Alexander: Labour has failed Scotland

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.”