Scottish Labour still in denial after fall from grace

Published on Thursday 27 March 2008 21:04

Party is doomed to further defeats unless members stop believing they have a divine right to rule

THE Scottish Labour Party that meets this weekend is confused and unhappy. This is a party with a rich history, which has contributed significantly to Scottish public life. In the past few years, things have not been going well. It experienced its first taste of defeat in two generations in last year's Holyrood elections and since then things have gone from bad to worse. The leaderships of Gordon Brown and Wendy Alexander have failed to make the political weather and instead have seen the party north and south of the Border retreat further and become less sure of its mission and purpose.

Scottish Labour has always been a strange beast and a difficult entity for outsiders to understand. It has consistently chosen to believe its own myth and folklore. This party likes to believe it is different from British Labour and the other Scottish parties.

This myth and folklore has allowed Scottish Labour members to tell a story to themselves. First, Scottish Labour has seen itself as "the people's party", speaking for and representing the people. The party never lost touch with or abandoned the people or was left by the people – unlike Labour down south in the 1980s.

As any number-cruncher knows, Scottish Labour has never won a majority of the vote, and in the 1980s and 1990s it regularly won between 39 and 42 per cent of the popular vote – broadly the sort of vote Margaret Thatcher won across the UK. Like Thatcher, Scottish Labour was rewarded with a parliamentary landslide due to the divided nature of the opposition. And, like Thatcher, Scottish Labour mistook this parliamentary strength as a statement of its real strength: something which came home to roost with both of them. Second, it has for long believed it was a radical party. This is in part about its past – Keir Hardie, Red Clydeside – but it has also been about a sense of a deeper connection with the trade union movement and a sense that a working-class sensibility anchored and informed the party.

Therefore, this was not some armchair radicalism, but a politics informed by the centrality of economic and social issues, rather than middle-class lifestyle issues or grand gestures. Scottish Labour was a champion of "economic prosperity and social justice", not the kind of issues beloved of Guardian readers such as constitutional reform.

Third, this was a party which believed in the idea of good authority, liberating people from poverty and offering a lifting hand to working people. Labour councils in the 1930s and 1940s made this nation a better place for millions of Scots, but as society changed and aspirations evolved this paternalist, "city father" knows best approach found it impossible to evolve.

This all leaves Scottish Labour in a state of denial. Having been the political establishment for the past 50 years, Labour has fallen for its own hype and chosen to believe it has a divine right to rule.

When you look at the faces of the Scottish Labour benches in Holyrood since last year, you see a party struggling to accept reality. Labour MSPs sit ashen-faced, by turns angry or despondent, looking over to the SNP sitting in the government benches and thinking that they are sitting in what are "their seats by right". The party has become the embodiment of "the Scottish tut". This is centred on the belief that you have the right to tell strangers off, go in the huff and throw your weight about to get your own way. In short, this is the equivalent of a middle-aged tantrum.

This approach is counter-productive, to put it mildly, and revealing of the party's attitudes to the Nationalists. Labour has no coherent strategy for working in opposition because it has been in power so long. Parliamentary arithmetic calls on Labour to develop a nuanced strategy of co-operation and measured opposition to the SNP, but Labour cannot get past its tribal detestation of the Nationalists. Thus, every week we get Alexander, going on about SNP "broken promises".

The most serious challenge facing Scottish Labour is even deeper than coming to terms with the SNP: namely, what is its purpose? When in office it became apparent under Jack McConnell that the main purpose of Scottish Labour was to remain in power. This is no longer an option. What should Scottish Labour stand for? We know that old-fashioned labourism and patronage are no longer enough; Alexander marketisation and neo-liberalism with a smiling face increasingly leaves Labour members, let alone the wider public, cold.

To begin with, any Labour renewal has to start by the party telling itself some uncomfortable home truths. This will be difficult, for it will involve the party having to challenge some of its most sacred myths and folklores about it being the popular, radical party of its dreams. Scottish Labour still seems far from that cathartic moment. UK Labour reached it when the party faced its second rejection by voters in the 1983 landslide, and most elements of the party are still wrapped up in self-delusion and self-denial.

As things stand, Scottish Labour looks set to embrace the logic of Labour in 1983: that it will take a second defeat for the party to wake up and smell the coffee. The party can take succour from the fact that it is doing everything in its power to head to that second defeat.

&#149 Gerry Hassan's books include After Blair: Politics After the New Labour Decade (L&W) and The Scottish Labour Party: History, Institutions and Ideas (EUP).