Labour told to forget about Thatcher

SCOTTISH Labour cannot keep fighting the “familiar villain of Thatcherism” if it wants to regain its relevance to Scots in a new and different era, Douglas Alexander will declare in a major speech next month.

In his first significant contribution on the aftermath of May’s humiliating Holyrood elections, the shadow foreign secretary will argue bluntly it is time to stop contesting old battles against “past wrongs”, saying the old images of the Thatcher era – characterised by industrial closures and strife – had lost the “emotive power” they once held among voters north of the Border.

Instead, he argues that the party can only win back power in Scotland by adopting a radically different approach fit for “new times”.

In an assessment of his party’s political strategy since devolution, Alexander will also use the lecture to declare that Labour has looked “uneasy” in the face of a “resurgence of Scottish pride and confidence” since the creation of the Scottish Parliament.

Scottish Labour’s decline had been further sealed, he will add, by a “weariness” among voters towards a party associated with an unpopular war in Iraq, the Westminster expenses scandal, and the perception that “Labour runs everything” north of the Border.

The comments, which will be delivered in the annual Andrew John Williamson Memorial Lecture at Stirling University next month, represent the first significant response from Labour’s senior Scottish strategist in the wake of the party’s humiliating defeat, and the starkest criticism yet of the party’s election campaign, when Scottish leader Iain Gray sought to reheat memories of Thatcherism in the hope it would persuade voters to back Labour.

“This was a story that sought to draw what emotional power it could manage from Scotland’s past, not Scotland’s future. And in a decisive rejection at the ballot box, in the language of the terraces, we were well and truly ‘gubbed’,” Alexander will say.

His call comes with senior party figures arguing for a complete overhaul if it is to avoid being wiped off the map at Holyrood. It won just 37 seats, down seven on its previous total, with just over 30 per cent of the popular vote. In 1999, in the first Scottish elections, under the leadership of Donald Dewar, the party won 56 seats.

In the lecture, Alexander will note how Labour politicians had grown up understanding that the “villain” of the Scottish political story had been “the insensitive, arrogant and selfish politics embodied by Margaret Thatcher”.

The closure and restructuring in the Ravenscraig steelworks, the Linwood car plant and the Fife coalfields helped to “shape Scotland’s sense of itself for decades”, he argues. Labour figures such as Dewar and John Smith were seen as the “heroes” in a struggle which, he says, “at that time felt like a struggle for Scotland’s soul.”

But the “emotive power” of this message has been eroded and has now “moved into history”, he says. As a result, Labour’s own anti-Thatcherite message to Scots has lost relevance. In the years ahead, Scottish Labour’s political purpose “has to be built around the future possibilities for Scotland, not the past wrongs done to Scotland,” he will say.

Alexander will also concede that his party has failed to come to terms with the new Scottish identity post-devolution. His Alexander’s call for a shake-up comes with the party having already decided to reform its structures in the wake of the defeat in May.

The party conference in Liverpool this week is expected to back reforms that will create a distinct Scottish party, to be headed by a leader who will take control of all party matters north of the Border. Both Alexander and shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy, despite being urged to stand for the new post, have declined.