Alexander: Labour has failed Scotland
Douglas Alexander: Blames Scottish Labour for being too negative
DOUGLAS Alexander today issues a damning analysis of Scottish Labour’s performance, saying it has been seen by the public as running “opposition for its own sake”, and failing to set out a clear story on how it would improve Scotland’s social problems.
In a key-note lecture to be delivered this evening, the shadow foreign secretary says the entire party in Scotland must share the blame for complaining “in unspecified ways” about the SNP while doing too little to say how it would improve the country.
He cites the party’s opposition to the SNP’s alcohol minimum pricing policy as a case where Labour was seen to be “unwilling” to rise to the challenge of “making a better Scotland”.
In further blunt assessment of the party’s status, He notes that the SNP’s success has been partly based on the fact that people have judged Alex Salmond’s administration to be “fairly competent” and “broadly aligned to their values”.
To attract people back, he says new faces, from outside the party membership, will be required to lead a revival of Scottish Labour’s fortunes.
The party also has to tackle the “myth” that “if you feel proudly and patriotically Scottish, and are ambitious for Scotland and its potential, you inevitably support the SNP”, he adds.
The comments, to be made in the annual Andrew John Williamson Memorial Lecture at the University of Stirling this evening, mark the most significant assessment yet of Scottish Labour’s devastating defeat to the SNP in May’s elections.
From expecting victory two months prior to the election, the party, led by Iain Gray, crashed to its worst result in nearly a century, losing seven seats. It watched helplessly as the SNP achieved a remarkable majority in the Scottish Parliament.
Mr Alexander, who has spent the past few months preparing tonight’s speech, was the author of the “Divorce is an Expensive Business” campaign that beat the SNP in 1999. However, he will use the lecture to argue that the time when Labour could win an election on such negative messages has long gone.
His opponents in the SNP last night said that Mr Alexander had to shoulder a significant part of the blame, as one of the key figures behind Scottish Labour’s strategy over the post-devolution years.
Writing in The Scotsman today, Mr Alexander declares: “I said after the 1999 election that it was the last time I thought we could run such a campaign and yet it is surely now clear that in the decade that followed, too little was done by my party to tell a story of possibility about Scotland.”
Labour, he argues, must put forward its own vision on how to improve Scottish society, based on its core values of creating a more equal society, based on an aim to build “One Scotland”.
He notes that the SNP has claimed the mantle from Labour as being the party of choice – while Labour has found itself stuck in the past, by repeating out-dated attacks against Thatcherism.
In the article today, he said: “The harsh truth for Labour is that the Nationalists’ victory in May did not derive exclusively from their approach to national identity. It also reflected that those who voted for them judged them fairly competent and broadly aligned with their values in their stewardship of government over the previous four years.”
He adds: “Just as importantly, Labour in opposition was seen as too often concerned only with opposition for its own sake. Too many Scots judged us to have complained in unspecified ways about the SNP’s failure to deliver, without articulating a clear enough alternative story and account of Scotland’s possibilities.”
In the lecture this evening, Mr Alexander points to the example of the SNP’s alcohol crackdown, opposed by Labour, which propose to increase the price of alcohol by putting a unit minimum price on all drink.
He says: “I sense that Labour’s past rejection of the SNP’s proposals, however well justified in terms of the weakness of the specific policy, was judged by some voters as reflecting an unwillingness to tackle heavy drinking and rise to the challenge of making a better Scotland.”
Mr Alexander says that since devolution, his party has failed to chart a course to where it wants to take the country.
He says: “In 1999 we identified what would have been the wrong path for Scotland but thereafter we didn’t do enough to describe the right path by which to achieve a better nation.”
Root and branch reform includes drawing candidates from what he describes as “Labour ‘people’”, drawn from “all walks of life who share our values and who are willing us to be better”.
