This
week sees the 10th anniversary of the setting up of this blog. Over the next couple of posts we will be
looking at the two big political trends in Scottish & UK politics over the
past 10 years, starting off with the decline of the Labour Party.
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| Scottish First Minister Jack McConnell with PM Tony Blair during Scottish Labour's Spring 2007 conference |
If we look at the
world of January 19th 2007 (and who the hell would post their first blog on a
Friday night?), New Labour held power in Westminster and in the devolved
administrations in Cardiff and Edinburgh.
Blair had let it be known that he was nearing the end of his time in
Downing Street, but we wouldn’t know how long he would remain. Rhodri Morgan was still holding the reigns of
power in Cardiff, he would remain Welsh First Minister for another two years
despite never being Blair’s first pick for the role. It would be here in Scotland and the third
Holyrood elections where Labour’s grip on Working Class votes would be
loosened.
Jack McConnell
had been Scottish First Minister since 2001, but had seen his share of seats
fall to 51 seats in 2003’s election.
Scottish Labour were still favourites to win a historic third term, even
if McConnel & Labour’s campaign did look tired and complacent. If any
moment could be said to be the starting point of Labour’s woes, then the moment
when the SNP won enough list seats to creep past Labour’s final total and
become the largest party would be it.
Since that teatime on May 4th 2007, Labour’s grip on Scotland and Scottish
politics has been loosened and remains the case to this day.
Why Labour’s grip
on Scotland and Scottish life has only loosened since that day is an easy
question to answer. Labour had always
sort of taken Scotland for granted, New Labour in particular actively tailored policies
to middle class and upper middle class families, somewhat sidelining less well
off voters. The calculation being that
Labour voters with centre/left values wouldn’t vote for anyone else. The SNP came along to promise to reverse
Scottish Labour’s planned hospital closures, tuition fees and prescription
charges – and promptly started to hoover up disaffected Labour voters miffed at
Labour’s decade long march to the right.
This was compounded by Scottish Labour’s inability to reconcile itself
to that loss. This has manifested itself
in two ways.
Since 2011,
Scottish Labour’s tactic has been very negative tactics. It might be only the past 18 months that the
SNP have dubbed Scottish Labour’s rabid tactics as ‘SNPbad’, but this is
essentially what they’ve been doing since Iain Gray became Scottish Labour’s
leader in 2008. Everything that the SNP
do has been labelled as bad with little in the way of rational explanation as
to why. This line became more rabid in
the aftermath of the 2011 ‘landslide’ defeat which saw an SNP majority
government. Scottish Labour’s response
to this was to begin to obsess about a possible Independence Referendum. For the next four or five weeks, Scottish Labour
were constantly talking about the threat of Independence and the dastardly SNP’s
plans to implement a manifesto pledge.
When the Independence Referendum became real, it covered up Scottish
Labour’s big problem. They had become
something of a policy vaccum.
In 2011, Scottish
Labour wanted to stand up to Tory Spending Cuts, only to run away from
Austerity protestors. If memory serves
this was all they really stood on, non of their policies were really that
memorable. As a result, and over the
course of the past ten years, they’ve fallen into a knee jerk type of left wing
policymaking which goes like this.
Spending money is good and tax rises are good therefore we must
indiscriminately raise taxes to throw money at public services. As a socialist, I’m offended that people
think of this as socialism (it’s not) and goes a long way to explaining Labour’s
policy failures. By the time Labour
repeated that mistake in 2016’s Holyrood elections by promising Tax hikes for all
and (an illegal) rebate (which fell apart under scrutiny), they had already
made the mistake that finished them in the eyes of many Scottish voters.
It’s not
surprising, or that controversial, that Scottish Labour should argue for
Scotland to remain within the United Kingdom.
It was the way they argued that case which alienated many Scottish voters. Scottish Labour helped to set up the
pro-Union Better Together campaign group and shared a platform with the Lib
Dems and the Conservatives. However it
was the continued use of Tory attack lines and the cosy comfortableness that
Scottish Labour hierarchy used those attack lines which resulted in the scales
falling from many a Labour voter’s eyes.
That the referendum was ‘won’ had more to do with the SNP’s lack of
economic arguments and Sterlingzone than anything Scottish Labour did as voters
concluded that Independence at that point under that White Paper was too much
of a risk. Voters also concluded that
Scottish Labour were also finished. How
different history would have been had Wendy Alexander remained Scottish Labour’s
leader in Holyrood and the SNP gathered enough votes to hold their referendum
in the first term.
644 days later
and another Referendum arrived. If the
Independence Referendum split (and continues to split) Scottish votes into
pro-Independence and pro-Union voters, then the EU referendum did precisely the
same thing to the rest of the country.
This time Labour found itself under a leader with Eurosceptic leanings
press ganged into being an apologist for the European Union. As a result, and still remembering how they ‘won’
the last referendum but lost the peace, Labour fell rather badly between two
stools by striking a sober but resolutely non cheerleading defence of the EU.
This would
normally not be the fatal mistake for Labour.
However this is a party at war with itself. Ed Milliband was not supposed to win the
Labour Leadership in 2010 (according to the script put forward by pro-Blairite
Labour MP’s) while Corbyn was simply not supposed to win the Labour leadership
in 2015 as he fought off three candidates from Labour’s Progress Group (the now
official group of Labour members who believe in Blairite Third Way politics). It took less than a second for the Progress
Wingers (on their website, the motto “The party within a party” appears –
predating Momentum) to make their displeasure known at the result as Jamie Reed
‘resigned’ from the shadow cabinet. His
was not the only person to, essentially, end their political careers by
throwing their toys out of the pram.
The Labour war is
really a proxy for something else. The
Progress Wingers believe that power must be won before good things can be done
(even if those good things are watered down to become more palatable to so
called ‘swing’ voters) so policies must be tailored to appeal to swing
voters. Corbyn and his supporters
believe that arguments must be made and policies must be formulated to appeal
to core supporters and that they can win through the power of their arguments
rather than through compromise. It is
the question which Blair never answered, indeed his premiership has rather
muddied the waters in this respect. In
the post Thatcher Britain, what exactly is Labour for?
From a position
10 years ago, where Labour held the reigns of power, we now see a Labour party
being torn apart from the inside and on the outside by political opponents like
the Tories, UKIP and the SNP. This is a
situation entirely of their own making through their own choices or their
reactions to other people’s choices.
Labour needs to have a long hard look at itself and ask serious hard
questions about what it stands for, why and how it can successfully regain
power without compromising those answers.
While I’m not sure if this blog will be here in another 10 years, if
Labour carries on with the current self destructive path it’s on then they
certainly won’t be here. Going the same
way as the Dodo, the Dinosaurs and the Liberals on the extinct list.
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