Leader: Labour's campaign relaunch reveals a leaking ship

Published on Sunday 24 April 2011 16:00

WHEN A political party in the middle of a bad election campaign denies it is staging a re-launch, you can be pretty sure it is doing just that.

So it was with Iain Gray, as the beleaguered leader of Labour in Scotland yesterday sought to take the fight to the Scottish National Party by attacking their plans for independence.

Labour, which has up to now argued that the idea of separating Scotland from the United Kingdom was a distraction, has, in the language of political professionals, finally chosen to "go negative". There can be only one reason for this: as our Scotsman/YouGov polls show, Labour is losing, and losing badly.

It is perfectly reasonable for a political party to seek to point out to the electorate what it believes are its opponent's weaknesses. What is puzzling is that the Labour argument has an echo of the attack spearheaded by Tony Blair in 1999 against the SNP using the slogan that "divorce is an expensive business". As we now know from the diaries of his former spin- doctor Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair and the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown, were exasperated at the lack of bite in the Labour campaign led by Donald Dewar, and they planned a full-frontal attack on nationalism.

It worked at the time but that was then, this is now. We are going into the elections for the fourth Scottish Parliament. We have had four years of a Nationalist government. Times have changed. Labour, it would appear, has not.

In his speech, Mr Gray argued that if Alex Salmond is returned as First Minister his first priority would be separation. Whilst it is undoubtedly true that Mr Salmond wishes to take Scotland to what he politely and unthreateningly calls full sovereignty, a vote for the SNP is only a vote for a referendum on independence. Mr Salmond has avoided saying when, in the next parliament, he would try to call such a vote, which polls show consistently he would lose - only 31 per cent of Scots voters say they would vote yes, against 55 per cent who would vote no, according to YouGov.

In this context Mr Gray's apocalyptic warning seems ill-judged and fails to take into account the fact that voters can find Mr Salmond appealing whilst being against independence.

There was another strange aspect to Mr Gray's speech. In it he argued that it was time for "our Parliament to come of age and to do the job that Labour created it to do, to protect our communities from Tory cuts and Tory policies". If that was the purpose of the Scottish Parliament, what was it doing all those years Labour was in power in Holyrood and Westminster? And whatever happened to the idea that devolution was about the principle of bringing democratic accountability to a stateless nation within the UK?

Like much of Labour's ill-fated campaign, Mr Gray's speech is ill-timed, ill-conceived and, for that reason, is likely to fail to resonate with Scottish voters. Labour's re-launched campaign is already sinking.