Brian Monteith: Lamont starting to seem like Salmond nemesis

The stoor of the local council election has now settled and, as everyone but the most partisan activists knew would happen, there have been some unholy political alliances formed in the last week.

In Edinburgh, Labour has baulked at embracing the altogether placid and moderate Conservative councillors and instead is prepared to sup with Steve Cardownie and his devilish SNP brethren. If ever there was a message that the Tories are still the most despised party in Scotland this was it. Are you listening David Cameron?

Forty-odd miles away in Glasgow it is an altogether different world. There, even if the sole Tory had been schooled at Eton and Magdalen, I’m certain Labour would have looked for his minority support to ensure the SNP could not forge the bridgehead it so desperately wanted. Fortunately Labour’s efforts in getting its vote out paid off and it did not need help from anyone.

It is now, during the expected two-year respite before the 2014 referendum, that Labour will seek to build upon last week’s achievements and give itself a platform to regain power at Holyrood, and it hopes, Westminster.

The referendum adds complications, but it also provides opportunities and it will be a canny political strategist in any party that can foresee and plan for the elephant traps and springboards that lie unseen over the horizon.

What is discernible is that at long last Labour has woken up to the reality that it is in opposition, that it has had its Holyrood toy taken away from it, and it now wants it back. It has gone through the bawling and the tantrums, and like any astute parent the electorate simply chose to ignore it. Thus it suffered the mother of all defeats last year.

Now Labour is in contemplative mood and one can expect the electorate will begin to respond favourably, so long as it does not throw the rattle out of the push-chair when provoked by the other children in the kindergarten.

Whether by design or just sheer good fortune, Labour appears to have found some weak spots in the SNP that it is well placed to exploit. I am not the only one who has remarked that while Alex Salmond is a giant among midgets he has always been at risk of succumbing to his own hubris; it was only a matter of time. It is just that it has taken far, far longer than anyone expected, and certainly longer than the electoral cycle.

By choosing to propel Johann Lamont into leadership – a position that no-one expected when she was first sworn in on the Mound in those antiquarian days of 1999 – Labour may have found the Green Kryptonite to the Superman Salmond.

Consider how Labour is now positioning itself. Gone is the appeal beyond its core vote to Scotland’s respectable middle classes through the saintly John Smith. Gone is the confirmation of that approach to the professions through the cerebral wit of the lawyerly Donald Dewar. Gone is the practical town planning managerialism of Henry McLeish. They seem like an age apart, and who can even remember the machine politics of mathematician Jack McConnell, who in the end got his calculations wrong? The time of Wendy Alexander and Iain Gray was a mere interregnum, a hiatus while Labour came to terms with its loss.

Now we have a Labour leader whose sudden glance can switch the lights off, whose bark will make dogs in the street cower and whose persona is the alter ego of those Blair Babes. You would not take a torn pay packet home to her. There is to be no messin’ with Johann Lamont.

This is, of course, what some of us have been crying out for. The horrible retreat into the culture of personality – and let us be honest, the whole question of independence rests on the continuing life expectancy of Salmond – is something that many hoped would eventually be brought to an end.

Innocently, in her anti-hero, sans-celebrity couthiness, Lamont is beginning to look like Salmond’s nemesis, an antidote to all that smiley smugness. It remains to be seen if the First Minister’s ego has over-extended itself, but noises in the SNP are beginning to suggest worries about his judgment.

What we can now expect from Labour is an attempt to play Salmond as a false socialist, a chameleon that plays to the Tory bosses one week while throwing subsidised or “free” bread and circuses to the masses the next.

Any hint of Toryism in the SNP will be exposed. Lower corporation taxes? A real socialist like François Hollande in France is seeking to raise them. Man of the people? Judge Salmond by the friends he keeps, like Rupert Murdoch, Brian Soutar and now Peter de Vink.

In policy issues Labour will, as Simon Pia suggested here last week, look to reaffirm its community-based roots. This is not without its problems, for it is sorely lacking in ideas and despite the revival of the Scottish Fabians it has to tread very carefully.

The SNP has studiously avoided any public sector modernisation, and for good reason: it does not wish to alienate any groups of voters before that crucial referendum. Yet the need for reform of our services is, and has been for the last ten years, the prime requirement and responsibility of Holyrood.

Thanks to reforms that have bypassed Scotland, English schools and hospitals achieve generally better outcomes than their Scottish counterparts, despite having less money spent on them. Will Labour go into an election offering change?

The truth is that there is not a cigarette paper between Lamont and SNP deputy leader Nicola Sturgeon. Their blood is not so much red as crimson, and Labour will also be wary of making public sector enemies.

Shorn of its past loyalty to local councils that it no longer controls, look for Labour attacking the 32 education authorities ranging in size from Clackmannanshire to Glasgow and suggesting fewer education boards with council representation. An offer of extra teaching posts (á la Hollande) will be thrown in to keep the teaching unions sweet.

Ironically then, Labour will remain relatively policy-lite. Instead, Lamont’s celebrity will be her lack of it. A sort of Susan Boyle, but with a face like thunder rather than a voice like one. Let the stair-heid rammy commence. l Brian Monteith is Policy Director of ThinkScotland.org