Inside Track Labour Party conference special Scottish Labour Party
Putting the Scottishness into Labour
Jim Murphy and Iain Gray
David Torrance Political commentator
On finding a vision
Jim Murphy’s recent review of the Scottish Labour Party – with its inevitable recommendations about loosening ties with London, embracing devolution and having a more “Scottish” leader – brings to mind the original “Scottish Labour Party”. Not Keir Hardie’s 1888 outfit, but rather the “breakaway” party formed by Jim Sillars in January 1976. It was an ambitious failure: its pitch was to the left of the UK Labour Party and more ostentatiously pro-devolution. But it was undone by Marxist entryism and lack of popular support. Deprived of its two MPs at the 1979 general election, Sillars drifted towards the SNP as did – much later – Alex Neil, the SLP’s research officer and the current Cabinet Secretary for Infrastructure and Capital Investment. But at least the Scottish Labour Party of Sillars and Neil had a raison d’être, a reason to exist, which is more than can be said for the Scottish Labour Party of Iain Gray, Johann Lamont and Ken Macintosh. In fact, since Jack McConnell’s modest ambition to make Scotland the best small country in the world withered on the electoral vine in 2007, it has been difficult to discern the political point of Scottish Labour. It was not always thus. Troughout the 1980s and ‘90s, the party in Scotland was driven forward by the twin aims of social justice and devolution, and very well it served them too, winning election after election and seeing off the Nationalists at every turn. But at some point in the second term of the Scottish Parliament they lost their mojo, yet to be regained. Te SNP is now the party of constitutional change, while the banner of social justice lies unclaimed. Why Labour has failed to grasp the latter is one of the curiosities of Scottish politics. Ironically, it is now Iain Duncan Smith who – for good or ill – makes all the running with creative thinking on welfare reform, derived from, of all places, Glasgow’s peripheral housing schemes. For a party that dominated the second city of the Empire for decades, that is an absurd situation to have found itself in.
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www.holyrood.com 19 September 2011
Beyond social justice, the uncomfortable (at least for some) reality of the 2011 Holyrood election is that all the “Unionist” parties – and above all, Labour – have to equip themselves with a constitutional narrative, and that cannot wait until the weekend before referendum day. Te independence option is clear-cut: the
“Since Jack McConnell’s modest ambition to make Scotland the best small country in the world withered on the electoral vine in 2007, it has been difficult to discern the political point of Scottish Labour”
SNP will urge people to vote ‘yes’, everyone else ‘no’; but it is the second question where salvation lies. Labour ought to be concentrating on shaping, and ultimately winning, that constitutional middle way. In that respect, the party’s MPs at Westminster
have always been a liability. Most of them thought devolution was getting out of hand in 1999, never mind in 2011, and the only way to deal with that is to reward them with little
or no influence over the future direction of the Scottish Labour Party. Sure, the usual suspects will squeal at the prospect of sliding even further down that slippery slope, but what’s the alternative? Smarter Labour MSPs (and ex-MSPs) have long grasped that realpolitik. Te leadership issue is secondary (as it is with the Scottish Conservatives). Yes, it was absurd that Iain Gray was merely the “Leader of the Labour Party in the Scottish Parliament”, but did any voter go into a polling booth seriously doubting that Gray was
anything other than the Scottish party’s leader? I doubt it. Yet Jim Murphy was wise
enough to realise this anomaly had to be dealt with. Embracing ‘devolution-max’, of course, brings
its own problems. As the political philosopher John Gray recently pointed out in the Guardian, Ed Miliband is “dangerously exposed to events”. “Even maximal devolution could trigger a redistribution of seats at Westminster that would leave Labour beached on the margins of politics.” Tat is assuming, however, that
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