Thirty years on, Labour is stuck with the same old problems

Published on Saturday 5 January 2008 16:54

HISTORY, as we know, has a way of repeating itself. That oldest of lessons is there for all to see at the National Archives in Edinburgh.

Last week, thousands of new documents from 30 years ago were released to the public for the first time. Anyone from the Labour Party who goes along to have a read would surely shudder with the depressing familiarity of it all.

In March 1977, a young Helen Liddell – then general secretary of the Scottish Labour Party – is down in London meeting ministers. It is a month after a bill proposing to introduce devolution for Scotland has been voted down by a Tam Dalyell-led rebellion. She isn't happy. "Helen Liddell said that the Government seemed to be indifferent to devolution apart from the ministers most closely concerned," the minute records.

A few months later, John Smith, Minister of State at the Privy Council Office, is bemoaning the problems of granting the planned-for Scottish Assembly some genuine clout. "John Smith spoke about the difficulties of finding a practical method of revenue raising," the minute records.

Sound familiar? The records aren't finished yet. In a private meeting with SNP leaders at Downing Street, Prime Minister Callaghan is ruminating on the woes Scottish devolution is causing him. "The Prime Minister said that English Labour MPs were getting disillusioned and this was spreading. The Government had got to take growing account of the English dimension."

Scottish Labour complaints about London indifference... Westminster leaders trying to balance the complaints of their English backbenchers with the Scottish question... the seemingly irresolvable complexities of framing a logical devolution settlement – not for nothing does Scottish Labour politics sometimes have a Groundhog Day quality. Pulled this way and that by the competing interests of English and Scottish MPs, local councillors, union leaders and now MSPs, the party still finds itself bewitched by its devolution dilemma.

Labour's internal woes are all the worse at present, as the party is forced to watch Alex Salmond's Nationalists carry all before them. It's fair to say that, as the party stares at the long new year ahead, it is in a state of total depression. The leading Labour figures to whom I have spoken over recent days were characterised only by their complete pessimism about the party; made worse, they feel, by their collective unwillingness to face up to the fundamental problems which they face. Wendy Alexander's inner circle continues to strike a note of defiant optimism, insisting that if – as they hope – the party leader is cleared over her role in the dodgy donation she received from an offshore businessman, she will come out fighting.

But even those sympathetic to her are not encouraged. They do not blame Alexander for the party's woes, although the row over her donations has hardly helped. Instead, they are fearful for the very future of a party whose activist base of councillors and foot soldiers has been decimated. Some of the more candid Labour politicians are frank about how much better the SNP is at the business of government than they ever were.

It all suggests that the SNP will continue to dominate the political agenda in 2008, just as they did last year. Alex Salmond's aides are taking great pleasure in pointing out how far they have moved that agenda onto their ground since last May; pointing, for example, to the fact that all the political parties at Holyrood now appear to believe the Parliament needs stronger powers. Their confidence is justified.

The big question now is whether this dominance will convince more Scots that independence is inevitable. We can all speculate about this – but let's hear again from 1977. The records reveal just how worried civil servants were about devolution. At the Home Office, Sir Arthur Peterson, the permanent under-secretary of state, is recorded as warning that the effect of merely discussing devolution had been "to unbalance a system of government of the United Kingdom to such an extent that many people have become fearful of its continued future."

Most presciently of all, John Herbecq, the second permanent secretary at the department, is recorded declaring: "It may be that devolution, as we tried to warn ministers in 1974, cannot be established on any stable basis and is all too likely to end in separation."

So much for George Robertson's claim that devolution would kill nationalism "stone dead".