As we begin to unpick our defeat last Thursday, we must keep in mind Keynes’ famous maxim ‘When my information changes, I alter my conclusions.’
Luckily, such a process is already under way. A number of our rising stars have already put forward compelling arguments for change and renewal.
I have heard, however, from other quarters one particularly specious hypothesis: that Labour’s defeat in Scotland was a result of the party being insufficiently leftwing, thus ceding ground to the more authentically socialist Scottish nationalists.
Such an argument could not be further from the truth.
For one, its characterisation of the Scottish National party as a party of the left, let alone one that is more progressive than Labour, quite simply holds no water.
The SNP’s spending plans imply more austerity than Labour’s, and its calls for full fiscal autonomy would create huge budget deficit which would leave ordinary Scots at least £1,000 worse off.
Its record in government is similarly regressive. In the last five years, the SNP has overseen a five per cent real terms fall in schools spending, and a paltry one per cent rise in health spending. Spending in these areas has failed to keep pace with the rest of the United Kingdom, which has seen real terms increases.
The number of students studying in Scotland’s colleges has fallen nearly 25 per cent since 2010, and the party’s ‘free higher education’ policy has left poorer students worse off. Under the SNP, Scotland has become the only part of the UK where borrowing is highest among students from poorer backgrounds. The attainment gap between rich pupils and poor pupils continues to go unaddressed, and is wider than in England where attempts at serious reform have at least been made.
Even setting aside the party’s questionable record, the fact also remains that the SNP’s animating ideology is innately reactionary.
Since when did parties of the left prioritise nationality over solidarity and cooperation, especially in cases where such cross-border allegiances already existed? If Karl Marx were an SNP supporter, he would write, ‘Workers of world unite! Unless you’re from England, Northern Ireland or Wales, or anywhere which is not Scotland.’
Within Scotland, we are now beginning to see the results of this divisive ideology. How people voted in the independence referendum is used by some as a test of true patriotism. The SNP fosters such divisions by claiming to speak for Scotland, thus implying the rest of us are working towards a less ‘Scottish’ agenda.
Why then do many voters support the SNP, including those who identify themselves as social democrats? The answer is relatively simple: they have bought into the notion that separation will cure Scotland of all its ills. It is Ukipism north of the border, with Europe and immigrants replaced by Britain, Westminster and its traitorous Scottish agents.
Moving further left will not convince these people to vote Labour.
Their main preoccupation is independence; the means has become the end.
To win these voters back Labour must do three things.
First, it must challenge the SNP’s philosophy. Britain succeeds and Scotland succeeds when people of all nationalities, races, backgrounds and abilities work together.
We believe we are all in it together. We also believe in equality.
Let Nicola Sturgeon explain why she cares more about a child living in poverty in Glasgow, than she does a child living in squalor in Manchester.
Second, we must do more to hold the Scottish government to account. We must constantly highlight its failures in office, challenge it to act, and give voters a credible alternative.
If the Smith commission proposals are enacted, the SNP will have even greater powers at its disposal. It will have nowhere to hide, and if it cannot use those powers to build a fairer, more equitable society then Labour will.
Finally, Labour must champion the idea of a UK constitutional convention to come up with a coherent comprehensive plan for a federal UK, one which will institutionalise devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, deal with the English democratic deficit, and provide a bulwark against the forces of separation.
We must face these forces down, resolute in our belief, as Donald Dewar used to say, ‘We achieve more together than we do apart.’
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George Foulkes is a member of the House of Lords and a former member of the Scottish parliament. He tweets @GeorgeFoulkes
From: http://bailoutswindle.com/GE2015/2015_03_31_InvisibleBanksUnseenAuthors.html
”
Invisible Banks: Unseen authors
The Conservatives and LibDems have written the banks out of the narrative
of the deficit and debt.
It’s a damnation of the Westminster political system that we weren’t surprised,
although it still shocked me, when Cameron and Osborne started blaming the
previous government for what the banks and The City of London and Wall Street
did to the economy of the UK, USA and the rest of the western World.
The soft peddling on making the banks restore investment to the real economy
showed us not only that, as most suspected, the Conservative Party was in
the pockets of the banks, but that the LibDems were corrupted as well.
Labour are no different. Shortly after Miliband became leader he and Balls
stopped rebutting the patently ridiculous assertion that it was the Labour
government to blame for the economic meltdown precipitated by the banks.
There is absolutely no political advantage for the Labour Party to accept
this. Having successfully fought off the decades old characterisation that
it couldn’t be trusted with the economy, there is no scenario which makes
having the public accept the false narrative that Labour are to blame for
what the banks did helpful to Labour.
Why the hell would anyone supposedly concerned about the extra million people
on the dole because of the banks, simply one day accept that blame?
