JOHN MACLEOD

John MacLeod

THE Scottish Labour Party is not pining. It is no more. It has ceased to be. It has kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-party.

In 2010, Labour was driven from power at Westminster, three years after the Scottish brethren were ousted from control at Holyrood – and that was only the beginning of the end for a Caledonian rabble that is now on its fourth leader in five years.

In 2015, Scottish Labour managed somehow to lose 40 of its 41 Westminster seats. It has fallen from power even in Glasgow.

And, at the recent European Parliament poll, the party of Keir Hardie and Ramsay Macdonald, Tom Johnston and Willie Ross and John Smith and Gordon Brown, limped in fifth – fifth – with a derisory 9.3 per cent of the poll.

Yet, still yipping that these were but flesh wounds even as the latest limb was sliced away with a bloody thud, Scottish Labour clung to one brave and tattered banner – utter support for the Union, as a party steeped in the values of internationalism, co-operation and pooled British sovereignty.

Only in March, Richard Leonard – latest leader of Scottish Labour, if scarcely a household name – was adamant. ‘We will not agree to a second independence referendum. There’s no appetite for it. A Labour government... would not agree to a second independence referendum emerging from either the Scottish parliament or from any other quarters. There is no case for a second independence referendum.’

Sleekit

Now if, for its own tactical ends, the national Labour leadership felt this position should now be softened, one would expect much measured, internal party discussion and serious consultation with Scottish Labour colleagues – before announcement was most appropriately made by Leonard.

Instead, Labour’s settled position on an independence referendum was thrown blithely overboard – and Leonard and comrades cut off at the knees – on an Edinburgh stage and early on Tuesday evening and by the sleekit member for Hayes and Harlington.

‘We would not block something like that. We would let the Scottish people decide. That’s democracy,’ purred John McDonnell, a key Jeremy Corbyn lieutenant and a far more substantial figure.

‘There are other views within the party, but that’s our view.’ Even worse, he added, almost casually, ‘The Scottish parliament will come to a considered view... and they will submit that to the government and the English parliament.’

At a stroke, Westminster – the national Parliament of the whole United Kingdom – was traduced as merely an AngloSaxon talking shop.

In scarce a sentence, the tireless Nationalist trope – that Scotland is ruled, badly, by the English – was endorsed by the Shadow Chancellor. And who had evidently quite forgotten the 59 MPs who sit in Westminster for Scottish constituencies – seven of them, since brief 2017 resuscitation, for his own party.

None of this showed respect for them, or regard for the reality that what remains of the Scottish Labour vote is an elderly, working-class and pro-Union rump who could never bring themselves to vote Conservative.

McDonnell was, of course, clumsily trying to flash a bit of ankle at Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP, as silly talk grows of some ‘government of national unity’ in a desperate bid to bring down Boris Johnson and stop Brexit. It’s a topic popular among hysterical diehard Remainers incapable of accepting a democratic decision, who foresee only some sort of howling wasteland Britain of dying diabetics and chlorinated chicken.

But we have only ever had ‘National Governments’ in times of true national emergency, be they the world wars or the Great Depression.

Brexit is no emergency. It is a binary question on which there cannot be compromise. We are either in the European Union or out of it and all the intermediary possibilities – living under EU rules with no say in them – are for the birds. One side must lose if Brexit is to be resolved and, at the moment, our government of national disunity is actually doing rather well.

The alternative – an improbable coalition of Labour and Lib Dems, Tory rebels, nationalists Scottish and Welsh, Independents disgraced or exiled, a single Green MP and Lady Hermon – is but fantasy.

Who would lead it? Even Phil Hammond would not sit under Jeremy Corbyn. Jo Swinson is unlikely to cuddle up on the front bench with Ian Blackford. Kenneth Clarke can scarcely bid to be Prime Minister of an administration which would be backed by half a dozen Tories and the dreadful Anna Soubry could start a fight in an empty house. The local fallout from McDonnell’s extraordinary rewriting of Labour policy seems only to highlight how eerily detached from wider political realities our Scottish leaders are.

It was ‘rank betrayal’, Ruth Davidson stormed, and made evident that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell would ‘sell Scotland down the river if they thought it could give them a sniff of power’.

This from a woman who flatly refuses to back the declared Brexit policy of a new Prime Minister who has just won, hands down, the leadership of her own party.

Respect

Meanwhile, Nicola Sturgeon – who had only just called for ‘some kind of progressive alliance that could lock the Tories out of government’ – hit Twitter to praise McDonnell’s ‘statement of basic democracy’.

The First Minister’s respect for democratic norms must startle the people of Northern Ireland, who have just had policies they abhor forced upon them by the votes of most Nationalist MPs – none of whom anyone in the Six Counties had elected.

The Liberal Democrats yipped piously somewhere and, of course, Richard Leonard came storming out to take John McDonnell apart – which, as was once said of another, must be rather like being savaged by a dead sheep.

‘I met with John,’ he insisted, ‘and I made clear to him that a second independence referendum is unwanted by the people of Scotland and it is unnecessary.

‘The 2014 referendum was a once-in-a-generation vote.’ Yet, afterwards, far from retreating, the Shadow Chancellor yesterday doubled down. He said: ‘What I want is a Labour Government, and let us demonstrate as a Labour Government what we can do to transform people’s lives.

‘And if, after a few years, people want to come back and say they want to test the water on an independence referendum then fair enough. I’m not here to block a democratic exercise by any means...’

Significantly, there was no further comment from Leonard. The party line has changed, and – as always – as decreed by the top.

The party has a long history of contempt for its Scottish outpost. When Jack McConnell applied to become general secretary of Scottish Labour, he had to fly to London for the interview.

Years later, once and twice captaining Scottish Labour through two Scottish parliament elections, he had humbly to attend Downing Street for orders on strategy.

Johann Lamont quit as Scottish Labour leader, in October 2014, after Ed Miliband refused to return her calls. Scottish Labour was being treated ‘like a branch office of London’, she despaired.

It is now little more than a kiosk and it faces – perhaps in a matter of weeks – a general election and, potentially, extinction, even as Corbyn and McDonnell play with their matches by the Union itself.