Labour, the patsies in a Nationalist pantomime
IT is difficult to remember now, but the Scottish Labour Party was actually on the winning side in the 2014 referendum on independence. In fact, beforehand they were seen as pivotal in that victory. I know. I was there working for them and Better Together at the time.
But since the day after victory, the Scottish Labour Party has seemed defeated on the constitution.
One of its longest serving leaders, Kezia Dugdale, flirted with the idea of a second independence referendum and it is even claimed she once told Nicola Sturgeon she supported independence.
Ms Dugdale earns the ‘longserving’ title because her 24 months in post positively dwarfs the nine months of Wendy Alexander and the six of Jim Murphy.
Her stance helped the Labour Party make electoral history, moving them from second to third in successive Scottish elections.
She tried to ‘out-Nat the Nats’ in a country that had decisively rejected the idea of independence. A strategy so clever that on the spectrum of cleverness it appeared to be almost stupid.
Another leader change – to Richard Leonard – and yet the strategy seems to remain.
This week Scottish Labour voted with the SNP to declare that there was a constitutional crisis over Brexit and authenticated the Nats’ claims of a ‘power grab’.
Endorsing the world view of your most deadly electoral rivals is a curious position for a political party to adopt. It could, of course, have been done out of principle. I suspect it was done out of fear and error.
If they had lifted the phone to their Welsh Labour Party colleagues, they could have asked why they had come to agreement with the UK Government on Brexit. Why they called the ‘power grab’ off.
They might have been told that the Welsh Government agreed with a position first advocated by the SNP. One that might even have been suggested by the SNP’s Brexit minister, Mike Russell. Why Welsh Labour was not selling out on principle.
They could have offered counter proposals to share powers with the rest of the UK. Better still abstained. Refused to be patsies in a SNP pantomime. Maybe even boycotted the debate and instead demonstrated against any one of the Scottish Government’s many failings, from health to education to the economy. But instead they fell into the SNP’s hackneyed trap.
Call a vote they claim is a test of Scottishness and dare the Labour Party not to support them.
Instead they voted with this country’s failing administration and gave Nicola Sturgeon the free pass to say that even the Labour Party agreed with her.
All of this thinking – or lack of it – goes back to the day after the 2014 referendum when the Scottish Labour Party snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
With traditional Labour areas such as Glasgow and North Lanarkshire voting Yes there was selfinterested panic among elected politicians from those areas. The need for analysis was swamped by the desire to blame. The failing, they decided, had been for the Scottish Labour Party not to run its own campaign but to throw their lot in with the Tories, LibDems and others in Better Together. There are many reasons why that thinking is lazy and wrong. The Labour Party had neither the money nor the organisation to run its own campaign. The most damaging thing for Labour entering into that coalition was that it exposed to political opponents that there was no such thing as the mythical ‘Labour machine’. There may have been a few people clicking the heels of their red shoes together but at the end of the yellow brick road there were surprisingly few campaigning wizards, just some charlatans hiding behind green curtains.
Many traditional Labour voters voted Yes because they thought they had nothing to lose. What the Scottish Labour Party should worry about is the political journey many of them have taken since.
THERE is the phenomena – not widespread but significant – of people who had voted Labour all their life, then voted Yes, then voted SNP and who, now they have decided they were mistaken on independence, have not returned to Labour but instead vote Conservative to back the Union.
If that hadn’t happened in seats such as Glasgow East at the last general election, Labour would have won the seat rather than lost it by a measly 75 votes.
But when the SNP whistles ‘patriotism’, the Scottish Labour Party dances. Unable to define what they are, they are visceral in declaring what they are not – Tories.
That was spotted some time ago. But they overreact to any taunt or insult that the Nats throw at them.
With the SNP likely to lose seats at the next Scottish election and the possibility of the Tories becoming the biggest single party, senior Labour figures are understood to already be discussing how they would prop up the SNP to keep Ruth Davidson out of government.
Vote Richard Leonard and get Nicola – or her successor – will not be an asset to the Labour campaign. Holding hands with their political executioners won’t save them from the chop.
It is time the Scottish Labour Party stopped falling into SNP traps and set up a few of their own.
To decide who they are and not define themselves by what they are not.