Is there still hope for Labour in Scotland?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/09/is-there-hope-for-labour-in-scotland

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When the contest to elect the Labour leader in Scotland tiptoes apologetically to a close this week, the result will go largely unnoticed by the party in London. Such is the blood-letting and turmoil that engulfs the Westminster party that the question of who leads Labour in Scotland will have as much impact as a squib in a volcano.

A newspaper friend reported last week that the subject of the Scottish leadership race emerged at the end of an interview he was conducting with a UK Labour grandee the previous day. “The chap couldn’t recall the name of either of the Scottish leadership contenders and conveyed the distinct impression that, in any case, he cared not a jot.” The response accurately depicts the attitude of the Labour leadership at Westminster to the Scottish party since devolution: “Just send us down your Glasgow and Lanarkshire MPs and keep your mouths shut in the meantime.” Well, as I’m sure they will have noticed by now, Scotland has stopped sending Labour MPs to London… well, apart from wee whatsisname in Edinburgh.

Kezia Dugdale and Ken Macintosh ought to bear all this in mind as they resist moves to decouple from the Westminster party, save for the glib assertion that they will seek more autonomy (whatever that’s supposed to mean). In any case, whichever of them is revealed as the new leader on Saturday will create history in becoming so. It will be the first and probably only occasion in Scottish post-devolution history when a Labour leader is resigned to the knowledge that the office of first minister is out of reach. As English Labour grapples with itself and lays bare its soul, it seems that in Scotland the two leadership hopefuls are disputing merely what shade of vanilla they are choosing for the new curtains.

Related: Kezia Dugdale: Corbyn win could leave Labour 'carping on sidelines'

In England, Blairites have been withering in dismissing those who voiced any degree of support for Jeremy Corbyn. If they are not rascally Tories making mischief or communist infiltrators, then they are leftie romantics, their heads in a dwam and full of ideals incompatible with modern, monetarist Britain. A Corbyn-led Labour can never win the 2020 UK general election, they aver. Their docile acceptance that only an anaemic facsimile of Labour can ever return to power in England marks the final triumph of conservatism after a 20-year project that might have been called Operation Manchurian Candidate.

In Scotland, there is still hope for Labour but only if the new leader accepts that England is a lost cause for the authentic left and that the party north of the border isn’t duped by the lie that only an economy based on monetarism and the absolute power of the free market can succeed. Every family in Britain is still paying for this touching belief following the bailout of RBS and the multibillion-pound hit we have been asked to take in George Osborne’s warrant sale of its shares. English Labour embraced this principle but finally succumbed to the dictum that you can’t out-Tory the Tories.

It’s not as if there isn’t scope for a properly run Scottish Labour party to reclaim the supporters who have migrated to Scottish Nationalism. The SNP has operated in a political never-never land in which if you say something often enough and loud enough then it will come true. The nationalists’ assertion that only they can deliver socially enlightened policies has lasted as long as a sandcastle in Saltcoats. In eight years of SNP government, we still have a judiciary and civil service firmly in the grip of a privileged old boys’ network every bit as priapic as that which dictates how English society is ordered. Under this administration, we have seen Scotland’s police force turn into an unaccountable behemoth. Places at our top universities remain out of the reach of children from our disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

There are signs that Kezia Dugdale might just get it. In a video that accompanied the launch of her campaign to become leader, she pledged to redistribute wealth and influence in Scotland. It sounded gloriously like she was having a wee clause IV moment, until she qualified it by stating that it didn’t mean she wanted to “nationalise everything”. She would have been better building on her idea by pointing out that nationalising everything wouldn’t be any worse than the extreme capitalism that continues to cost every household thousands in bailing out dysfunctional banks.

If she does win the Scottish Labour leadership contest, Dugdale must choose her advisers wisely. Labour in Scotland has been plagued by an assortment of Blairite apparatchiks more concerned about working their tickets to Westminster than by shaping a credible alternative to the SNP. Is there any real surprise that several of them are now hawking their wares in the twilight zone where rightwing thinktanks and men in white hoods are indistinguishable?

Dugdale must also construct a detailed critique of the SNP’s stewardship of the health service in Scotland, which is coming apart at the seams in every area. In education, she must think the unthinkable and be radical in addressing this country’s neglect of children in our poorest areas. On land reform, she must challenge the SNP on why it has allowed its land reform bill to be quietly hijacked in scrapping proposals to prevent companies in offshore tax havens holding title to land and property in Scotland. Writing on his blog last week, the respected land reform campaigner Andy Wightman stated: “This would have been a progressive move and one in which Scotland could have been taking the lead in a UK context. Instead, the bill proposes a meaningless right to request information.”

Labour must also learn to come to an accommodation with Scottish independence. It must accept that there will be a second referendum and understand why tens of thousands of its core supporters abandoned the party over the issue. Many of them left because, as Jim Murphy and his team demonstrated, Labour appeared to be more eager about preserving the union than about addressing unfairness and inequality in Scotland.

In England, Labour may not win a UK election under Jeremy Corbyn. But it will never regain Scotland until it drops its opposition to independence.