Leader: Labour in Scotland needs to follow Alexander’s lead

IN AN important speech today to the Scottish Labour Youth and Student Conference, Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, sets out on a redefinition of Labour’s aim and purpose in Scotland.

It proceeds on an examination of the party’s crushing defeat in the Holyrood election in May which returned the SNP with an overall majority.

He pinpoints two problems. One, at UK level, was a loss of policy debate and discussion in the centrally driven drive for modernisation. The other, accounting for the “landslide defeat” in May, was a sense that renewal was not necessary for electoral success. Specifically, the party in Scotland did not grasp that devolution altered the environment in which it operated and how it came to contribute to Scotland’s own sense of itself in the period since 1999. For Scottish Labour to win, he argues, it now has to be more than the anti-Nat party, but to be what many of its radical voices always insisted that it was: the party of Scottish Home Rule. The party’s support for Calman and now the Scotland Act demonstrates the willingness to adapt this devolved model. The party, he says, must continue to advocate devolution as “a new affirmation of Scottish Labour’s agenda for our nation”.

Now this is a telling advance on Labour’s previous position. It puts a marker down on the view that its commitment to devolution should not stop at Calman and the current settlement, but embrace wider powers for Holyrood.

This immediately puts into play what is meant by “status quo”. Until now, the mooted main question in the referendum was to be whether voters support the opening of negotiations for independence or the status quo. But if the “status quo” is now to be defined by the main opposition party as a realm beyond Calman – indeed, a moving target – it will have three immediate consequences. One is to impose on Labour an obligation to articulate how exactly, how far, and at what speed, it would like to proceed down this road. The battle of ideas has to be about more than embrace of movement but to articulate an end goal.

The second is to impose on the SNP an obligation to more clearly define what is meant by independence. The third is to render the notion of “status quo” meaningless for the purposes of the referendum. Indeed, it would cut out from voter choice the option of “Calman and no further for now”. Labour can hardly complain if the political agenda now continues to be dominated by constitutional change, if it embraces this as a feature of its mission.

Mr Alexander has shown courage in putting this definition of purpose forward for discussion. However, that it has come from him rather than one of the contenders for the Labour leadership in Scotland further highlights the error the party has made in not having one of its big guns in situ to defend what has been a critically important constituency: a massive oversight by any standards.