Joan McAlpine: Alexander’s confessional was not time well spent

The most surprising thing about Douglas Alexander’s speech in Stirling last week was the time he apparently spent on it. An insider told The Scotsman the Paisley Labour MP and shadow foreign secretary had worked on the address “for months”. Let’s hope these were the words of an over-enthusiastic underling. If he had given the matter serious thought for any length of time, he would surely have come up with a more detailed analysis of Labour’s demise in Scotland.

That might be a surprising summary, given that Mr Alexander’s address in Stirling, and accompanying article on these pages, was on the surface a painfully honest exposé of where the party had gone wrong. Mr Alexander ’fessed up to his role in devising the “Divorce is an Expensive Business” campaign of 1999 – though he defended its central objective. He went on to admit, however, that in the ten years that followed, “too little was done by my party to tell a story of possibility about Scotland”.

He was scathing of Labour’s 2011 Scottish election campaign which focused on the twin ghouls of Thatcherism and knife crime. Labour, he admitted, was also seen as indulging in opposition for its own sake. The speech has been interpreted as Alexander saying: “We wiz gubbed and deserved it.” But while it would be tempting for an SNP member to join the rabble throwing rhetorical rotten tomatoes in the direction of Labour’s Holyrood benches, that would be to let Mr Alexander and his colleagues off far too lightly.

Labour’s May 2011 campaign was indeed negative and patronising. Their performance in opposition was, as Mr Alexander suggests, more mean spirited than public spirited. But surely Labour’s Holyrood ranks were just following orders? They took a lead from London Labour who, through their long years in power at Westminster, showed little or no respect for the Scottish Parliament.

Mr Alexander admits the Iraq War and the MPs’ expenses scandal damaged the governments of Blair and Brown. But he has little to say about the attitude of those governments towards Scotland.

Let’s start in 1999 and Mr Alexander’s own “Divorce”. It is notable that 1999 was the year of peak production for North Sea Oil. This was noted last week in a number of articles about the Clair field, which BP say means production will be buoyant till 2050. Although the price of oil is now higher, meaning that fewer barrels will make more money, it is poignant that at the very moment the black stuff was gushing ashore in record quantity, Labour was telling Scotland how poor and dependent she was.

Let’s also look at 2007 when Mr Alexander again had a central role in a Scottish election. The First Minister at the time, Jack McConnell, was sidelined from the campaign because he wouldn’t toe London’s anti-independence, fear-mongering line. He was over-ruled by Mr Alexander, his boss Gordon Brown and the Labour spin doctor John McTernan. Labour subsequently lost it.

In between those elections London Labour’s behaviour towards Scotland was even more telling. Any journalist working in Scotland in after 1999 was accustomed to telephone tantrums from Scottish Labour MPs, ranting because their MSP counterparts got all the media attention. This jealous territorialism spilled into policy. It was apparent when Henry McLeish was First Minister and introduced free personal care for the elderly in 2002. The London Labour government did not like Scotland going its own way and withheld £30 million worth of attendance allowance from residential homes in Scotland.

There were similarities between this and the Labour government’s spiteful threat in 2008 to withhold £400m worth of council tax benefit. The SNP had won support to reform council tax in 2007. But the secretary of state for Scotland at the time, Des Browne, was positively triumphant in defending his government’s refusal to hand over Scotland’s share of the allowance, thus sabotaging the reform. And who can forget Dungavel, and Jack McConnell’s forlorn attempts to persude his Home Office colleagues that Scotland found the detention of children unacceptable?

There’s more. The Treasury under Labour refused to hand over Scotland’s £200m fossil fuel levy, raised from North Sea oil to fund investment in renewables. A Labour chief secretary to the Treasury, Andy Burnham, refused to pass on Scotland’s entitlement to a share of the money being spent on the regeneration of London for the Olympics. Labour set up the discredited Calman Commission. It was under Labour that voices within the expert Calman Group asking for more sensible tax devolution were over-ruled or silenced. Professor Alex Kemp, the world’s foremost oil taxation expert, said that Scotland should get a share of petroleum revenue, but his views were ignored.

The Scotland Bill, which Labour continues to champion alongside the coalition, will give the Treasury more control over Scotland’s finances than at present. London will predict our future tax income then cut the block grant by an as yet unspecified method. It could result in us losing £8 billion over a decade. Instead of blaming his colleagues in Holyrood, Mr Alexander might wish to reflect on London Labour’s – and by extension his own – actions. He might ask what progress has been made in the light of May’s historic SNP majority. One of the three Scottish Labour leadership candidates to declare so far, Tom Harris, said this weekend that Alex Salmond should be forbidden by London to ask a question on full fiscal autonomy in the future referendum. This coincides with a Scottish Social Attitudes Survey showing this option is favoured by the great majority of Scots – 74 per cent.

Mr Alexander’s speech offered some gloopy dollops of policy-lite waffle about “telling a new story” to the people. He would be better advised to forget imaginary narratives and start listening to what those same people are saying.

• Joan McAlpine is SNP MSP for the South of Scotland