Whisper it, but an SNP collapse could put Corbyn into Number 10

IT is tempting to behold the scrap between Anas Sarwar and Richard Leonard for the Scottish Labour leadership and dismiss it, in admittedly barnacled cliché, as but two bald men fighting over a comb.

The party, or what is left of it, is picking its seventh leader in just a decade. As recently as 2010, it swept Scotland’s Westminster seats even as Gordon Brown’s political career came balefully to its close and most commentators (and the opinion polls) expected Labour to resume control at Holyrood.

Instead, in May 2011, Labour was kicked out of the park by the Nationalists, who wrung out an overall majority from an electoral system expressly designed to prevent one. Even so, the people’s party fronted the Better Together campaign which, three years ago, saw off – rather decisively – Alex Salmond’s campaign for an independent Scotland.

Labour won that one, yes, but it won dirty, and in months of extraordinary politics its lieutenants began behaving like losers as the SNP ran improbable victory laps, burgeoned in the polls, and Nicola Sturgeon filled a Glasgow Hydro strutathon faster than Beyoncé.

Jim Murphy duly led Scottish Labour to a 2015 Westminster election performance that was less a catastrophe than an extinction event – by night’s end, only the lush suburbs of Edinburgh South, in all of Scotland, returned a Labour MP, in the People’s Party’s worst showing since the reign of Edward VII.

You might regard the seven seats they clawed back at the last General Election, in June, as significant recovery. But Scottish Labour’s overall vote actually dipped on its 2015 horror movie and smiles were monopolised by the Scottish Tories. Weeks earlier, Labour had lost dozens of councillors – and control of, for instance, Glasgow – and, at last year’s Holyrood election, won only three real live constituencies.

Battered, bloodied, yes – but still unbowed. And there are sound reasons why we should not assume that Labour in Scotland has had a stake pounded definitively through its heart.

Volatile

The Scottish Tories, after all, have come storming back from electoral wipe-out in 1997, in June recording their best General Election performance since 1979 and overturning some enormous Nationalist majorities. It was a sharp reminder that the electorate remains intensely volatile and that neither of Scotland’s two oldest and strongest political traditions can ever be written off.

But Ruth Davidson’s achievement was on a dangerously narrow base – her own considerable charisma and uncompromising opposition to a second independence referendum, which Sturgeon had foolishly laid on the table weeks before Parliament was so unexpectedly dissolved.

That is a mistake the Nationalists are unlikely, in the near future, to repeat and they seem already to be quietly parking independence and positioning themselves on more Left-of-centre territory.

It may be a tacit admission that they see little prospect of recovering historic heartland SNP seats in the North-East from the Conservatives. But it is a shrewd strategic move from what remains the biggest and wiliest political operation in Scotland – and in itself a tacit acknowledgment that the SNP still regards Labour as a serious opponent.

That is wise because – despite sustained humiliations – Scottish Labour remains the only credible, alternative party for Scottish government.

There is no electoral scenario that would see Davidson and her troops anywhere near a majority of Holyrood seats and no other party would be as suicidal as to support the Scottish Tories in coalition or minority government. If it came to it, Labour and the Nationalists would hold their noses and govern together rather than hand Davidson the keys of Bute House.

You might mock this as the lazy Leftist virtue-signalling of this generation of 1980s student union politicians, but we are where we are. And there is, besides, a still bigger reason why the health and wellbeing of Scottish Labour matters.

That is because Scotland is critical to the party’s Westminster operation and any serious prospect of Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister – and, incredible as it would have seemed only a few months ago, that is a very real prospect indeed.

In the last General Election campaign, every last weapon flung at Corbyn failed to work. Much of the electorate is too young to remember the bleak balefulness of Soviet Communism or the sustained atrocities of Irish republicanism.

And most ordinary people have seen – in real terms – their wages fall and their living standards decline even as the spivs and speculators who, nine years ago, blew up our economy continue to do very well for themselves.

There is great anger out there and Corbyn deftly surfs it. His beige, tweedy, faintly self-mocking style seems, too, to appeal to large elements of the public weary of packaged managerialism in politics. We have, meanwhile, a humiliated Prime Minister drifting from week to week whom no one expects to be allowed to lead her party into another General Election, given her proven hopelessness at retail politics.

Yet Mrs May presides still over a divided, squabbling administration and an increasingly nightmarish Brexit process, at the mercy of nations and events. She does so largely because no one else in Cabinet, right now, wants her job and for dread of another General Election that could hand us over to Corbyn, McDonnell, Thornberry, Abbott and the fanatics of Momentum.

Scotland’s Westminster seats are critical to their ambitions, as Damian Lyons Lowe of Survation – the only polling company correctly to predict the General Election result – argued on Tuesday.

Marginal

Labour, Lowe declares, ‘will live or die in Scotland on the basis of how they do versus the SNP. There aren’t any marginal seats in Scotland that don’t involve a Labour versus SNP factor.

‘A 3 per cent swing against Labour will take them back to one seat and a 5 per cent swing to Labour from the SNP would give Labour 28 seats in Scotland. That would take Labour to overall majority territory across the UK. There is a huge opportunity for Labour to gain seats in Scotland but it requires them to win from the SNP.’

Labour strategists are privately a little bitter that the party did not make a stronger recovery in Scotland at the General Election than it did. Certainly it held Edinburgh South with landslide ease and unexpectedly snatched six other seats from the Nationalists. But it could have won even more, had resources been better targeted and had not Kezia Dugdale run a flat, pale Unionist campaign and discouraged Corbyn from showing face in Scotland – and thus, in endless discussion of Indyref 2, keeping the election firmly on turf most favourable to the Tories.

That is a mistake Scottish Labour is unlikely to repeat, whoever succeeds Dugdale: constitutional issues will be marginalised and there will be far more optimistic magic money tree talk for the many, not the few.

There are two reasons for cautious Scottish Labour optimism. The Nationalists have been in power in Scotland for more than a decade. On assorted fronts – health, schools, infrastructure – they are fast running out of excuses and the electorate ultimately falls out of love with any party in protracted government.

It is also difficult for the SNP to make a sustained case for its Westminster reputation.

The last two General Elections in Scotland have been freaky. The Nationalists had hitherto, before and since devolution and even in Holyrood power, struggled for relevance in these campaigns and had typically taken three to half a dozen seats.

And, for all the bold talk of ‘standing up for Scotland’ and ‘holding Westminster’s feet to the fire’, the SNP accomplished nothing of significance – even when it held practically every seat in the country.

It was exceedingly lucky to retain, in June, as many Commons seats as it did.

However, we may yet find ourselves praying for the health and wellbeing of SNP MPs in the months ahead. They could be all that lies between us and a man from Islington determined to turn us into Venezuela.