He concludes: “Just as years ago, New Labour had to dispel the myth that if you were ambitious, had done well, and had got on in life, you inevitably supported the Conservative Party, so now and in the years ahead, Scottish Labour must dispel the myth that if you feel proudly and patriotically Scottish, and are ambitious for Scotland and its potential, you inevitably support the SNP.”
He admits in the lecture that Scottish Labour failed to modernise along with the rest of the country over the last decade, sticking instead to the politics of the “struggle against decline”.
“These changes meant that some of the old Labour ‘hymns’ were increasingly unfamiliar to an audience increasingly without personal knowledge of the tunes,” he says. He goes on: “This comfort in old orthodoxies contributed to the party’s disorientation and vulnerability when we came under attack [from the SNP].”
Mr Alexander also claims the SNP has stuck with “Mandelsonian discipline” to the line that ‘London Labour’ does not have the interests of Scotland at heart.
“It is spin designed to disqualify and delegitimise a broad swathe of Scottish opinion that does not share its agenda.”
An SNP spokesman said: “Douglas Alexander is undoubtedly correct in his analysis of where Labour went wrong – basically the more negative they went on the SNP, the worse they did – but he has to take a large share of the responsibility. In 1999, in the first Holyrood election, it was Douglas Alexander who said Labour’s job in Scotland was to ‘engender fear’.
“Their problem is, apart from being the anti-SNP party, Labour don’t actually stand for anything positive anymore.”
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Comments
There are 258 comments to this article
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Mikey von Ruden
Saturday, November 12, 2011 at 01:36 PM"Labour has failed Scotland" - then there is simply no viable reason for the Westminster, Labour Unionist party to interfere in Scottish affairs again!
VOTE YES
Sunday, October 16, 2011 at 08:35 AMLabour has failed Labour has failed voters has failed its principals has failed social democracy has failed standards of moralty has failed Scotland has failed...
VOTE YES
Sunday, October 16, 2011 at 08:32 AMScotland vs England: subsidies and benefits Old people Scotland: Free personal care for all residents of nursing homes. England: Proposal that anyone with assets worth £35,000 should pay all the costs of their care. University tuition fees Scotland: Free – to Scottish students. Holyrood abolished £1,000-per-year tuition fees. England: Students pay tuition and top-up fees of up to £9,000 a year – and English students at Scottish universities are charged £1,800 for tuition. Education maintenance allowances Scotland: Up to £30 a week England: £0 Prescription charges Scotland: Prescription drugs free for the chronically ill from next April. Expected to be free for everyone within four years. England: £6.85 per item Health checks Scotland: Free dental checks and free eye tests for all. England: Standard charge of £17 for dental check-ups; eye tests cost £18.85. Transport Scotland Over-60s travel free on buses; 16- to 18-year-olds get a third off. England: Off-peak journeys free for over-60s and schoolchildren. Heating for elderly Scotland: Central heating installed for all pensioners; England: Grants available for those on pension credits. School dinners Scotland: Free in the first three years of primary school. England: Poorer children qualify for free meals – but this applies to only 16 per cent of pupils. SNP government actually doing the left-wing things that help society.
