When the Green party tells us with a straight face that it believes it can become the second force in Scottish politics after next year’s Holyrood elections, the scale of Labour’s decline becomes clear. To put it in perspective, though, even the Taliban would fancy their chances, such has been the speed of Labour’s evisceration in Scotland. Meanwhile, the Scottish Tories have become intoxicated by the prospect of a resurrection fortified by little more than the fact that no one seems to have a bad word to say about Ruth Davidson, their cheerful and pawky leader.
There she was on Have I Got News For You last weekend laughing through the gentle barbs of Ian Hislop and Paul Merton who had obviously decided to go easy on this jolly decent Scottish lass. This week, she will be the subject of one of those “intimate” radio one to ones in which she will pause and choke a little while saying nice things about her mum and dad and talk of how the death of the family cat in her childhood had a profound effect on her understanding of life and death. Expect her soon to be choosing Beethoven and Girls Aloud on Desert Island Discs.
The optimistic noises coming from two parties whose role in Scottish life thankfully has merely been to hold the jaikets shouldn’t concern Scottish Labour’s new leader, Kezia Dugdale, too much, nor should she allow it to sidetrack her from achieving her only goal at the Scottish election: to prevent the SNP gaining a second successive overall majority. Today in Perth, at the end of her first Scottish party political conference as leader, she is entitled to think that she has come through as tough an introduction to this job as anyone could have imagined.
No Scottish Labour leader has ever previously come to the job with the party in such a reduced and abject state. In the space of eight years, the party, which had always regarded Scotland as its fiefdom, has now been cast out and sent into political exile. First, it lost Scotland and now Scotland pretends not to recognise it, crossing by on the other side of the street as if she has just glimpsed the sad, drunken neighbour from number 64.
Nor has Dugdale been helped by becoming leader during an absurdly distended four-year cycle of elections and referendums; of hoopla and alarums, which make it almost impossible for the country to settle down and have a quiet word with itself. In these circumstances, the writ of normal politics – of passing laws, quietly improving people’s lives and culling small injustices – is swamped by loud-hailer politics, of bluster and grandiloquence, of gesture and sweeping statements. This is what the SNP, with its fur coats and no knickers approach to politics, specialises in. The Labour party in Scotland, though, needs it like a shite in a shoe.
But this is the hand Dugdale has been dealt and she must simply get on with making the most of it. So far, it seems, she’s been making a decent fist of things; that is if you can hear her above the din and tumult of the nationalist legions and their 55 SNP cohorts who, by all accounts, are making the most of their once-in-a-lifetime bus run to Westminster. This is the perpetual white noise of Scottish politics where the outcome appears to be settled and the shouting is about whether you are merely a unionist lickspittle or a vile unionist lickspittle. When she addressed a full meeting of the Westminster parliamentary Labour party last Monday to tell them of her plans to secure more autonomy for the party in Scotland, she was deemed to have performed well. Ian Austin, the MP for Dudley North, said that Dugdale had performed “brilliantly”. And though Stephen Pound, the MP for Ealing North, criticised the proposals in an attempt to see that rare thing – his name in the papers – he was scorned by one senior observer there who told me: “Pound just sat there muttering under his breath and making schoolboy jokes.” When she warned them that Scotland was a glimpse of their future if they didn’t address complacency and that Ukip in the north of England could easily become their SNP, there was widespread agreement.
Dugdale has also quietly been making the rounds of the unions, big and small, and is beginning to make a positive impression, something that was beyond her two immediate predecessors. Indeed, her meeting with Len McCluskey, general secretary of the powerful Unite union, was described as “very good”. “There was a rapport there and they liked each other, although they were not in complete agreement about everything,” my source said. McCluskey, it was, who drove the final nail into Jim Murphy’s coffin as his short-lived leadership began to fail, although it was felt that the activities and influence of John McTernan as adviser was beginning to antagonise McCluskey and other senior figures in the movement, both left and right.
It’s clear that Dugdale and Jeremy Corbyn have the sort of relationship that Nicola Sturgeon once had a long time ago with Alex Salmond, according to SNP insiders. So she has already amassed a personal war chest that her predecessors could only dream of: an excellent working relationship with a leader who “gets” Scotland, approval by the unions and a growing respect within the party in both Holyrood and Westminster. Now all she needs is policies. The one that will be unveiled today is a small step in solving the attainment gap in education which, after eight years in office, has been beyond the abilities of the SNP.
Labour will propose a fair-start fund under which a cash sum for all pupils entitled to a free school meal will go directly to the headteacher for the purpose of closing the attainment gap. The initiative carries obvious benefits for schools in less advantaged areas, but it also has a degree of innovation and creativity, which has thus far been lacking in the SNP’s education solutions.
The problem for Dugdale, though, is that she needs a few more of them, not to mention a few more people of the calibre to deliver them successfully.
