Gerry Hassan: Time to cut in on Labour-SNP dance of animosity

Scottish Labour gathers in Oban rather pleased and comfortable with itself. It is confident it will win next year's Scottish Parliament election and see a return to the natural order of things: itself in office, and those pesky Nationalists brushed off once and for all.

At the same time, there is an element of uncertainty about what Scottish Labour stands for, what kind of vision it has, and what it wants power for beyond its own sake. Yet in one area the party's passion and fire beats unconstrained: its antagonism towards the Scottish Nationalists.

There are many misconceptions about the Labour-SNP dance of animosity and battle for supremacy. One is that it has been with us for as long as there has been a SNP; another is that it all stems from recent history such as bringing down the 1979 Labour government.

The received wisdom is that the Labour-SNP dynamic is the result of the closeness and similarity of the parties, the constitution apart - philosophically, in values and the kind of Scotland they would like to see. This is only part of the picture. Both parties insist they are social democratic, but start from very different places. Labour's ethos was shaped in its formative years by a culture which saw the world in terms of "haves" and "have nots"; the SNP's ethos by a "Scotland first" and "Scotland why not?" mentality.

The first is about the politics of economic and social values, the second nationhood and ultimately, the SNP's soul of Scottish statehood. Wherever they position themselves now, these are diametrically opposed places to start from.

A long history and memory matters in this. When Labour were committed centralisers and anti-devolutionists under Attlee's post-war government, "Scottish nationalism" even as an idea came to be portrayed as anti-Labour, hostile to progress, and helpful to the Tories. It didn't help that the Tories railed against "London centralisation", aiding Labour's transition to its 20-year stand against a Scottish Parliament.

Then came the influence of the new left, nuclear disarmament and CND in the Sixties when Labour, after briefly supporting unilateralism, turned its back on it. Instead, Labour embraced nuclear militarisation on the Clyde, and many who shifted over to the SNP at this time did so because of this issue.

The same process began to be evident after 1979 - with a whole generation of centre-left politicians - people such as Nicola Sturgeon, Roseanna Cunningham and Kenny MacAskill to take but three examples - who would have joined Labour as the main anti-Tory force south of the Border, became prominent in the Nationalists.Labour's onslaught on the Nationalists as "tartan Tories" arose out of its entitlement culture of feeling it had the right to run parts of Scotland without scrutiny or challenge and a sense that this was now under threat. The invective of "tartan Tories" fitted the anti-Toryism which was increasingly the leitmotif of a Scotland which, while pretending it had radical credentials, was conservative, managerial and wary of change.

Labour was of the opinion that having seen off the once powerful "real" Tories, it had earned the right to do so with the new "surrogate" Tories: the SNP. Both were forces of reaction, holding back the bright, modern Scotland which Labour felt it was creating in the 1960s: a land of new towns, motorways and massive housing construction.

This antagonism has been mutual, while in recent years being more bitter on the Labour side. SNP politicians have regularly lambasted Labour as "London Labour", seeing all the unionist parties as dancing to a different tune. The most black-and-white cybernats even deny that "Scottish Labour" exists, citing that it is not registered at the Electoral Commission and is only the regional branch of British Labour. This is classic psych-ops: trying to deny your opponent the right to exist.

Yet it is Scottish Labour which still more often falls for the politics of going over the top. From its most senior level to the grassroots, the party has not mastered Robert McNamara's first dictum in The Fog of War of how to fight a conflict, namely "to empathise with your enemy", which states you should never fall into the trap of dehumanising or demonising the foe. Labour too often portray the SNP as an illegitimate guerrilla army, a kind of Scottish Vietcong, who need swept away in a counter-insurgency cleansing operation.

We need to ask and hope that one day this will be different, but will it and how is this even possible? The fantasy story of Labour-SNP co-operation and its absence is one of the defining faultlines and distortions of recent Scottish politics. What are the circumstances which would make Labour-SNP engagement possible?

An economic crisis of unparalleled proportions has not moved the two, but surely, if the constitutional question solved itself, either through independence or a radical post-nationalist UK political order, a more civilised politics would emerge.

A deeper part of the Labour-SNP contest is about the struggle for the soul of social democracy, but given both conditional support of centre-left politics and embracing of big business and corporate power - from Trumpland with the SNP to PFI/PPP under Labour - neither can lay exclusive claim to this terrain.Moreover, if we look at this in the aftermath of the collapse of socialism and the disaster of neo-liberal dogma, what comes next? Is the best we can hope for a reheated, compromised and battered social democracy? Or after the neo-liberal crash and the Blair-Brown "Fantasy Island Bubble", is the articulation of a post-nationalist, post-social democratic politics possible?

Change is coming to Scotland and the UK, to the economic and social fabric we have grown accustomed to, and this will have huge consequences for the political shape of the UK state.

Who can give voice to this change could define our land and politics for a generation. Is Iain Gray or Alex Salmond up for this, or are both content to contest the mantle of "Scotland's Shield"?