So, last night we lost one of the safest seats in Scotland. The Scottish Labour campaign was well organised. Activists turned out to do the work. We had a great candidate. And we lost.
With sore feet and a heavy heart, we need to start figuring out what the voters of Glasgow East were telling us, and we need to act on it pronto.
It seems clear that this was not a straightforward vote for the SNP. On not a single doorstep was the issue of independence raised with me. I didn’t hear from anyone that Salmond’s SNP government was going so well that they’d decided to give it a shot in the arm, or even give Labour a kick in the teeth.
The issues that were raised were a lot closer to home: there’s not enough for the kids to do; the state of a damp close (or tenement for those of you reading this south of Gretna); funding for a social club for people with dementia.
When prompted, but only when prompted, people liked the winter fuel allowance, free bus travel for pensioners, the new schools we’ve built. Now I’m aware that there’s a jumble of Scottish Parliament and Westminster initiatives in there, but we have to acknowledge that that’s how the electorate seem to think.
While we were in government at Holyrood and Westminster, and in Glasgow’s case, at local authority level, that wasn’t too much of a problem, but as SNP cuts begin to bite, making that separation is going to become more and more of an issue.
Or maybe not. It may be that amidst the complexity of post-devolution Scotland, what we need is a clear, straightforward message of hope to put to the electorate. Parties win elections on hope, not fear. People want to hear that life could get better, not that it’s about to get worse.
Again though, there’s another complication. We are now in opposition at Holyrood, where so much that impacts on the health, education and prospects of the electorate is decided, and where the SNP are implementing policies that are fundamentally opposed to the social justice values we hold so dear. We are still in power at Westminster, which the SNP loudly accuses, despite the facts, of underfunding Scotland and making unavoidable their budget of cuts.
We are also still in power at Glasgow City Council. It is becoming ever clearer that the SNP plan to use local government as a scapegoat for the impact that their cutbacks have on the Scottish people.
It’s an extraordinary strategy for any government to adopt, to avoid taking any responsibility whatsoever – apart from for the good things, obviously.
We do have a choice here, and a responsibility of our own. We cannot be passive observers, transfixed by the sway of the SNP python. Instead we need to do some clever Indiana Jones type thing and cut off its head. We’ve seen that opposition and government are simultaneously possible, it’s time to make it work for us.
What of the Tories? They weren’t squeezed as much as the other small parties, but their share of the vote did go down. Despite their poor showing, there are still repercussions for them. We know it suits the Tories to see the SNP winning in Scotland, just as it would suit the SNP to have a Tory government in Westminster. The people it wouldn’t suit, I remain convinced despite this result, is the population of Glasgow East, and people all over the country who want a better life for themselves, their families, and for our wider society.
I can’t claim to have all the answers, to be frank I’m still figuring out the questions. But what I do know though is that we need to take our fingers out of our ears and honestly work out what the voters of Glasgow East were telling us yesterday, and then we need to act.
Judith Fisher