To be elected leader of the Scottish Labour party is to be handed the poisoned chalice of British politics. On Saturday Kezia Dugdale became Scottish Labour’s eighth leader in the 16 years since devolution, defeating Ken Macintosh by a nearly three-to-one margin. The three leaders of the major parties in Scotland are now women, which is something to celebrate. Yet Ms Dugdale should enjoy her victory while she can. For with support for the Scottish National party currently running at 62%, she doesn’t have long to turn things around before the Holyrood elections in May.
There have been many different reasons for the high turnover of Labour leaders in Scotland, including deaths, scandals and defeats. But the three latest contests – those in 2011, in 2014 and now, less than nine months after the last, this one in 2015 – have all been caused by Labour’s inability to staunch the nationalist tide. Labour in Scotland has been so badly pulverised, politically and electorally, by the SNP since 2011 that, in spite of being on the winning side in the independence referendum last year, the party barely knows where to turn. It will require a superhuman effort by Ms Dugdale, as well as a generous helping of luck, to alter that in less than nine months.
It is ironic that as the pressure in Scotland mounts for the party there to become independent of the British Labour party – ridding itself in the process of the self-inflicted “branch office” tag that has done Scottish Labour such damage in nationalist eyes – it is the UK-wide Labour contest to succeed Ed Miliband that has really fired many Scots’ attention. Jeremy Corbyn has been playing to packed and sold-out events in Edinburgh, Glasgow and other Scottish cities of the sort that neither Ms Dugdale nor Mr Macintosh could match.
It is possible a Corbyn win in September will temporarily slow the SNP juggernaut. Yet whether that effect, even if it occurs, would last for long is another matter. As Gordon Brown argued in his powerful speech in London today, if Labour cannot give voters hope that it is an emancipatory force that can govern on their behalf, the voters will walk away from the party. Mr Brown did not say explicitly that this would happen under Mr Corbyn, though he manifestly fears it would. But if a Corbyn UK Labour party were to lose credibility, any putative Corbyn effect in Scotland could be shortlived.
The fundamental problem facing Labour in Scotland is that the SNP has successfully persuaded large numbers of voters that it, rather than Labour, is the party of social justice, nuclear disarmament, anti-austerity, defence of the welfare state and redistribution of wealth. Labour struggles to counter this claim, even though the SNP’s government record is not much to write home about and recent polls show only a third of voters think the SNP government is doing a good job in key policy areas including health, education and the economy. Labour hesitates in part because it fears being drawn into a rhetorical bidding war with Nicola Sturgeon. But it also does so because no Scottish government could actually deliver that kind of social democratic programme within the UK in current circumstances without arguments with London that would stoke separatist feeling. Labour does not wish to do that, and it is right not to do so. Ms Dugdale has an election to fight in nine months, but she must also play a long game.