“
Stunning analysis, George, truly stunning. It explains exactly why labour in Scotland don’t exist any longer
Scottish Labour completely missed the point about the SNP. Scots want to be Scottish : governed by Scots in Scotland.
It’s a raw, visceral, heart driven attitude called nationalism but its very very real.
For decades now Labour and the Left has deluded itself into thinking nationalism is bad and internationalism is good – when they are exactly the same. You can’t have internationalism without nationalism. Nations matter. Scotland matters to the Scots and England, Englishness and England’s sense of national identity matters to the English.
No one is saying that the SNP is an ‘authentically socialist’ party. However, it is obvious that the SNP benefited hugely from presenting a coherent anti-austerity narrative, when Labour was perceived as offering ‘austerity-lite’. We need to reflect on that. If Labour had opposed Tory economic policies more effectively over the last five years, Labour would have held the ‘anti-austerity’ vote and retained quite a few more seats.
At last! An eagerly awaited communique from the lavishly-appointed, taxpayer-funded day room of the Westminster Home for the Politically Defunct. What at first appeared to be a pile of dead stoats has bestirred itself to reveal none other than everybody’s favourite pantomime peer, Baron Foulkes of Cumnock, eager to rail against those damned Teddy Boys…. er… Hippies… er… SNP! Yes! That’s it! It’s the SNP! Damn their eyes! Bright as they are with inspiration and confidence.
Curse them! Blessed as they are with the trust of the people of Scotland.
Only a bladder such as Foulkes could fail to recognise the irony of an unelected denizen of one of the greatest symbols of privilege, patronage and pampered incontinence in the entire world quoting Karl Marx. If Karl Marx were an SNP supporter he would impatiently explain to the ermined eejit that political boundaries are no barrier to working class solidarity. He would tersely point out that true socialist solidarity works across borders. He would doubtless have much more to say about British Labour and Lord Foulkes, but it’s probably best to draw a discreet veil over that.
The befuddled baron gets pretty much everything spectacularly wrong. He clearly has not the faintest idea what the modern SNP represents. Thus, he tilts at phantoms. His recipe for restoring British Labour in Scotland to vitality has as its main ingredients all the things that have poisoned them. Mindless hatred of the SNP. And arrogant sense of entitlement. Stubborn refusal to acknowledge Scotland’s increasingly distinctive political culture. He purports to be offering a cure. He is proffering a goblet of hemlock.
He says they must challenge “the SNP’s philosophy”. But what he actually refers to is not the SNP we know here in the world outside the bubble of unearned privilege Foulkes inhabits. He mistakes the caricature he carries in his pointy wee head for something real.
Similarly, he demands that Nicola Sturgeon explain a belief which belongs, not to her, but the travesty of Sturgeon that has been conjured by his addled mind.
Then he suggests that British Labour in Scotland should “do more to hold the Scottish government to account”. By which he means that they should ramp up the smears and the denigration of Scottish institutions such as the NHS. His advice is to keep on peddling the old propaganda and if it doesn’t seem to be having the desired effect, peddle harder.
Finally, he demands yet another rigged constitutional talking shop. Presumably in the hope that this time they can contrive to impose on Scotland a constitutional arrangement which disadvantages the SNP to the extent that British Labour in Scotland can regain its former status without having to trouble over-much about actually winning the arguments or the trust of Scotland’s voters.
Foulkes presents all of this evidently convinced that he is offering some radical new thinking. It is a measure of his detachment from the reality of Scottish politics that he is dumbly unaware that all of this has been tried by British Labour in Scotland. What he describes is a strategy which has already failed disastrously for British Labour in Scotland, if somewhat more elegantly for the people of Scotland.
It’s time for elevated George to toddle off and collect the 300 quid he gets as a reward for finding his way to the publicly-subsidised bars and restaurants of the House of Lords. Clearly, he has nothing to offer British Labour in Scotland but the embarrassment of being lectured by an eccentric elderly relative.
Nicola Sturgeon does not care more about a child living in poverty in Glasgow than she does about a child living in squalor in Manchester but why should the chid in Glasgow have to continue to live in poverty because the UK as a whole refuses to do anything about the child in Manchester? If the UK are going to continue to vote for austerity Scotland can’t do anything about that but we can take matters into our own hands and do something about the poverty in Scotland. We heard all this back in the run-up to the referendum. “Vote No in solidarity with the rest of the UK and Labour will bring about social justice for all”. How has that worked out? It sounded good but Labour couldn’t deliver on their side of the bargain.
How long are we going to have to wait for the Labour Party to organise itself so that the child can be removed from squalor in Manchester and we can help lift the child in Glasgow from poverty? Five years? Can Labour say with confidence that they will be an electable party of government in the UK in 2020? Or do we have to wait longer? To 2025? 2030? Those children will be grown up by then.
