A Scots lesson

PG Wodehouse once declared that it is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine. You’ll find precious few rays of sunshine among Scottish Labour bigwigs in Westminster.

Last May, Scotland was the one bright spot in a bleak election for Labour. If Gordon Brown couldn’t find the G-spot of the English electorate, he had Scottish voters sighing appreciatively. A year later and Iain Gray and Ed Miliband were unceremoniously dumped.

So what went wrong? Miliband’s team are furious with the complacency of the Scottish campaign. They say polls showing a strong Labour lead were used to justify a conservative, uninspiring, forgettable campaign and to fend off any critique from outside. As a result, Miliband’s office will be coordinating the postmortem into the election campaign, and promise it will be broad and deep.

Yet there’s more than enough blame to go round, and some in Scotland blame London for not understanding their need for a specific anti-Nationalist message. Yet others, both in Scotland and in Westminster, also point the finger back to Norman Shaw South, asking why Miliband didn’t take control of the faltering Scottish campaign.

In Miliband’s defence, it isn’t clear what he could have done. Two months out, with Labour apparently leading, he couldn’t grab the campaign without undermining Gray. Then, when it was obvious the campaign was going wrong, taking control would have only made things worse for the embattled Scottish leader.

The truth, argues one Scottish MP, is that Labour was out-spent, out-thought, out-campaigned and out-debated. That’s not just the result of a poor short campaign; it follows from years of complacency.

Nor is the path back straightforward. With Gray retired and hurt, Andy Kerr defeated, Cathy Jamieson, Douglas Alexander and Jim Murphy in Westminster, the next generation of Scottish Labour leaders needs to establish themselves, and fast. Johann Lamont may be Labour’s deputy leader, but your correspondent knows at least one political editor who was surprised to discover she is a woman.

Nor is it just at the parliamentary level that Labour suffers from talent drain. From Blair McDougall to John McTernan, from Joanne Milligan to Kirsty McNeill, many of Scottish Labour’s best and brightest are to be found in SW1, not EH99.

Where next? Expect a swing of power and campaigning influence to Labour’s Westminster MPs, many of whom have looked on in impotent horror as Scottish Labour has appeared to stagnate intellectually and organisationally.

Free of ministerial responsibility, Labour’s Scottish MPs represent our biggest intellectual and campaigning resource as we rebuild. There are emerging talents among the 2010 Scottish Labour intake – like Pamela Nash, Gregg McClymont, Gemma Doyle, Anas Sarwar and Ian Murray – all of whom have the ability to give Scottish Labour a more modern, less tribal face before the next Westminster election.

These bright young Scots will get the chance to define themselves as leaders of Labour’s recovery, while new MSPs rebuild the Scottish parliamentary party and John Smith House is reorganised from top to bottom.

As for the leadership, when Scotland next votes for Holyrood, it will likely be a year after the next Westminster election. The Scottish National party government will be nine years old. Contrast will be essential, so perhaps our next candidate for first minister isn’t even a sitting MSP.

Finally, it’s not lost on Labour strategists that a combination of better financing, a supportive press and an aspirational and presidential campaign by the governing party destroyed a big Labour poll lead faster than a gang of neds can get through a bottle of buckie.

The challenge for Miliband isn’t just reversing the defeat in Scotland, it’s stopping a repeat across the whole of Britain.

Ahh, the Alternative Vote

There’s a strange split in the attitudes of Labour people to the Alternative Vote. While the Labour Yes campaign emerged from defeat with credit and goodwill intact, the ‘official’Yes campaign, headed by those guardians of democracy Pam Giddy, Neal Lawson and Katie Ghose, became widely loathed, even among pro-AV MPs.

You don’t have to look far to find out why. The Yes to AV campaign implied MPs were a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings, who needed shouting at through megaphones to even answer a letter. Labour MPs were infuriated, and several withdrew their support from the campaign, despite the entreaties of the Labour Yes team.

What struck insiders as most bizarre was that so few people at the top of the Yes campaign had experience in winning elections. Ghose is an NGO campaigner, John Sharkey a Liberal Democrat who knows all about evanescent poll numbers, while Giddy should probably have learnt her lesson from the 2010 election, when she targeted six MPs for ‘standing in the way of reforming parliament’. Five got big majorities, and the last was beaten by someone who immediately became a whip. The Yes campaign team was dominated by inner London progressives, and they duly won a majority – in progressive inner London.

Still, every defeat has a silver lining. As one pro-AV MP told me ‘The one good thing about all this is I never have to take those clowns seriously again.’

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