Scottish Labour’s calamitous losses in the Holyrood Parliament prompted a swift and welcome response from leader Iain Gray before announced his resignation.
He said the party would work with the governing Scottish National Party on policy areas where they hold common ground, for example the creation of jobs and particularly in addressing youth unemployment.
And Gray promised that Labour would undertake a thorough re-examination of both the direction and structure of the party, starting immediately.
How far Labour is willing to work with the nation’s ruling nationalist majority, and how far it is willing to remake its policies and transform its internal organisation are three questions crucial to its longer-term future.
Without a rethink far more fundamental that Gray probably has in mind, Labour’s long, slow decline in Scotland is sure to continue, threatening increasing obstacles to its ever regaining power north of the border – and, potentially, south of it, too.
Labour’s devolution No-sayers in the 1970s left the party with a fatal legacy, in which much opinion up to now discounts power in Scotland as of secondary importance to the House of Commons.
This was reflected in the leadership’s initial presentation of the Holyrood election as designed to strengthen Labour’s resistance to the coalition at Westminster. The Scottish electorate was perfectly well aware that this election centred on which party could best conduct the fightback against coalition policies as they affect Scotland. And they judged that the SNP was best able to do this.
When Labour switched its theme to opposing an independence referendum and raised all the old alarm bells about “separation,” its fate was sealed. The electorate knew that voting SNP did not mean a vote for independence, but for a plebiscite in which they could have the final say.
The media, as always, focused largely on personalities, the appeal of SNP leader Alex Salmond as opposed to the lack of it in Iain Gray, but there were huge areas of policy where the SNP has been far more in tune with the voters.
Here are a few examples. The SNP will oppose the replacement of the Trident fleet and campaign for nuclear disarmament. It has rejected a new generation of nuclear power stations in Scotland and pledged a massive expansion in renewable energy.
The SNP stood up to the coalition and Scotland’s own university principals in resisting tuition fees and the alternative graduate tax. Scottish students are expected to continue to enjoy free higher education.
The SNP opposed the Private Finance Initiative to fund health and education and will seek to reinstate public sector funding for essential capital projects. The Tory-led Government at Westminster’s marketising of the NHS and education provision will not be replicated in Scotland.
On election night, George Galloway perceptively remarked (before he too headed into sectarian oblivion): “The SNP now looks like Labour used to.”
The SNP is a social democratic party, primarily on the centre left, while at the same time pursuing populist policies of the right, such as the council tax freeze, with which both Labour and the Liberal Democrats have gone along. Salmond will collude in handing over precious Aberdeenshire sand dunes to Donald Trump, while Nicola Sturgeon saves accident and emergency services in Lanarkshire.
Labour’s job in Scotland must be to reinstate its radical principles, leading the way for example, in opposing public services cuts and job losses, and campaigning for social advance. The “too far, too fast” mantra of Labour’s national leadership cuts little ice in Scotland, with its message of slower, lesser pain, while still playing to the free market agenda.
The great Labour founders of Scottish devolution, John Smith and Donald Dewar, had a larger vision of its role than those who saw it simply as a mechanism for negating populist nationalism and a vehicle for the administration of subordinate powers. They, and many with them in other parties, the churches and the unions, had a vision of a progressive consensus working for the nation’s benefit.
Behind them they had the inestimably useful force of the Scottish Labour left, organised in the 1980s and ’90s in the Scottish Labour Action pressure group, whose main aim was to secure, through broad alliances, the return of self-government.
Most of the country’s brightest young political talents were involved, and many subsequently won elections and played key roles in Holyrood and local councils and the trade union movement. Unfortunately, they disbanded as a group once the “claim of right” was won and some, even more unfortunately, succumbed to the lure of New Labour.
Scottish Labour has to reclaim its radical principles. It has to revisit its policies and rid them of Blairite compromises and deviations. It has to cut out the perpetually negative scaremongering, and opposition for opposition’s sake. It has to open doors in the constituency parties to a new generation of fighters for peace and social justice.
