Analysis: The road to recovery is going to be a tough one

Published on Monday 16 May 2011 19:28

After the perfect storm, the damage assessment is the easy part. The challenges for Labour's review lie in the clean-up and future prevention.

The problem here is that 5 May wasn't just an unfortunate political accident.

The carefully (Labour-built) flood defences of the Holyrood electoral system were overwhelmed, not by a freak wave but by political climate change.

Only if the review recognises this does the party have any real hope of long-term recovery.

The signs are not especially good.

The temptation to take refuge in comfortable but misguided diagnoses is strong at times like this.

Yes, Labour's vote fell only by a tiny percentage between 2007 and 2011. But statistics, as someone once said, are just like people: torture them enough and they'll say whatever you want them to.

The other numbers are more telling: 27 seats lost, and, with them, some of Labour's biggest beasts. And, of course, the SNP snug in government for the next five years with its own nine-seat majority.

It would be just as dangerous to underestimate the permanence of what's happening.

Yes, there was a Salmond factor, but even without him, the game doesn't really change.

For one thing, while "Team Scotland" may be a peculiarly annoying term, this SNP line-up isn't going to collapse in the absence of the man himself.

But, in reality, the problems for Labour far transcend personalities, whether the SNP's or their own.

Any review has to accept some hard truths.

Election day saw the belated arrival in Scotland of what analysts call partisan dealignment - or the end of the tribal vote.

This phenomenon changed UK politics via England's voting habits long ago.

This gave us first of all Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and then Tony Blair in 1997.

Now, in Scotland, there's no longer such a thing as a Labour "heartland" (or a Liberal Democrat one either, for that matter).

Votes have to be won, not harvested, and the SNP's rampage through the Central Belt shows Labour's failure to properly grasp this.

Scotland's natural slant towards the centre-left remains, but now there's a choice about how it can be expressed electorally.

In this regard, Labour's raising of the separatist scare merely insulted the intelligence of the electorate.

Difficult as these truths may be for Labour - how much more so is the next stage: formulating a recovery plan in the light of them?

• Norrie MacQueen is senior lecturer in politics at the University of Dundee.