The angry recriminations that followed Saturday’s resignation of Johann Lamont as Scottish Labour leader should be a watershed for the party south as well as north of the border. Ms Lamont’s angry accusation that Ed Miliband’s people at Westminster treated Scottish Labour as a branch office was plainly recognised by many of those who have held the job in the past 15 years. She is at least the fourth leader to depart fulminating at the UK party’s disastrous failure to adapt to the altered world created by its own successful introduction of a devolved Scottish parliament. For the sake of its future in Scotland, that must change. And not only for that reason. Labour is promising wider devolution across the UK. It will be at the heart of its manifesto. It will be a hollow offer if the party continues to fail to deliver it for its own people.
The charge that London Labour runs Scotland has dogged the party from the earliest years of devolution. Henry McLeish, Jack McConnell, Wendy Alexander: it is an all too familiar story. The irony is that Ms Lamont’s election by the Scottish party in 2011 was supposed to mark a new beginning. Instead, she was repeatedly crowded out of big decisions, from the bedroom tax and the row over the selection of a candidate in Falkirk to the conduct of the referendum campaign, where she was brutally elbowed out of the limelight. London’s unilateral sacking of her own appointee as general secretary, Ian Price, a fortnight ago, was only the last of many blows. Ms Lamont is not blameless. She has her detractors, not only in Mr Miliband’s office. But this is a question that goes much deeper than matters of personnel, or even the over-cautious, lacklustre referendum campaign where Labour’s southern leaders were perceived to have lined up with the Tories against Scotland. All too clear in the reluctance of major figures, with the notable exception of Donald Dewar, to choose Edinburgh over London, there lies a deep and unwarranted disdain for Holyrood in the UK leadership.
The call for an autonomous, possibly even entirely independent, Scottish Labour party has growing support, not least from a new pressure group, Labour for Scotland, that was launched only last weekend. It must be respected. But time is very tight. The party is seriously threatened by a resurgent SNP that is ahead in the polls and may yet, by parking its tanks on the social democratic lawn, win enough Westminster seats to deprive Labour of a majority next May. Redrafting the party’s constitutional relationship has to be high on the agenda, but the priority must be to choose an effective leader around whom the party can at least try to regroup. Given the bad-tempered relations within the Scottish party as well as between it and London, that in itself presents a serious headache.
There is a young and talented group of Labour MSPs elected in 2011, people such as Kezia Dugdale and Jenny Marra. But they have barely learned the ways of Holyrood. Gordon Brown is said to have acknowledged that he is not the answer. Ms Lamont’s interim successor, Anas Sarwar, is a likely candidate but he too is a Westminster MP. There is support for Jim Murphy, the shadow development secretary who took an admired pro-union campaign out to the country from a drinks crate, but his Blairite past would be used against him. It is, anyway, too soon for names. Whoever it is, they have one critical responsibility: they must represent, persuasively and plausibly, a fresh start for a battered party.
