Let’s be clear. It wasn’t the candidate. Labour’s loss in Glasgow East would have been even worse had it not been for the valiant efforts of Margaret Curran, one of the party’s best campaigners working extremely hard in an area she knows very well.
It wasn’t the campaign. The campaign itself was ‘very strong, imaginative and well targeted’. Not my description, or even that of a self-congratulating campaign staffer, these are the comments of Gordon Brown’s own MP! Willie Rennie was the Lib Dem victor in Dunfermline & West Fife and formerly their campaign coordinator with some other significant byelection triumphs under his belt. He knows a good campaign when he sees one.
So what went wrong? Can we pinpoint where, or indeed when, the tectonic plates began to shift in Scotland? Is it possible to identify the root causes of such structural failure of the party in Scotland and chart a course for future success?
We must go back to the beginning of the current political period, to 12 March 1994. The premature death of John Smith left a vacuum across Scottish politics. His mainstream European social democracy, which would have accurately reflected ‘middle Scotland’, was replaced by a singular focus on the pursuit of power.
As New Labour was being crafted in the heat of fierce political debate in England, Labour in Scotland simply refused to enter the debate. Neil Kinnock’s first steps to modernise the party with the expulsion of Militant had been tolerated rather than celebrated. Smith’s own one member, one vote changes had limited impact. Tony Blair’s rewriting of clause IV did little to change the policy status quo in Scotland.
Big change was, however, expected with the passing of the Scotland Act. Although delivering devolution was clearly a very popular decision, the Scottish parliament became the high water mark of constitutional reform and not its trailblazer. ‘Scotland leading Britain’, the party’s campaign slogan, was only given its true meaning, with its full federalist force, with the smoking ban legislation. Other policy areas simply didn’t cut it, and ‘London Labour’ lost interest.
Not for us the energy of a ‘first 100 days’ in power. Instead, we argued over what to call the new government and spent over 10 times the amount it cost for the Welsh assembly building Holyrood’s upturned boats. Not a great start. It got worse.
In the 1995 council elections, on the anti-Tory tide that swept the UK, Labour had won outright control of 21 of Scotland’s 32 new unitary councils. Before the single transferable vote form of PR had even been chosen to replace the discredited voting system this figure had been halved. Labour was losing control of most of the cities, had clung on to power in the capital and had never represented large swathes of the country.
Cushioned by an inflated sense of its own support, the party in Scotland simply refused to respond – by changing in either one direction or the other. It was very much business as usual. The Scottish executive put together two totally uninspiring programmes for government. These were essentially shopping lists that sought to ‘right the wrongs’ of the Thatcher years, with no positive programmes of action attached.
This was power without a purpose. In education, we scrapped school league tables and school boards, replacing them with an information vacuum. In health, we scrapped the internal market, leaving a vacuum of ideas about how best to boost Scotland’s particularly poor performance. In the good times of rapidly increasing budgets, huge investment was made, without any real reform of our public services.
Under Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish and then Jack McConnell, Labour in Scotland simply blundered on, regardless of the seismic electoral shift that was taking place under its leaden feet. Stumbling from calamity to crisis, each leader dented the devolution dividend thereby creating the political context for last year’s election defeat. And then came Wendy Alexander’s ill-considered coronation. Another leader, another non-election. No battle of big ideas, no fight for the soul of the party – again.
All the while, as control of councils was lost and Scottish parliament majorities were slashed the Westminster village continued on regardless in the mistaken belief that the party’s foundations could withstand any tremor heading its way. Glasgow East proved how wrong that was. Another leader, or whatever that post is allowed to be called, has now departed, so let the battle of ideas begin, and maybe, just maybe, the Scottish Labour party can be saved from itself.