Labour set to feel squeeze
GIVEN events in Downing Street yesterday, with a wounding showdown between Theresa May and her Brexit Secretary, who isn’t preparing for a snap election?
The Scottish Tories, I’m told, have spent a substantial sum of money surveying the attitudes of 10,000 Scots voters in recent weeks.
The results are being kept wrapped tight under the spare Union flag Ruth Davidson brings to photo opportunities. But they contain some very mixed news for Scottish Labour.
Interestingly, Jeremy Corbyn emerges as slightly more popular in Scotland than Nicola Strugeon, which would seem to chime with an inevitable pendulum swing against the well-established First Minister.
In former west of Scotland Labour strongholds, which SNP politicians can now tour in the comfort of a Rolls-Royce, courtesy of SNP-run Glasgow City Council, that might be crucial.
Corbyn’s Love Island win over Sturgeon is slight but enough to persuade Tory strategists they cannot rely on re-running the devastating image of a Labour leader tucked into the top pocket of an SNP First Minister.
The powerful poster of Ed Miliband in the SNP’s pocket was a decisive factor in marginal seats, as the 2015 Labour loser Jim Murphy acknowledged the other week when he re-appeared on the political stage.
This should be good news for Scottish Labour, a party now being re-focused as a delivery mechanism for a Corbyn win.
Among the 64 target seats Labour would need to form a Commons majority, 18 are highly marginal Scottish constituencies.
But focusing on the Corbyn dream has a downside. The other lesson from the polling for the Tories, and for Richard Leonard, is that Scottish Labour are absent.
No one knows who Leonard is or what he stands for.
Both Leonard and the new party deputy Lesley Laird made it very clear what they stood for in speeches this week – an anti-austerity, job-creating agenda.
This is standard fare. If a Labour politician isn’t for jobs and eradicating poverty, what are they for?
In that sense, the SNP’s Growth/Cuts Commission (delete according to preference) should be a gift to Leonard.
Andrew Wilson’s independence prescription needs Scotland’s public services to be ravaged in order to buy Angus Robertson a pew at the United Nations in New York. Leonard can shout, and should shout, loudly on austerity. But it will suit both Sturgeon and Davidson to frame any contest around, guess what, the constitution.
Scotland’s binary debate will consolidate both SNP and Tory bases, with the opportunity for the Tories lying in hollowing out the Labour vote and claiming it for the Union.
The Tories calculate Labour have not yet adjusted to what being the third party in Scotland means.
The biggest question Leonard will face is not what he stands for but who he will stand behind?
Conditional on diminishing the Greens, Labour’s role in Holyrood is to be a Queen-maker.
Any hint from Leonard of keeping the SNP running into a fourth term will send exasperated unionists into Davidson’s arms, in a campaign the Tories would relish.
Any signal of denying the SNP power at the expense of the Tories would spin Leonard from socialist to Thatcherite in a quick-wash cycle.
He has to be more nimble, not just more left-wing, than opponents.
Being in the Remain vanguard, carving a distinct trail for the rest of the country to follow, would have granted Leonard some space.
The same golden opportunity to advance a progressive agenda presents itself to Labour in the Commons next week.
But, even as Tory Ministers knife each other in Downing Street, Labour cannot persuade their Euro-sceptic selves to take advantage of Brexit to defeat a government and turn the polls around.