Learning the lessons from Labour's Scottish defeat

Submitted by cathy n on 9 May, 2011 - 10:32

According to most opinion polls the Scottish Labour Party began the Holyrood election campaign with a lead of ten or more percentage points over the SNP.

But by the time the votes had been counted after polling day on May 5th the SNP had increased its share of the popular vote by 13%, increased the number of constituency seats it held by 32, and won an absolute majority of 69 seats in the 129-seat Holyrood Parliament.

By contrast, Labour’s share of the constituency vote (31.7%) was the lowest is had achieved since 1923. Even worse, its share of the list vote (26.3%) was its lowest since 1918. It had lost 20 constituency seats, leaving it with MSPs in just 15 out of 73 constituencies.

In the traditionally rock-solid-Labour Glasgow region the SNP won five of the nine constituencies. In the Lothian region Labour was left with just one constituency – the other eight being won by the SNP. And in the Central Scotland region what had been eight Labour seats and one SNP seat became six SNP seats and three Labour ones.

Labour can take some – very limited – consolation from the fact that the SNP’s victory was partly due to the collapse of the Lib-Dem vote (down by 7%, costing them seven of their nine constituency seats) and a decline in the Tory vote (down by a more modest 2%, at a cost of two constituency seats).

But this should not be allowed to obscure the total bankruptcy of Labour’s election campaign, both in terms of the "leadership" provided by Scottish Labour Party leader Iain Gray and also in terms of the policies (or lack of policies) on which it sought to contest the election.

Gray was the physical, visible, walking embodiment of the lack of any drive to the Labour campaign. He was the personification of nothingness.

When Gray was filmed about a fortnight before election day running away from half a dozen anti-cuts protestors, first taking refuge in a fast-food take-away, and then being bundled by his minders into a taxi (destination unknown), the Labour campaign was probably already dead in the water.

The incident did, however, guarantee that the campaign was never going to revive. Labour was the party which was going to protect Scotland by standing up to the Tories? But it was led by someone who couldn’t even stand up to half-a-dozen protestors!

Gray was one of the only three Labour constituency MSPs with a majority of less than 15% who managed to survive on 5th May.

That is positively cruel. For the next five years Gray can sit amongst the debris of Labour’s parliamentary representation, staring into the massed ranks of SNP MSPs, haunted by the knowledge that such an outcome would not have been possible without him.

But it would be unfair to scapegoat Gray for the debacle of Labour’s election performance. (He was, after all, only the party leader.) The germs of the malaise which struck down Labour’s election campaign were borne by far more than just one individual.

In the opening stages of the election campaign Labour’s ‘strategy’ appeared to be to rely on its lead in the opinion polls and simply coast along to victory. But as Labour’s lead quickly began to melt away, the party ‘strategists’ sought an alternative.

Their answer was to try to run a campaign attacking the Con-Dem coalition in Westminster. For a brief moment in time this checked the decline in Labour support.

But then the decline began again. Simplistic attacks on the Con-Dems in Westminster had no purchase in elections for the Scottish Parliament, especially given that the outgoing government and main electoral competitor was the SNP.

The Labour campaign was re-launched, this time with a focus on attacking the SNP and its support for an independent Scotland. This proved to be to no avail either. Polling carried out over the last days of the election campaigning showed that as many as 80,000 Labour voters switched at that time to voting SNP.

The SNP certainly backs independence for Scotland. But it was fighting the election campaign on the basis of its record in Holyrood: ending prescription charges, freezing the council tax, scrapping tuition fees, scrapping bridge tolls, ending council house sales, and preserving free personal care for the elderly.

Attacking the SNP for its support for independence failed to engage with the basis on which the SNP was actually campaigning for, and winning, votes. Instead of running a campaign to win a Scottish general election, Labour was effectively running a campaign to win a non-existent referendum!

Labour’s attacks on SNP support for independence also failed to take on board that voters were aware that a vote for the SNP in 2011 could be combined with a vote against independence in an eventual referendum. Many voters must have rightly perceived Labour’s campaign for what it was: scaremongering.

