There is a middle Scotland and it decides elections
—Johann Lamont is the third leader of the Scottish Labour party to sit on the opposition benches and watch Alex Salmond lead the nation. He is now Scotland’s longest-serving first minister and theoretically, just possibly, 12 months away from become Scotland’s first prime minister.
A textbook approach to opposition would have seen Lamont stand up and shout down the Scottish National party’s case for independence at every opportunity, hoping that once its raison d’être had been beaten at the poll in 2014, support for the SNP government and its brand of popular nationalism would crumble with it at the 2016 election.
That would have been the safe option, and it might have worked, but it would have failed to address two fundamental but very different challenges: the price of the public spending crash and who pays for it, and the desperate need to reform and modernise the Scottish Labour party.
So, not for the first time in her life, Lamont opted for the hard road. Why? Because it was the right and honest thing to do, right for the party she loves and for the people she has devoted her life to serving. It is who she is.
Early in her leadership, the Scottish Labour leader made a significant speech calling time on the retail politics that had so defined the last two Scottish parliament elections: free prescriptions, free tuition fees, free personal care, bridge tolls scrapped, council tax frozen. Lamont declared the shop shut until the nation had an honest conversation about the price.
With one speech she shifted public debate in Scotland and reframed it around the lived experiences of the people she represents.The price of free prescriptions in Scotland is that care workers find themselves with just 15 minutes with each client – no time for dignity and decency, just task and go. Access to groundbreaking cancer drugs falls far short of those available in England and Wales. Wards in Scottish hospitals have 1,200 fewer nurses than they did just three years ago.
The price of free higher education in Scotland is the highest drop-out rates, the worst record on widening access and the weakest student support package for the poorest students across these isles. It is 120,000 fewer part-time college students, and a nine per cent cut in college budgets. Lamont has never shied away from a battle in her life, but in many ways she is leaving the referendum debate to others. Her focus is, as it has always been, on the most vulnerable and disadvantaged, a community that constitutional politics leaves cold.
She also knows that only a modern, aspirational Labour party can win in the leafy suburbs of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen – because there is a middle Scotland too, and it decides elections. The SNP knows that, and its brand of retail politics serves it.
Doing the right thing and winning the 2016 election seem somehow incompatible in that context, unless you set out to drive the popular will rather than follow it. Lamont knows that those answers must be combined with a radical, innovative and exciting offer of something bigger. And so the work begins on a policy platform which speaks to both the proudest of our Labour traditions and the most ambitious hopes of an aspiring nation, one which will be taken to the people in 2016 by a heady mix of youth and experience in the shadow cabinet team, and a party fit for 21st century politics with trained organisers in every seat and a community organising academy that empowers activists not only to find Labour voters but to create them.
So, while the world’s eyes are on Scotland’s referendum in 2014, take some comfort in the fact that Lamont’s are firmly where they should be – on 2016.
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Kezia Dugdale MSP is shadow cabinet secretary for education
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