Eddie Barnes: Leading question for Labour

Little-known outside party circles, condemned as B-listers by their critics, three candidates are fighting it out to succeed Iain Gray as leader of the opposition at Holyrood. Our Political Editor sizes up their challenges

AT THE Scottish Politician of the Year Awards ceremony in Edinburgh’s Prestonfield House last week, the hosts played a video montage of the year’s events on a large screen, with appropriate music played as an accompaniment. For Ruth Davidson, the new leader of the Scottish Tories and kickboxing aficionado, the tune was Kung-Fu Fighting. When a clip appeared of the three contenders for the Scottish Labour leadership job, the director’s choice drew some sly laughs: The Who’s Who Are You?

Davidson’s election almost two weeks ago for the Conservatives has been the box office draw this autumn at Holyrood, following an acrimonious campaign. By contrast, the more important contest to become leader of the Scottish Parliament’s main opposition party has been a side-show. It has meant that those contenders – Johann Lamont, Ken Macintosh and Tom Harris – have not received the kind of attention they might have expected. With the Tory race now over, however, the candidates have six weeks of uninterrupted campaigning to convince party representatives, members and union affiliates that they are fit for the job. It is not just the crowded news schedule that has ensured the threesome are not yet household names. Neither Lamont nor Macintosh nor Harris come to the contest with the kind of profile that assures them recognition on the street.

So far most of the questions about the campaign have been about why two Scottish Labour politicians who are known – Douglas Alexander and Jim Murphy – aren’t going for the job. Inevitably, just a few months after Scottish Labour was hammered by the SNP after being portrayed as a B-team up against Alex Salmond’s group of A-listers, the same warnings are now being made about the three people who aim to succeed Iain Gray.

The matter is given added relevance this time round because, whoever wins, becomes the de facto head at the Scottish Parliament of the campaign against independence. Psephologists reckon that the pro-Union camp can rely pretty solidly on Liberal Democrat and Conservative identifying voters in Scotland. Not so with Labour voters, who may be persuaded to back secession come referendum day if they see the SNP representing their values, rather than Labour. It puts a heavy responsibility on the three unknown candidates. Are any of them up to the job?

Scottish Labour has had a summer and autumnof agonising after its spring of despair. In 2007, after losing the election to the SNP by one seat, the sense was that the party had done pretty well to come so close to winning, in the face of a well-resourced and well-organised Nationalist campaign.

The unexpected scale of the 2011 loss, when previously staunch Labour redoubts in Glasgow and the west of Scotland fell to the SNP, has put the party collectively on the couch. Lamont, Scottish Labour’s current deputy leader, admits it didn’t read the signals right after 2007. “In 2007, it was like a Scotland game where we lost to a dodgy penalty in the 90th minute. It was a moral victory and because the defeat was so narrow it was a case of what-if. I didn’t accept early enough that what happened represented a trend.”

It didn’t help that polls and the press were clear that Labour was going to win right up until March of this year, she says. As a result a fatal caution struck the party – and policy proposals which were ready to be published, on the council tax and on university funding to name two, were pulled. Lamont adds: “After four years, realising the consequence of losing in 2007, we really, really wanted to win and we really didn’t want to do anything that would damage that. We wanted this so much, we knew how important this is, people across the country were working their socks off. It wasn’t complacency, it was caution … the caution became too much.”

Harris agrees, noting that one of the failures of the party north of the Border is that “we have been too conservative”. Harris, a Blairite MP and former transport minister under Gordon Brown, says: “We haven’t been willing to change when the electorate wanted us to change and one of the symptoms of that was that we didn’t embrace Blairism.

“It is important that we display our willingness to change. The problem is that we have been cast as too unwilling to look at any alternative.”

Macintosh, one of Labour’s MSPs, also makes this case – although his language borders on the anodyne. “My key message is that the party needs to change. We need to be more positive and less negative. It is about not being framed as negative but about what the Labour party has to offer. Everyone knew what we were against. We need to be for something.”

Another familiar line from across the party is that its sense of “entitlement” has now gone for good. Lamont adds: “I know [people] didn’t really believe us but we are hungry for you to come back to us. There is no entitlement about this.”

So much for the post-mortem. The major challenge for the new leader, however, is that there will be precious little time for navel-gazing once they are in power, as the pace quickens towards the independence referendum which will dominate their period in office.

