A couple of years
ago I wrote a post where I argued that if Labour wanted to win, they needed to dump their leader Johann Lamont. Now
that the referendum campaign is… well we’ll maybe comeback to that one… Now the vote has passed, Labour has come to
that conclusion.
Except that Lamont
has jumped before she was pushed. Ah,
you can never find a man in a grey suit when you need them...
Lamont’s
departure has put into focus the current post referendum narrative, that having
been a “key” player in the pro-Union Better Together campaign, Scottish Labour
have contrived to lose the peace. What’s
worse for them is that with Westminster followed very quickly by Holyrood elections,
the bitter recriminations look highly likely to spill into both campaigns. This makes the SNP’s task that bit easier in bringing
that group of Labour held seats that currently need a swing of over 12% within their range. It also means a first full
term for Nicola Sturgeon at Holyrood.
And boy are there
recriminations. Lamont described Labour
MP’s as dinosaurs (“colleagues who think that nothing has changed”) and accused
“London Labour” of treating “Scottish” Labour like a branch office. There’s the allegation that she was
sidelined. There’s the allegation that
the General Secretary (of the Scottish party) was removed without Lamont being
consulted. There’s an allegation of some
sort of “network” of Scottish Labour MP’s intent on doing down Lamont. It sort of points to the fact that Lamont was
not trusted to do the job she was elected to do – in essence she was in office
but not in power.
That version of
events only works if you ignore Lamont’s failings as leader. She did make speeches that positioned her
party to the right of the SNP – the infamous “Something for nothing” speech
being the obvious example of this. I’m
not sure I have any sympathy for her. For
one thing, she was in the shadow cabinet when Iain Gray was leader, so she must
have had an idea of the poison chalice that awaited. Especially with a party run by “Anglos” on
the Blairite Compass group wing of the party.
For another, it was those strange decisions. Either she was tactically inept not to spot
an opportunity on the left of the SNP, in which case she was not leadership
material. If she was told to go down a
right wing line – echoes of which could be seen in the allegation that Lamont
& co told to not oppose the Spare Room Subsidy until Miliband had made his
mind up – she should have shown some spine and resigned.
One of the thing’s
I speculated about in that post was who would be the candidates to succeed Lamont. The conclusion being that there was no
outstanding candidate. This is even more
true now. The favorite to succeed is
the current Eastwood MP Jim Murphy.
Labour MP’s are already trying to sound Murphy out about running for the
job. Should he decide to go for it, Murphy
would be the big hitter Labour have needed… pretty much since they engineered
Alexander’s removal as Holyrood group leader in 2008.
There are two big
problems to Labour adopting this particular plan – pioneered by Salmond 10
years ago. Firstly, they probably would
prefer Murphy to be in Holyrood in the run up to the 2016 election and not
leave the Holyrood group in the hands of a deputy/caretaker for too long. The bigger problem is that Murphy, being from
the Compass Group wing of Labour, would take the same policy positions as Lamont
did. In a country that did not take to
New Labour with the same zeal as the rest of the country, this will be a problem. Especially given that Sturgeon is likely to
take the SNP slightly leftwards.
The other
Westminster name being touted is someone by the name of Gordon Brown. Yes, he did save the union with his speeches
& by laying out that timetable so carefully crafted to include touchstone
Scottish dates… but really, the guy that
failed as Prime Minister…
That the
frontrunners are two Westminster MP’s really illustrates Scottish Labour's
problem in that there’s no one really at Holyrood that can be seen as viable
candidates. That one of Lamont’s rivals
three years ago (Ken McIntosh) seems to have vanished from front line politics
illustrates the paucity of talent on the Labour benches. That’s not to say that there’s not talent on
the Labour benches. You do sense however
that there’s just not enough experience between Dugdale, Marra or Findlay for
any of them to make a decent fist of the job. They may have potential down the
line, but those three are still only just over half way through their first
term at Holyrood. If anyone doubts the
need for experience, just look at the current line up of leaders at Westminster
where Cameron is the most experienced party leader, having been elected to parliament in 2001. It shows.
I wonder if the
best strategy available to Scottish Labour is not the Salmond strategy from
2004, but the strategy employed by the Conservatives when they ditched Iain
Duncan Smith in 2003. They rallied
around an experienced figure, one that was essentially an elongated caretaker
figure, this gave possible future leadership contenders time to gather
experience & to formulate campaigns & ideas. Yes they possibly did write off 2005, but
then again it’s unlikely whoever wins will be in a position to be First
Minister come May 2016. An elongated
caretaker figure also gives Scottish Labour time to sort their internal structures,
look at ideas & just generally just to stop and think about where they are
going.
While the SNP and
the other parties in the “Yes” coalition have much to learn from the referendum,
so do does the leading party in the “Better Together” coalition. That lesson is not the frankly graceless “We
won… (and) helped to deliver over 2 million people that kept us in the union”
but more to do with there being an appetite for left of centre politics and
that Scotland is fed up of being left behind by the cosy right wing Westminster
consensus. Lamont’s legacy may well be
that in resignation she forces Scottish Labour to look at the changed landscape
before the party becomes totally irrelevant.
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