With many senior figures of the UK Labour party blaming electoral defeat on Ed Milliband being too left-wing (Goodness only knows what Karl Marx would have thought of that.) and the prospective party leaders falling over themselves to claim they are the ones to make Labour a party of “aspiration” and business I am not sure many would think the wait will be worth it. That seems to have been the view of those voting last Thursday too.
if labour build their future in scotland on the advice of such remote and discredited figures then the outcome is predictable. The need is now and the possibility is here, in Scotland. Time after time we have went along with the careerists (most ably identified in the form of a politician who has built a career on pseudo-socialist pretensions and then has a swan song as an unelected ‘lord’ in the heart of the westminster establishment) and it is always the same moan about ‘another 5 years of the tories’. When labour has got in to power nothing changes, the lot of the worker is not transformed and the wealth of the nation is not redistributed. If Foulkes wants to know why the SNP have taken the initiative it is simple – a century of labour has done more to enrich politicians than it has to advance the working class.
Thanks a lot, Labour Party. Thanks to you we will be governed for another five years by
the party that has pushed people into poverty in their droves, that has seen
suicide rates soar among the sick and disabled, and food banks spread like a
fungus. Thanks to you the party that has brought the UK’s economic recovery to
a standstill whilst doubling the national debt can go on wrecking what is left
of our assets and destroy the environment as collateral damage. Thanks to you,
Ian Duncan Smith will be allowed to continue his assault on the most vulnerable
and Theresa May can go on slashing our civil rights in the name of fighting
terrorism. Thanks to you the rich will get even richer while everyone else will
get poorer and the NHS in England may as well pack up and go home. It is your
fault, Labour Party, that the Tories now have a clear majority, unchecked even by
what little moderation the Lib Dems might have been able to impose. The Tory
reign has been so abysmal, you ought to have won this election by a landslide.
You failed.
Now don’t you dare even think of blaming Scotland. In Scotland, we did our bit to bring
down the ConLib coalition: we ousted all but two of them. Actually, Carmichael
and Mundell won by very narrow margins and if you hadn’t been so hell-bent on
fighting your potential allies, the SNP, we might have got rid of those two as
well. In any case, Scotland has reduced the coalition’s seat count by ten. All
you had to do was add a little to the Labour seats in England and Wales and
we’d have been home and dry. But no, not you. You lost big time.
I’m going to help you out here, Labour, because I have watched your decline for a long time
and it seems clear that you have not the foggiest idea where you have gone
wrong. That is why almost everything you did to improve your prospects has only
made things worse. So let me try to explain.
Forget Blairism. The con Blair pulled off worked once, but it will not work again in
our lifetime, because there are things people don’t forget. Blairism gained
Labour the support of a certain number of swing voters and that helped you as
long as your core supporters loyally stood by you. Whatever made you think,
though, that you could give up the goals and values of your real clientele and
that nevertheless they would keep voting for you indefinitely? Sure, many
people feel loyal to a party and are patient with it, and there is a certain
inertia that needs to be overcome before some voters desert their traditional
party. But if that party continually fails to represent their supporter’s
interests, these supporters will eventually walk away. The sentence I heard
again and again and again these last few months was this: “I have not left
Labour, Labour have left me.” That is the core of the problem.
So listen to me well, Labour Party, because if you get this wrong again you will be done for,
once and for all: Don’t try to appeal to Tory voters. Tory-leaning voters might vote Labour as a one-off protest vote, but by pandering to them you alienate the people that are your natural
clientele. For a few years that might work out, but eventually the Tory-leaning
voters will return to the Tory fold and your own supporters will decide you’re
just not worth it anymore. If they have any sense, they’ll move on to the
Greens, and if not, there’s always UKIP. If they feel seriously conflicted,
they might just stay at home and not vote at all. In Scotland, they have
serious alternative now. In any case, you’re unlikely to gain back their trust
as long as you present yourself as a paler copy of the Tories. Nicola Sturgeon
did give you the heads-up in the leadership debate. She said that of course
there is a difference between Tories and Labour, but the problem is that the
difference is not big enough. It is nowhere near big enough.
There are several ways in which this failure to be properly Labour instead of Tory-lite
has played out.
You have failed to be an effective opposition. Instead of challenging the
Tories’ brutal austerity policies, their hair-raising incompetence with the
economy, their blatant favouring of the rich elites, you have done little else
than bicker about details. You have allowed the electorate in England and Wales
to believe against all evidence to the contrary that the Tories have is
basically right. You voted with them for more austerity cuts. You voted with
them for Trident renewal. You voted with them for more foolish military
interventions in the Middle East, even though you must know by now how the Iraq
War has damaged you. You abstained from the vote on the fracking moratorium which would have succeeded had you not been so cowardly. You have not been a
counterweight to the nasty coalition, you have enabled them.
