Allan Massie: Incompetent architects of their own downfall

AN obvious lack of any aspiration leaves the Labour Party in Scotland on the threshold of another defeat

The indications are that Labour will take another hammering in the council elections and may lose control of Glasgow and even of North Lanarkshire. This would be remarkable if it was surprising, but it isn’t. Some Labour activists may explain it away as the consequence of Jack McConnell’s weak surrender to his Liberal Democrat coalition partners, who demanded that proportional representation replace the first-past-the-post system for local government elections. No doubt there is something in this. Others may regard it as just punishment for the party’s incompetence and corruption in local government and, again, this may well be the case.

Yet the causes of Labour’s decline and fall from its self-proclaimed status as “Scotland’s party” go deeper. They go back to its commitment to devolution, and what followed when the 1997 referendum ensured that there would be a Scottish Parliament.

Labour converted, reluctantly and less than wholeheartedly, to devolution in the 1970s. Some of the party’s devolutionists were sincere, notably John Smith and Donald Dewar. Smith argued that having your legislature in London and the Scottish Office, charged with the administration of Scotland, in Edinburgh was a recipe for “mandarin government”, and that this was a bad thing. Dewar believed that the establishment of a Scottish Parliament would “make for the better governance of Scotland and the United Kingdom”.

Nevertheless it was the rise of the SNP from the Hamilton by-election in 1967 to the election of 11 Nationalist MPs in October 1974, which persuaded Labour to opt for devolution. Jim Callaghan got rid of Harold Wilson’s Secretary of State, Willie Ross, who had contemptuously dismissed the SNP as “Tartan Tories”, but there were Labour MPs who remained opposed to the Devolution Bill – not only Tam Dalyell but also, notably, Robin Cook. Experience of the Thatcher government would persuade Cook to change his mind.

After the 1987 election, Labour’s third defeat in a row, the party committed itself to devolution again, participating in the Constitutional Convention and subscribing to its Claim of Right. The SNP seemed less threatening, but the combination of a Tory government and the Tories’ electoral unpopularity in Scotland gave a new impetus to the case for a Scottish Parliament.

There was talk of Scotland’s “democratic deficit”, though few remarked that this was an argument for independence, not for devolution, since the existence of a devolved parliament in Edinburgh would not prevent major decisions on fiscal and economic matters from being taken by a Tory government that had no majority in Scotland.

The sweeping Labour victory of 1997 caused the democratic deficit to disappear, but left Labour committed to devolution, which now had two purposes: to protect Scotland from any future Tory government and, it was hoped, to satisfy soft-nationalist aspirations, and so dish the SNP.

However, few of the leading members of the Scottish Labour Party opted for Holyrood. Dewar was almost alone in doing so. Gordon Brown, Cook, George Robertson, John Reid, Helen Liddell, and the up-and-coming Alistair Darling all remained in Westminster. It was clear that the Labour team in Edinburgh was a second division outfit.

Having created a Scottish Parliament, there seemed to be little – certainly after the first year or two – that Labour wanted to do with it. It was enough to keep things ticking over. The administration, in coalition with the Lib Dems, was lacklustre, especially after Dewar’s sudden death.

There was no ambition to emulate the reforms in schools, higher education and the health service which the Blair government was embarking on in England. Quite the contrary; the Scottish Executive, dominated by Labour, set its face against them. Constitutional change had been effected so that everything else could remain the same, and the party assumed the Scottish electorate would remain loyal and obedient.

Meanwhile, far from being “buried” by devolution , the SNP was invigorated . In 2007, it became the largest party in the parliament, though with only one seat more than Labour, and formed a minority government which seemed, even to many non-nationalists, agreeably competent.

Scotland remained more or less loyal to Labour in the British general election in 2010, retaining seats though significantly mostly with reduced majorities, but in May last year, the SNP achieved what had been thought impossible: an overall majority at Holyrood. Labour, having run a singularly inept campaign in which its fire was directed at the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition in Westminster, rather than at the SNP, didn’t know what had hit it.

So, it has been a long, drawn-out story of electoral decline. The reason is clear. Labour committed itself to devolution for purely negative reasons: to block the SNP and to remove Tory influence from Scotland. But it had no positive aims, no idea of what it should do creatively in government here. So it had nothing to offer aspirational Scots.

Despite all the pre-referendum talk of “a new Scotland”, Labour was committed only to the preservation of the old Scotland in which it reigned supreme, managing its client state at both national and local level. By the time of last year’s Scottish election, there was no particular reason to vote Labour – and fewer people did so merely from old habit. So, having lost power at Holyrood, Labour finds its support and, therefore, its power, ebbing away at local council level too.

We all know what the SNP is for. We may not like it, but we recognise that it addresses itself to the future and does so optimistically. We may think its prospectus flawed, but at least it has a prospectus to offer. But Labour? What is Labour for? What vision of the future does it have? What hope does it hold out? Unless it finds an answer to these questions, and begins to speak of aspiration, its support will surely continue to seep away, leaving the party confined to its defensive laager.