”. Interviewed by Glasgow’s Herald, he said: “There may well be a way back for Scottish Labour, I don’t see how that is. The demographics are appalling for Labour at the moment.”

In a swipe at the party’s UK leader, Jeremy Corbyn, he added: “I think one of the reasons Kezia [Dugdale] is finding it difficult is because of the UK leadership. Mostly, it’s things outside the Labour party’s control. The key is to get someone who the Scottish people see as a potential prime minister.”

Perhaps Harris is still in recovery mode following last May’s electoral disembowelling and has not had time properly to analyse what has been happening to Scottish Labour in the eight years since it was last in government in Scotland. This is hardly surprising. The Scottish Nationalists to whom I spoke on the night of 7 May, while incredulous at the scale of their triumph, nonetheless were able to pinpoint a common thread linking some of their more unlikely gains.

“Many of the sitting Labour candidates had been accustomed simply to turning up a couple of weeks before polling day and expecting to win after a few token days of campaigning,” I was told by one Glasgow activist. “When they arrived back in their constituencies this time around, they discovered that we had annexed entire streets through sheer, hard graft over many months while they had been largely absent.”

If Harris, like many other soon-to-be-vanquished MPs, had had his ears closer to the ground in his constituency, or had been better advised by strategists in what passed for the party’s command structure in Scotland, he would have learned that the game was up for the Westminster contingent as soon as the previous year’s independence referendum campaign had started. That was when, to the dismay of tens of thousands of its rank-and-file supporters, Labour began to morph into the Conservatives for the purposes of defending the union from the wicked nationalist hordes. That many of their supporters were among said hordes did not appear to have occurred to the Labour leadership until it was way too late. By then, many Labour voters, thoroughly sickened at the antics of Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown and Jim Murphy, had decided that the party had left them.

The key to any recovery is not to get someone who the Scottish people see as a potential prime minister. Rather, the key is to have more Scottish Labour politicians who are like Jeremy Corbyn. What is the point of gaining government if your social policies can only be split from those of the other lot by the width of a cigarette paper? I lost count of the number of times I was told by elderly voters, now planning to vote for the SNP for the first time, how disappointed they were by Labour in government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. They were deemed to have squandered a three-term advantage by pandering to big business and finance houses to disastrous effect.

Of course, it doesn’t help the cause to observe the post-Westminster employment choices of Gordon Brown and Darling. These two, who handed billions to our toxic financial institutions after the 2008 crash, had expressed some distress at the prospect of a Corbyn-led Labour party. How many of their party’s supporters, though, were distressed at their joining the boards of two of the world’s foremost companies in the business of making rich people even richer? And how many have simply become fatigued at the sight of yet another worthy of the People’s party (Darling) taking his ermine and filing dutifully into the UK’s most absurdly undemocratic political body?

Labour in Scotland has been on the slide for 10 years, but it’s only now that a bewildered ex-MP suddenly thinks the party is on the verge of extinction. It’s not the current Labour leadership at Westminster that is responsible for the catastrophic numbers of Scottish Labour, Tom; it was the last 18 years of London Labour leadership in government and opposition.

No one needs to tell Kezia Dugdale how bleak the outlook is for the party she leads in Scotland. She has spent much of the last six months developing a strategy to raise the quality of Labour candidates for Holyrood, a quest she hopes will begin to bear fruit before the Holyrood election in 2020. Her job this year is to ensure Labour holds the line as Scotland’s second party and to begin to chip away at the SNP’s weaknesses on health, education and policing.

She and others ought to be looking at what is happening in the new Labour party south of the border. There is a renewed spirit of optimism and belief among supporters and activists in England and Wales. They have a leader alive to the suffering of working-class people as a result of the wickedness of this hard-right Tory government. They no longer want the tactical acquiescence of chocolate socialists such as Blair, Ed Balls and Darling, all of whom are reaping rich rewards for serving the party of the weak, the poor and the vulnerable. Huzzah.

Labour supporters only lost an election last year, but in England and Wales they rediscovered their party. Kezia Dugdale’s challenge is to do the same in Scotland.