LABOUR MAY NOT BE DEAD, BUT IT IS DEAF

IF sullen, self-obsession attracted votes, Scottish Labour would have won by a landslide on Thursday night. The party has been telling us they’ve been listening and learning since they first lost a Holyrood election in 2007. The evidence suggests for the ensuing decade they have been listening exclusively to themselves and by doing so have learned nothing.

And this week’s election took that indulgence, that addiction, to a new level.

For three years Scotland endured a referendum campaign on leaving the UK. Thankfully, we voted to stay in Britain (I know YOU know this but I write it for the benefit of the Labour leadership who seem to have missed it).

It has left the country profoundly divided. Even two years on, the wounds cannot yet be called scars as they still lie open.

Their defeat in the referendum did not make the SNP even break stride in their campaign for independence. They held rallies with thousands of Yes supporters to give the mirage of victory. They are gagging for another vote on separation.

So what was the Scottish Labour Party’s strategy to win Thursday’s election?

To ignore almost entirely the defining issue which shapes our political culture. Nothing to see here, just move along. The art of politics is to take your convictions, beliefs and passions and shape them to the needs of the people you are seeking to serve with proper policy which reflects your values and meets the public’s desires.

But Scottish Labour’s approach was a mixture of arrogance and desperation. They would tell us what to be concerned about and not to be so silly in our choice of defining issue.

To summarise, their position was this. Independence? Yes Labour members would be allowed to vote for it. Another referendum? Why not? The Scottish Labour leader even speculated about the circumstances in which she might vote Yes.

Days later Kezia Dugdale then assured us she was against another referendum and wants Scotland to stay in the Union.

GROWN-UP political parties are supposed to have narratives on serious issues, not the plot-turns of a Latin American cable channel soap opera. The lessons the Scottish electorate has been handing out to them over the years may have got louder and louder but Labour has sat at the back of the class whispering to itself.

If this party isn’t dead it is at best profoundly deaf. Illiterate in sign language. Closes its eyes when the public says, ‘read my lips’.

Instead of standing with the majority of Scots who they had asked to vote No, they instead chose to chase those members of the ‘45’ who used to vote Labour but turned to the SNP after voting Yes.

And by doing so they lost hundreds of thousands of voters desperate to vote for a pro-Union party which would be a proper opposition to the inevitable SNP government.

As someone who joined the Labour Party on my 15th birthday and who has had the privilege to serve it and my country in government and opposition, it brought me no pleasure to warn in these pages a few days ago what was going to happen to them in this election – but the serial acts of stupidity leading up to it were too painful to ignore.

Increase taxes to reduce austerity? Austerity is people not having enough money in their pockets. Taking more cash out of their wallets and purses makes it worse not better.

I cannot think of an election in this country won by a party saying they would put taxes up – and for everybody.

And then there was a real first. A party shooting itself in the feet with a fully loaded political non-sequitur.

For some reason – even though the leader and her team back it – they came out against the renewal of Trident.

Holyrood has no power over that particular policy. It wasn’t an election issue until they tried to make it one.

Crucially, Kezia Dugdale asked the people to support her to back a policy they know she doesn’t believe in.

But there was more. Labour would make sure not a job was lost by getting rid of Trident – but had no idea how many jobs rely on its renewal.

If removing Trident is an issue which decides your vote, you already don’t vote Labour.

It was the equivalent of the Church of Scotland announcing it now believes in transubstantiation to try to convert Catholics. It was never going to work.

And opportunities to attack the SNP were missed.

If ever Labour needed a disruptive event to change the path of the election it was in this one.

Labour grandee Brian Wilson provided one when he exposed the Nats’ dodgy deal with China on inward investment. It could have been a running sore to bedevil the SNP.

Yet the student politicians of the Labour leadership spurned the chance to undermine the credibility of Nicola Sturgeon out of either stupidity or arrogance.

After each defeat Labour’s instinct is not to ask, ‘why did we lose?’ or ‘what do the people of Scotland want?’.

Instead, in the worst of Scottish Labour traditions, the first question has usually been: ‘Who can we blame?’

The supposed party of the collective dissolves into a disparate collection of the most self-seeking of individuals. A sacrifice is made and the caravan moves on.

Downhill.

SADLY for them the public is not quite as compelled by the bitter rivalries of Labour men and women who are not even legends in their own living rooms as they are with themselves.

If Scottish Labour is to survive, that can’t happen this time. Yes, she has made mistakes, but Kezia Dugdale is the party’s last chance – if that opportunity has not yet passed them by.

The pointless sacrifices have to stop and instead collective responsibility taken on.

Miss Dugdale must be given the time and space to reform Labour from top to bottom – and that will require unprecedented levels of discipline from her colleagues.

She must be given the same chance to re-invent herself and her party that Nicola Sturgeon was given, when the woman then known as the ‘Nippy Sweetie’ couldn’t even win her own party leadership more than a decade ago. Look where she is now.

The scale of Thursday’s Labour defeat cannot be underestimated. In the battle for second place they were smashed by ruth Davidson’s Conservatives.

Scots said emphatically that not only did they not believe that Labour was up to government, it couldn’t even be an effective opposition. In a passionate speech the morning after the election a clearly drained Miss Dugdale defended her disastrous strategy.

She must think again. Scotland may have turned to the right but you can only get away with saying, ‘the lady’s not for turning’, when you are in government with a majority behind you, not hours after your party’s worst result for more than a century.

Labour needs a new story for Scotland. And it will only be able to craft one if it stops speaking to itself and truly listens to the concerns of Scots.

If not, Thursday night might turn out to be the beginning of the final chapter in the history of a once great party.

The party which has been deaf for a decade might just end up dead.