Dear Jim,
It’s now almost a month since you were elected leader of Labour in Scotland. I trust that by now you have been made aware of the task that confronts you. These past four weeks ought to have been spent in seeking wise counsel on why Labour in Scotland has been in relentless freefall for seven years and on finding ways to recover the trust of many of its core supporters. I sense, though, that you have instead been listening too much to some who appear never to have known why many of us once loved this party.
You stated last week that you wanted to reach out to the 190,000 or so Scots who voted yes in the independence referendum but who have never voted for the SNP. The majority of these are men over the age of 40 who live within a 25-mile radius of Glasgow. Well, Jim, here I am; I have never voted for the SNP, I am 51 years of age and I have always lived within 25 miles of Glasgow. I was proud to vote yes. Some have identified this grouping as “Glasgow Man”, a sobriquet that I feel was made for me. Apparently, I can look forward to a visit or a phone call from you or one of your acolytes, so I have bought in some quiche and alfalfa crepes in excited anticipation. This is an ambitious and laudable undertaking and if you manage to pull it off then you will be due some praise. I fear, though, that you will persuade very few of us to vote Labour; it would take several visits and the persuasive wisdom of Solomon to make us return to the way of the red rose. This is a source of great regret to me as the Labour party is still my natural political home.
The conduct of too many Scottish Labour politicians and that of the superannuated fluffers and panderers who attached themselves to the party in the last two years has, quite simply, been lamentable. It will be a long time before many of us are persuaded that it is once more worthy of the name Labour. I understand, too, that you may have hired several of those in the vanguard of the Better Together enterprise. If true, this is depressing indeed. In less than two years, these characters almost blew a 20-point lead for no in the referendum campaign before they were bailed out at the end by the worthless, fag-packet promises of Gordon Brown. This led, in turn, to the Smith Commission, the biggest political confidence trick ever to have been played on the Scottish people. You have also made John McTernan, a formidable political enforcer beside whom Tony Blair looks like a socialist, your chief of staff. It seems that you are on a personal crusade to revive the Blair project in Scotland. I do hope not.
I won’t reprise all of the more wretched examples of this grand betrayal during the independence referendum. But in a spirit of filial goodwill I’ll remind you of the most glaring offences. Labour at the outset had a serious lapse in judgment in opting to share platforms with the Tories to save the union. There was no reason why Labour couldn’t have campaigned alone for a United Kingdom underpinned by the values of social democracy and fairness.
Your own Irn-Bru tour of Scotland certainly added to the gaiety of the proceedings, but some of us would rather have seen you display such passion in campaigning against inequality and multi-deprivation. And, listen up: by holding to this falsehood, you insult many thousands of Labour supporters who voted yes. Some also have condemned as lies Labour claims that the NHS and pensions would be safer in the UK in view of what has occurred since. I’ll settle merely for “false”.
Seven recent opinion polls have put the SNP around 20 points ahead of Labour, which would turn the latter into a party of political wraiths in Scotland. This is hardly surprising in view of the behaviour of Labour since last September. Have you learned nothing? The revelation that, in the last hours of the Smith stitch-up, Labour sabotaged the devolving of the minimum wage to Holyrood was a gross betrayal of its core support.
Since then, in its policy on free school meals, Labour has looked more confused than a drunk man caught relieving himself in public. Iain Gray’s jibe about Nicola Sturgeon and middle-class children was juvenile and tawdry. The gleeful braying of your Holyrood stand-in and her colleagues about the collapse of worldwide oil prices has been as predictable as it has been dishonest. They know and so do you that day one of an independent Scotland would not have occurred for at least another 15 months and that, even without oil, Scotland’s GDP per head is the equivalent of the rest of the UK.
I entreat you, Jim, establish a clear and radical leftwing identity for Labour in Scotland. Here are some suggestions: restore Clause 4 as one of the cornerstones of the party’s philosophy. Of course you couldn’t do this in England, but Glasgow Man would rejoice at its return. Pledge to stop Scotland becoming a police state by bringing our coppers back into the community and out of Stephen House’s private army. End the charitable status of private schools and stop getting hung up about pupil/teacher ratios. Instead, devote your energies to establishing educational enterprise zones in Scotland’s most deprived areas. Embrace the living wage.
Desist from fatuous claims about providing 1,000 more nurses than the SNP would, as contrived a piece of political posturing as I’ve ever seen, and instead work to bring an end to the obscenity of two-tier health provision in this country. Pledge to establish a six-month-long health and inequality symposium, bringing together Scottish, UK and international thinkers in these fields; be ready to fund and embrace their proposals, no matter how radical. I promise you, Jim, this will bear fruit, even if not within either of our lifetimes. Reject the abject, neoliberal doctrine of profit before people that disfigures Westminster politics. Seize back our lost lands, Jim. And listen to me closely: never again curry favour with cartoon, neocon sects such as the Henry Jackson Society.
Yours Aye,
Kevin