Having been portrayed so relentlessly by the SNP for its negativity during the election, Labour’s contenders are all wary of it being seen as the “anti” party in a referendum. Whichever leader wins, they promise to campaign on the “positive vision for Scotland inside the UK”. The tricky issue for Labour, however, is that, with a Conservative-led government at Westminster, they have to explain why they prefer to carry on living with the enemy to allowing centre-left Scotland to go it alone.

Harris answers simply: devolution ensures the UK government’s writ no longer rules on public services here. Lamont, however, in her opening speech last week, aired her thoughts on a post-independence role for Labour, suggesting she was sanguine about the outcome. Not so: she insists she is four-square behind the UK. But the campaign is going to be complex. She does not intend to form a joint campaign with David Cameron, and suggests she doesn’t want to share a platform with him (something shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy has also said). Scottish Labour wants to set out its own stall. Of the Union, she says: “The test is, is it in their interests or not? If people don’t feel that way about the UK just now, then we have to make that argument and it won’t be about who is on what platform with whom.”

The fact that the Tory-Labour divide conflicts with the unionist-nationalist divide sees other problems emerging for the new Scottish leader. The Westminster government is ruminating over whether to take control of the referendum, for example, to prevent the SNP from deciding how and when the crucial vote happens. Some Labour figures are tempted. But, others, such as shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran, declared last week that the idea was a “complete distraction”. The leadership contenders are waiting to see what happens, saying it should be for the Scottish Parliament to run, but only if it is organised properly – with, for example, an independent body like the Electoral Commission brought in to oversee matters.

As for timing, Salmond insists he told people before May’s election that the referendum wouldn’t be held until the second half of the parliament. But Lamont declares: “I promise him, if he brings the referendum on earlier, I won’t give him a row for breaking a promise.”

Then there is the question of Holyrood’s powers. With Salmond having won an election supporting a further extension of powers at the parliament, there is talk at the highest levels within Labour about whether themselves to back so-called “devo-max” – whereby virtually all tax powers go to Edinburgh. The leadership contenders appear to want to park the matter until after the referendum is done and dusted. The question for the pro-Union camp is whether arguing for the status quo, when polls suggest more powers are more popular, may push soft nationalists into the pro-independence camp.Lamont is now widely seen as the clear front-runner. Macintosh’s campaign is described as “meandering”, one sympathetic party figure says. And while Harris is the best communicator of the three, the MP has discovered that turf wars continue to exist within the party, having failed to gain the support of a single MSP. The Holyrood group all appear to believe that, despite a rule change allowing MPs to stand for the new leader’s job, the power should reside at Holyrood, not anywhere else.

All this has left the capable and sincere Lamont – who has won substantial backing among MSPs and unions – as the clear favourite. Some grumble she is going to win purely because of her lengthy links with the party; that “she’s going to get support from people just because they happen to go back to the Co-op movement”, says one MP. People are not, therefore, asking whether she is the leader most able to take the party back to power. Unfair, argue Lamont’s allies, who say that her confidence and presence is growing as a result of the campaign.

But can the little-known Lamont really hope to challenge Salmond – who last week was lording it in Time magazine? She insists: “The bigger challenge with Alex Salmond, in my view, is not about can you stand up to him in the chamber, it’s about addressing the political strategy he has been successful around. It is about making a positive case of Scotland in the UK and I can make that case.”

Won’t the left-wing Lamont simply be the candidate of Labour’s declining core base though? Harris warns that sticking to the old socialist hymns won’t work if Labour wants power.

He says: “There are certain political truths and one of them is that if you appeal only to the Left, then you will lose. It is as simple as that. I hope the days when the Labour party used to chant ‘no compromise with the electorate’ are behind us.”

And Macintosh says: “I am worried that we are being seen as the party of the Central Belt and council estates”. (Fellow party members might reply: if only.) He continues: “We need to make sure that we appeal to people in areas that we have never won like Orkney or the Borders. People have to see that the Labour leader is speaking for them.”

The result comes on 17 December. The scale of May’s defeat – and the resulting referendum – has ensured none of the three can be under any illusion as to the difficulties ahead. This is a job for a political giant: Labour must hope one of their little-known candidates can rise to the task.