There have been many staging posts in Scottish Labour’s descent into political oblivion. The journey only really picked up speed, though, during the first independence referendum campaign, when it grotesquely misjudged the instincts of many of its core supporters who favoured self-determination while remaining loyal to the party.
These men and women, many of them activists, began to face harassment and intimidation within their constituency parties for declaring an interest in voting Yes. As Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown and Jim Murphy increasingly aligned themselves with Tory opponents of independence during the campaign, the fate of Labour in Scotland was sealed and the migration of thousands of its supporters to the SNP soon followed.
However, this only partly explains why the party in Scotland now has fewer customers than a vegan restaurant in Texas. Another contributory factor has been its wretched attempts to construct a valid critique of Scottish independence that isn’t at odds with its sacred commitment to social justice. This required authentic leadership reinforced by sound intellectual and philosophical principles. In other words, they needed to be clever, a wee bit canny and street smart. Instead, they were clumsy, lazy and incoherent. They took short-cuts and indulged in shallow sloganeering rather than deploy rigour.
It was a massive missed opportunity for the party in Scotland. The referendum campaign offered the SNP a chance to widen its appeal by plugging into a crackling current of civic engagement that electrified the country.
Labour could have done that, too. It could have reminded Scottish working-class voters that their real enemies were the pursuit of capital, embedded and unearned privilege. Its campaign could have been a celebration of socialism and universalism; of finding solidarity with all those around the world who have been dehumanised and disinherited by capitalism and the worship of the market as the one, true, holy and indivisible force in the modern world.
It could have boldly and unequivocally reclaimed its heritage, built around trade unionism and the nobility of work in exchange for a fair wage, a decent home and the sacred truth that all men and women were created equally. All of these are more important than the constitutional future of Scotland. And if the working people of Scotland had stated that independence was the best way of pursuing these, then so be it. The party in Scotland would simply have had to ensure it was ready to meet the challenge of neoliberalism in an independent state and to be the flag-bearers of social justice.
I’ve remained curious as to why Labour in Scotland failed sufficiently to advance these arguments during the referendum. Almost immediately after September 2014, Darling, Brown and other Labour luminaries such as Gregg McClymont and Douglas Alexander all accepted jobs with assorted firms and enterprises whose core business is to protect the interests of unfettered capitalism.
And so Labour in Scotland took the easy path and the one that has led to its virtual annihilation. Their favourite trope is that referendums are “divisive”. Indeed, to listen to the Labour MSP James Kelly at Holyrood last week, you were left to wonder why UN peacekeepers hadn’t been brought in to monitor the last one. Kelly said that it was a thoroughly nasty and “divisive” experience, with people being “chased up and down streets”. The Electoral Reform Society, which monitored the referendum to the satisfaction of all parties, begged to differ. The referendum, it stated, provided a gold standard of civic engagement.
Kelly is a close cousin of mine and has grown well into his important and influential brief of business manager for Labour in Scotland. The way that his party has conducted itself over these last few weeks has been astonishing. To oppose Scottish independence on the grounds that universal global justice is more important is a valid position to hold; to oppose the right of the people of Scotland merely to choose is a betrayal of its own guiding principles.
Another theme favoured by Labour is that recent opinion polls consistently show that a majority of Scots don’t want a second referendum. This is palpably untrue. Even if it was, is the party suggesting that opinion polls trump the mandate of successive SNP victories in the Westminster election of 2015 and Holyrood in 2016? The unreliability of opinion polls was manifest in the election of Donald Trump and the outcome of the EU referendum.
It seems that the manifesto of Labour in Scotland is being written by Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Tories. In the last referendum, another Labour mantra was that, while the country was engrossed in the constitution, everyday government was being put “on pause”. The Lord only knows what will happen to issues at home while the UK government is trying to negotiate favourable trade deals with 27 nations across the EU. There was no identifiable lapse in the government of Scotland during the last independence campaign and there is nothing to suggest that such will be the case for the next one, which would be significantly shorter in duration.
Yet, the SNP remains deeply vulnerable on its home flank. The attainment gap between Scottish schools in affluent and disadvantaged communities is a national scandal. The NHS in Scotland is bogged down in managerialism and a reactionary instinct, where task forces are sent in to help failing health boards in the hope that the public will forget to ask what they ever achieved.
Meanwhile, it was revealed last week that targets for cancer treatment waiting times were missed. The Scottish government has also failed adequately to answer why the new Forth Bridge at Queensferry has been delayed again (it’s now nine months in total). First of all, it was inclement weather and now it’s “high winds”. Note to Keith Brown: this is Scotland we’re living in, not Zambia. To echo one correspondent in The Glasgow Herald: “Stop taking us for idiots and treating us with contempt.”
Such then are the everyday problems of governing Scotland. The problem for Scottish Labour, which ought to be feasting on this, is that by dancing to the Tories’ tune in opposing a referendum it has renounced the right to speak for working-class communities.
