Scottish Labour owes us an exciting, new story

THE Scottish Labour Party might be in a terrible place at the moment, but it believes that it is slowly beginning to dig itself out of the mess it is in. It has started to address the inadequacies of its structures through the Jim Murphy-Sarah Boyack review – which seems, so far, more cautious than transformative.

Politics isn’t just about structure, but more tangible issues such as culture, purpose and leadership. Labour politicians touched on this after the election when they lamented they did not have a leader of the calibre of Alex Salmond, or any equivalent to “Team Salmond”.

What is missing from Scottish Labour is any sense of public leadership. Leadership is about vision, building trust, taking decisions, making things happen, taking people with you, and communicating to colleagues and the public.

A host of Labour leaders have struggled with this: Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish and Jack McConnell in office, and subsequent leaders in opposition, Wendy Alexander and Iain Gray. Each had qualities and skills as well as limitations. Their wider failures to set a strategic course or vision has been about more than them personally.

There is a paradox in this. How could a party which ran large parts of Scotland for so long have this lack of leadership? Well, for one thing Labour pre-devolution largely ran Scotland through local councils and committees along with a complex network of public bodies. This was a collegiate kind of leadership, exercised mostly in private away from the public gaze.

Another group of Labour movers and shakers were the Westminster MPs, a sort of political class in exile. They represented Scotland, but were divorced from it, spending most of their time in London only communicating back home via TV and radio from College Green.

The exceptions to this tell us something. The major Labour totemic figures of the past who changed Scotland – such as Tom Johnston and Willie Ross – were leaders. In a sense they were the last Labour leaders of Scotland. They gave voice to and represented a powerful mission and purpose, which believed it had a story of Labour Scotland, and which had an optimistic vision of the future. No more can that be said of the party.

Why some things happen in politics and some things don’t is complex and contingent on many variables. Leaders shape events. Labour’s lack of leadership quality under devolution was caused by a variety of factors. One was that Labour morphed into the establishment in Scotland, changing the nature of the party, and sapping it of any sense of energy, dynamism and ideas.

Another was the atrophying of social democracy, of a bigger, bolder purpose which informed everything Labour did. A further factor was Labour’s inability to deal with and understand the SNP as a “normal” political party, instead pathologising Nationalists as malicious “separatists”.

It isn’t surprising, considering this, that all three Labour First Ministers, Dewar, McLeish and McConnell, struggled to find their place. There wasn’t an appropriate set of archetypes, of an idea of what a modern Scottish Labour leader should look like, should sound and act. Dewar and McLeish in their short reigns found their authority contested, while McConnell took the path of least resistance. Alexander in opposition was just too different, buzzing with energy and ideas.

It is fascinating to reflect on all the work that went into the pre-devolution period, 1997-99. But Scottish Labour spent next to no time thinking how it could develop a leadership culture and what that meant. I don’t mean by that all the fledgling Labour politicians should have gone away on some McKinsey weekend break on transformative leadership. That’s the New Labour pre-1997 model, which saw then Shadow Cabinet ministers going on Arthur Andersen seminars on preparing for government. That approach ends in ministers thinking the solution to every problem is to call in the big consultancies: the Blair-Cameron view.

It was actually too late by 1997-99 for Labour, and for the first Scottish Parliament. The only Labour styles of leadership on offer were out of date or discredited, those of the old boys’ network, of fixer politics, or of authoritarian labourism. None of Labour’s First Ministers fitted into that, but nor did they develop a distinct style of leadership. Instead, they flailed about. Behind them there remained a powerful negative leadership model, the controlling, hectoring, lecturing tones of feeling you have the right to tell people off, captured in Alasdair Gray’s evocative remark about the perils of “our own wee hard men who hammer Scotland down to the same dull level as themselves”.

All of this has to change if Labour is to have a viable future in Scotland. And not end up like the Tories or the Lib Dems, a small rump reminiscing about the good old days. Scotland needs a credible centre-left alternative. The SNP needs it to keep Alex Salmond on his toes.

Scottish Labour has to create a culture which is comfortable with exceptional people emerging, leading, taking risks and making decisions. And then beginning to flesh out a vision and bigger picture.

Much more than Labour’s internal review on structures and what the leader is called or not called, the party needs to become comfortable with the sort of leadership which is appropriate for the modern age. One which is positive, not negative, delegating, not controlling, focused around an individual, but who is part of a team, and who has a generous, ecumenical account of what Scotland is and what it can become.

They have to recognise that times have changed, Scotland is different and Labour too, and that the old battle songs and hymn sheets won’t do any more. It isn’t possible to scare the children at night any more with tales of the SNP bogeyman. Instead, they are going to have to reach out and tell a modern Labour story of Scotland. And hope people will listen and respond.