You have allowed the Tories to determine the political narrative.
Instead of countering their agenda with your own agenda, you kept
telling us you would do much the same as the Tories, only in a nicer way, and
you deluded yourself that this would keep everyone happy. All this nonsense
about cutting the deficit by slashing public services and restricting
government spending, when it is standard textbook economy that in times of
recession the government must increase spending to help the economy recover –
you could have called the Tories out on this, you could have presented the
figures of how the Tory approach had made the economy much, much worse. Why did
it have to be Nigel Farage of all people who pointed out in the leaders’ debate
that the Tories had doubled the national debt? That would have been your role,
you should have hammered this message home relentlessly instead of letting them
get away with their ludicrous claim that they had fixed the economy. You even
allowed UKIP to set your agenda: Instead of making it clear, like Natalie Bennett and Leanne Wood and Nicola Sturgeon did, that immigration really, really isn’t a relevant problem, you went about printing “Controls on immigration” on mugs and even inscribing it on your
ridiculous monolith.
Instead of fighting the Tories, you fought your potential allies. This
wasn’t so disastrous in the case of the Greens and Plaid Cymru, given their
small numbers, but your treatment of the SNP might well be what cost you the
election. Again, you let the Tories determine the narrative. They crowed about
a constitutional crisis, about a second referendum which neither the SNP nor
the wider YES movement are seeking within the next few years anyway, about
“breaking up our (sic!) country,” about chaos and nationalism and England being
held to ransom. They and their compliant media outlets abused the SNP and the
people of Scotland on a daily basis in the most despicable terms. And all you
did was parrot them. Nicola Sturgeon could not have held out her hand any more
sincerely, and yet you sneered at it.
What you could have done, should have done, was to challenge the Tory
narrative. You could have pointed out that the SNP are a moderate party of the
centre left. You could have pointed out that they have a track record of eight
years of competent and sensible government in Holyrood. You could have pointed
out that they stood for the kind of temperate progressive policies that many,
many people in England would have been delighted to see. You could have pointed
out that in no imaginable universe would even 59 SNP MPs be able to call the
shots in a 650-strong parliament; that you would always be the boss in any kind
of arrangement. You could have thrown all your might into convincing the
English electorate that a Labour/SNP team effort would be good for the whole of
the UK, as it undoubtedly would have been. Instead you declared a week before
the election on national television that you would rather see the Tories return
to power than work with the SNP. The stupidity of this is mind-blowing. And all under the banner of “not working with a party that seeks to break up the UK.” Tell me, what is your deal again with
the SDLP, a party that seeks to unite Northern Ireland with the republic? You
don’t even field candidates against them to give them a better chance? If you
can work with them, why not with the SNP? But even today you still harp on
about “nationalism” when in fact what the people of Scotland have opted for is
the moderate social democratic policies which you should have offered but
didn’t.
Having alienated your core supporters and turned your back on your potential allies, and with no progressive track record as an effective opposition to show to the electorate, you have based
your election campaign on sound bites, PR stunts and silly gimmicks. Just after
Nicola Sturgeon presented her gender-balanced cabinet and promised to work
tirelessly on shattering the glass ceiling, you insulted the women of the UK by
inviting them to talk “around the kitchen table” about “women’s issues,” proudly
brought to us by a pink van. And you didn’t see it coming that people would
call it the Barbie Bus and laugh it out of town? You allowed Jim Muphy to run amok
in Scotland with one insane “policy announcement” after another – remember the “1000
more nurses than anything the SNP promises?” Why not promise weekend breaks on
Jupiter for the over 65s? You wheeled out Gordon Brown at random intervals to
make meaningless promises and you expected people to be swayed by the pledges
of a retiring backbencher? You had some wishy-washy election promises carved in
a massive gravestone and you thought that was a good idea?
Yours was a hopeless, hopeless campaign from beginning to end, without
vision, without structure, without conviction. And yet I, like so many, clung
to the hope that surely people in England must be so fed up with the Tories by
now that they’d vote for you anyway and that surely once the election day dust
had settled you’d see sense and head a progressive alliance with the SNP, SDLP,
Plaid Cymru and the lovely Caroline Lucas who is worth her weight in diamonds.
We could have turned things around for the good of the many rather than the
few. Instead the Tories now have carte blanche to suck dry the people of the UK
and grin smugly while they feast on our bones. All thanks to you, Labour Party.
Now get your act together and make sure this will never happen again. I cannot
spell it out any clearer.