Inside Track Labour Party conference special
approach. To scapegoat them would be really unfair and they can’t answer back. We didn’t lose the election because of them but maybe there is an argument that we didn’t have enough staff members.” So with no recriminations necessary, there is only one scalp – Iain Gray’s. Is that fair? “Iain felt scunnered and bruised and I respect his decision to stand down. But Iain is a much more substantial person than that month of the campaign showed him to be. He is intelligent, thoughtful, decent, caring and really passionate when the mood takes him. Te public got Iain after a month of being battered and bruised and at his worst. Te Iain Gray that I know is not the Iain Gray that the public saw but that is life. Te Neil Kinnock that I knew was not the man that we read about in the Sun and for all the belittling of Michael Foot, he was a funny, intelligent, decent human being that believed in things and the caricature of the man in a donkey jacket at the cenotaph is just bullshit, just rubbish. In my view, the people that make these observations are lesser people than the people they are criticising. Was Iain right to resign? Yes. But I would rather he didn’t have to and I would rather he was First Minister or that we had run a better campaign together but we didn’t.” Does he feel that if he had taken more of a lead in the campaign that things may have been different? “If Iain had to run it again he would do it
differently, so you have to test this on whether this is hindsight you are using or foresight. Look, I keep saying, for the Labour Party to win we have to make it a contest between patriotism and nationalism not social democracy and nationalism and we should have done a lot more about that with the flags and the emblems and the iconic sense of Scotland and Scottishness in fashion, food, culture, flag, football and that optimistic sense of patriotism. Let them have nationalism and we’ll have patriotism. Mandy, your running mate [Wendy Alexander] used to say it was a question of socialism vs. nationalism but that is a dead end for us; now it is about articulating a real pride in who we are. “Te SNP managed the trick of taking Labour supporters in the West and picking the pockets of the Tories in the North-east and you don’t win parts of Perthshire by being some kind of Govan proletariat, so the SNP are appealing to something else and it’s not the left/right argument. Tis is quite important because they are not making an appeal on left or right, they are making an appeal on pride and optimism and the sense of belief that there is a better way of doing things and there is no future for the Labour Party if they are the endless realists and absolute practicalists, if there is such a word. Tat can’t be our argument because for enough people it wasn’t too big a leap jumping from Labour or elsewhere to the SNP because the referendum was there as an insurance policy. For some people, it was a choice between two social democrats: one waving a flag, and one without,
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www.holyrood.com 19 September 2011
and we need to start waving the flag more.” Is it about being more Scottish and will his
review result in a distinct Scottish Labour Party or a more enhanced Labour Party in Scotland? “It’s not Labour in Scotland, that’s like a visitor, like someone coming on their holidays. What you will see is a rebirth of the Scottish Labour Party. You can’t come to any other conclusion; it is the genuine creation of a fully devolved Scottish Labour Party. “Te good thing is that while people feel let down collectively by the leadership, me included, they want to give more and they have skills we didn’t use, the vast majority want there to be a clear Scottish leader of the party and they feel annoyed about the three tribes within the party; the MPs, the MSPs and the council tribe. Tat is destructive and has to finish. We need to put that tribalism within the party to one side with MP vs. MSP and councillor vs. MSP and what the review is doing is taking on the three tribes to make it one party.
It’s interesting that Murphy is focused on
trying to eliminate the tribalism that he sees holding back the party given he was in the thick of it at Westminster. On the day we sit down to talk about the review, Alistair Darling is staring at us from the front page of the Guardian, advertising yet another interview exploring further lurid details about the rows and factions at the heart of Downing Street when Murphy was there. “Yes, it all saddens me and, as you say, I was
“There is a lot of work to do but we will get it done and we will give people a good reason to vote for us”
“We can’t afford to continue with the tribalism within the party. So shocking was our defeat that it is no longer about left-wing Labour or right- wing Labour or New Labour or Old Labour, the only people I am against is lazy Labour, that’s it. I want to root out lazy Labour and I want candidates that we are proud of, who have a sense of pride at carrying a flag and that our standard becomes the Scottish flag and that is what we are working on. “We are recommending an awful lot of changes. I think structurally it is bigger than when New Labour was formed. We didn’t lose an election because of our structures but it will help us win again if we have an undisputed top of the ticket who is, beyond doubt, in charge of the strategy, of the campaign, the policies, the tactics, the resources, the team, going on the media, doing the debates and that will be a big advantage and this is the person in charge and while that may be quasi-presidential, that is modern politics – you can bemoan it but it is reality and you have to deal with it. “Sarah and I have done the work but our job is to move things forward and it is up to others to choose if they want to go with it and implement it but we can’t just pretend that structurally the status quo is managing decline and if we continue as we are, we will be having this same discussion straight after the next election. We need to be back being the heavyweight organisation in time for the referendum and then we can go toe to toe with the Nats.”
part of it and I didn’t stop it and that’s a regret. But one of the things about the Labour Party is that it genuinely has people from all sorts of different political philosophies: student socialists, socialism, social democracy, liberalism, relative social libertarianism, economic liberals, social libertarianism, social conservatives, geographies, personalities and so on and that leads to frictions and that kind of friction can be healthy but it became all consuming for a while from 2004 onwards and people, real people, in the Labour Party in 100 years’ time will look back on it and wonder why that was allowed to happen. In 20 years’ time, probably, there will be a sense of embarrassment about it.”
Could that have led to electoral defeat?
“Possibly but we also won elections during that time but yes, some people will see that as a reason for some of the electoral defeats. But in the same way that we didn’t lose in Scotland because of structures, we didn’t lose in the UK because of broken relationships. People looked and asked the question, ‘how will this crowd vs. the other crowd improve my life and my country?’ and they came to the view that it wouldn’t be Labour. So well done to the Tories, they won or at least lost the election less badly than we did, and well done to the Nats, they won. But I think in May we hit the very bottom and I am optimistic about the future for the party in Scotland because the things that contaminated the party in London are not rooted in Scotland, even though Gordon and Alistair are and the political culture and the structure we will put in place following this review would mean it would be impossible in the future for that [contamination] to happen. Tere is a lot of work to do but we will get it done and we will give people a good reason to vote for us and so they can answer that question, ‘why would I vote Labour’…” And so, no clearer about what this new Scottish Labour Party’s vision would be, we return to the question that I posed at the start of the interview, why would I vote Labour? “Because you believe in Scotland,” says
Murphy and without a hint of irony or a nod to the SNP’s election campaign team and its ‘be part of better’ winning slogan, he adds: “And that it can be a better place.”
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