Editor’s note
Follow me on Twitter @HolyroodMandy Future planning Te UK is in the depressing political situation
Mandy Rhodes
mandy@holyrood.com
L
ater this week Labour will announce its new leader in Scotland. After a seven-month wait, this should be an historic moment when Labour stamps a
distinctive new brand on Scotland. It should herald an exciting new dawn. A time when a vibrant new leader takes over the mantle for being not just Labour’s man or woman in Scotland but Scotland’s leader in Labour. It should reveal a charismatic figurehead with a clear and positive message for Scotland’s future; open a new chapter on left of centre politics in Scotland and rejuvenate a political debate led by an enthusiastic standard-bearer to provide strong and thoughtful opposition and to take full responsibility for all its elected representatives in Holyrood, Westminster, Brussels and the 32 Scottish local councils. Labour needs a cohesive and dynamic figure that can galvanise the party faithful, give direction and be armed with a fully versed brief for taking the party to victory in 2016. But oh, dear, the signs don’t look good. It’s all been a bit of a great, big yawn. I hear the party say they have learnt from the electoral beatings in 2007 and 2011. I hear them say they can offer an alternative and that they can be positive and I hear the rhetoric about a party review, root and branch reform, and an internal restructuring but what I see is more of the same old, same old; the bitterness, the bile and the grievance. Te three candidates are all perfectly good, decent and capable people in their own right but none strike you as being a leader. Tom Harris is the only one brave enough to even mention that he could be the next First Minister. But frankly, can you imagine any of them running the party, never mind the country? Macintosh and Lamont seem strangely gauche; almost apologetic about their own self-promotion. And they all appear resigned to the fact that they don’t really expect to make much of a difference anyway but out of party loyalty and moral responsibility, felt they should at least give it a go. And who can blame them for such a cut-rate approach to leadership?
of record unemployment, a broken economy, near social breakdown; and a dysfunctional government that Labour in opposition down south has categorically failed to make much of a dent on. Ed Miliband was elected leader on the back of his party’s electoral failure and a review of party structures and yet still presents as a leader in waiting. Tis is the man who said Labour would win the Scottish parliamentary elections and would then use it as a testing ground for new policies and vision. He is also the man that up until
“Frankly, can you imagine any of them running the party, never mind the country?”
the end of this week is still the leader of the Labour Party in Scotland and yet what has he done for us? He has certainly been remarkably silent about the defeat in May and absent from the leadership election, other than to rather memorably not be able to name all three contenders. Miliband has been unable to offer any leadership to Scotland because he can’t fill his own leadership boots, never mind advise anyone else how to fill theirs. But the most depressing thing is not just that no natural leader has floated to the top of Scottish Labour but the fact that the party has so consistently failed to think about succession management before now.
Labour has had five leaders in Scotland in the
short space of time that we have had devolution and almost all have been appointed by default rather than being groomed for the job or seen as the next obvious successor. Two of them have run the country in government, one advised the first FM and one is still in place and yet, where are they now in the debate for a new leader for their party? Where is the mentoring, the grooming and the recognition of future talents and ability? Even newly elected MSP Jenny Marra, so keenly touted by some in her own party as one to watch, appears to have fallen into line, carping from the sidelines about issues that while ordinarily important appear parochial and sniping when set in the context of an SNP First Minister glad handing with the global powers of the world, bringing in investment and bold enough to raise human rights without causing offence. Labour in Scotland is still moaning about losing an election, busy rewriting history about whose responsibility that might be and only agreeing on one thing, which is that no matter how big brained, decent and competent they all may say he is, Iain Gray must go. Te most startling thing now is that Gray remains the best of a pretty average bunch.
Labour in Scotland is looking to the next Scottish parliamentary election in 2016 to show how much it has changed yet there is the inconvenience of local council elections, European elections, a Westminster election and an independence referendum, before that and they have already lost nearly a year in terms of trying to sort themselves out and come up with nothing very inspired. Te SNP shook itself down in 2003 and looked at how to make itself electable and that was with a credible leader, a vision and a team which includes succession management should, heaven forbid, Alex Salmond ever fall under that mythical bus. We are about to enter Scotland’s most revolutionary constitutional period and we are looking at a Labour leadership that could be simply blown over in the SNP’s headwind.
Since last time...ordered my organic turkey which is apparently so expensive
because I kind of adopt it before I get to eat it ... my justice correspondent won Feature Writer of the Year ... son delighted that wind closed his school ...
12 December 2011
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