BitterSwiftysweet
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 08:44 PMNOT ANTI WALL-STREET PROTESTS AT ALL, BUT INSTEAD RACIALLY MOTIVATED AGAINST WHITES THEY WERE MURDERING YOU WITH AND INSIDE OF THEIR CORPORATIONS FOR OVER 66 YEARS !!! THEY HAVE CLOSED DOWN ALMOST EVERY SMALL COMPANY IN UNITES STATES OF AMERICA AND NOW, THEY WANT YOU TO GO OUT THERE AND PROTEST FOR THEM AGAINST WALL STREET(corporations = Wall-street) !!! FOR ENTIRE 66 YEARS, ON DAY TO DAY BASES, ALL THEY WERE DOING IS CRIME CONTEMPLATING AGAINST US INSIDE OF THEIR BACK OFFICE CUBICLES(on job torturebullyingmobbing and forceful unemployment to progress humanity as Obama exclaimed over and over) PER EEOC AND NOW, THEY WANT YOU TO RAISE COMMUNIST FLAG UNDER AMERICAN SKY !!! ONE RACE; RAT RACE(Wall street protesters = Obama's raise of the planet Apes army which spread from London per Zionist Washington DC and communist Moscow) !! WHEN YOU PROTEST(it is much more than just than necessarily), RAISE SIGNS WHERE DISPLAYED "66 YEARS OF GENOCIDE AGAINST WHITES IS NO LONGER ACCEPTABLE !!!" AND GIVE THEM MY NAME(am not "anonymous" for sake of communistzionist governments any more) !!! GOOGLE ANY PORTION OF : "MULTICULTURALISM = TERRORISM !! OBAMA = OSAMA !!!" http:stateofterror.blogspot.com OR ALL NEW “OBAMA = STALIN = BUSH or USA = SOVIET UNION” http:avsecbostjan.blogspot.com
freedomlander
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 12:07 PMI Am Off To Newsnet
Tartancult
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 01:31 AM# 245 Tartancult: Sometimes you are quite funny but hey you dont spell kilt cult that's just the way it's pronounced. Up yer cult I have a tartan kilt and everyone in my gang has a tartan kilt, we worship idols and brainwash newcomers which makes us a cult, ergo Tartancult..
ScottyAbroad
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 12:53 AM251 comments, and very few are actually about the story! WTF are you people doing? Worrying about paragraphs, fussing about characters that you can and cannot use. For goodness sake, use the site to have a debate. That's what it's for! All I can say is that you are VERY, very sad people! You should get a life, really. Now let's have some intelligent discussion about the real issues, eh?.... Cheers. Scotty.
Vino Tinto
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 12:01 AM246 Moniker Lewinsky Craig Murray reckons it's worse than the Kristine Keeler affair. ............................................................................................................... Oh dear gotta go it's midnight! ............................................................................................................... Cheerio!
Vino Tinto
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 11:55 PMThe moniker Cynicus Unbound should be available as I've rejected it. ............................................................................................................... New paragraph.
Vino Tinto
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 11:53 PM248 Cynicus ............................................................................................................... I see you have many monikers. I was Cynicus Unbound earlier today just for a laugh. I just wanted to wind you up! ............................................................................................................... Do you have any other monikers? ............................................................................................................... New paragraph.
Cynicus
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 11:28 PM"Are Cynicus & Cynicus in Exile the same person or is one a fake?"-200, Tartancult is out to get me!________________________________________________________________________________________________ Both genuine The fake, imposter and identity thief (at least for now) is Cynicus Unbound. _______________________________________________ OK?
Cynicus in Exile
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 11:25 PM"Are Cynicus & Cynicus in Exile the same person or is one a fake?"-200, Tartancult is out to get me!________________________________________________________________________________________________ Both genuine The fake, imposter and identity thief (at least for now) is Cynicus Unbound. _______________________________________________
Moniker Lewinsky
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 10:46 PMAnyway in the other papers Fox is getting done in, with a strange pincer movement between the Grauniad & the Torygraph. They have both got stories about him which make him toast - & if you want the real skinny on Fox - read Craig Murray's blog. Seriously, this govt are so so bad. Any criticism of the SNP pales in comparison, the UK govt are beyond the pale, & are selling every single one of us out to the banks & foreign governments.
Vino Tinto
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 10:36 PM244 WTF ............................................................................................................... Then we'll have to sort out the forward slash muncher. I was going to post a link to the talking cat on You Tube but it's too much hassle. ............................................................................................................... For paragraphs I'm sticking with my 110 dots. ............................................................................................................... Tartancult: Sometimes you are quite funny but hey you dont spell kilt cult that's just the way it's pronounced. Up yer cult!
WTF was wrong with my old name?
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 10:28 PMI vow never to bathe, Shave, or change my socks, until the paragraph munching monster has been slain.
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