In any case, how could Labour attack the SNP for implementing policies which it had failed to implement itself? From 1999 to 2007 a Labour-Lib-Dem coalition had been in power in Holyrood which, had it had the political will to do so, could have implemented the policies which provided the bedrock for the SNP’s re-election campaign.

Labour’s attempts to attack the SNP head-on were rendered all the more futile by the fact that such attacks only served to highlight the impoverished state of Labour’s own election policies. What, after all, was Labour promising to do in the event of winning the elections?

Some of its manifesto commitments were SNP policies which it had opposed yesterday only to adopt in a watered-down form today.

Labour opposed the SNP’s promise of another five years of freezing the council tax. But the policy was massively popular. So Labour did a sudden and unexplained about-turn and promised to freeze council taxes for another two years.

Other manifesto commitments were unobjectionable but did nothing to inspire people to turn out to vote for Labour (whatever the ‘focus groups’ of the party ‘strategists’ might have said).

One of Labour’s most high-profile promises was that it would reduce the waiting time for results of cancer tests from four weeks to two weeks. Fine – two weeks is better than four weeks. But there was never any prospect that this would become a major issue in deciding voting intentions.

Worst of all were the election promises that were really the property of the Tories. If Labour ‘strategists’ had a ‘big idea’ in the election campaign, it was that Labour would be tough on crime.

Labour promised a mandatory prison sentence for anyone caught carrying a knife – as if social problems (in this case: the ‘culture’ of carrying a knife) could be resolved simply by sending more and more young people to jail.

In any case, the policy fell apart in a “Newsnight Scotland” interview (and deservedly so).

Would a woman who had used a knife to defend herself from domestic violence and had then run into the street still carrying it automatically receive a jail sentence? Answer: No. So a jail sentence for carrying a knife is not going to be mandatory after all? Well, errrr ... ....

Labour also attacked the SNP for its policy of scrapping short prison services. Indistinguishable from a true-blue Tory, Labour promised that jail would mean jail.

Labour’s election commitment was that it would not only send more people to jail but also that it would send people to jail for longer. As one election leaflet explained: “The SNP have been soft on crime. They tried to stop short-term prison sentences and voted against ‘Carry a knife – go to jail’. I know that Labour will be tough on crime.”

Those responsible for Labour’s debacle must now be called to account by the party membership and its trade union affiliates. But that is something quite different from what the Scottish Labour Party leadership is now proposing.

Gray has announced that he will remain party leader until the autumn while “a root-and-branch review, which brings together all parts of the Scottish Labour Party” is carried out. The “terms of reference” for that review are being drawn up by the party’s Scottish General Secretary.

And according to one press report, “the party is understood to be eager to create as much stability as possible for the new leader to take over.”

It takes some degree of panache for those who effectively sank the Labour boat in the election campaign now to appeal to party members not to rock the boat (“... create as much stability as possible ...”) But, of course, these people have a vested interest in maintaining “stability”.

Gray should resign with immediate effect. There should be no “review” which consists of the architects of defeat compiling a report behind closed doors and restricting rank-and-file involvement to answering a questionnaire.

(Especially when the traditional Labour Party questionnaire is one in which the choice of questions and the phrasing of such questions pre-determine the outcome of the questionnaire.)

What is needed is the convening of a Labour Party conference in the autumn, open to delegations from CLPs, affiliated unions and affiliated societies. It should be a conference, not a rally, and debate motions on what steps, both political and organizational, the Party needs to take to overcome the legacy of 5th May.

Affiliated unions should play a leading role in promoting democratic debate and accountability. Unite, in particular, should take the opportunity to put into practice Len McCluskey’s commitment to fighting to reclaim the party from the right-wing timeservers and leftovers from the Blair-Brown era who bear the blame for the humiliation of 5th May.

The left in the Party – the Labour Representation Committee – should also stir itself into action by running its own election-analysis meetings in the major Scottish cities, circulating its own analysis of the reasons for Labour’s defeat, and selecting a candidate who will run for party leader in Scotland on the basis of socialist policies.

For years the Labour Party in Scotland has taken its working-class vote for granted, transforming the party from a potential agency of social change into a career mechanism for timeservers with inflated egos.

The inquest into Labour’s defeat on 5th May provides an opportunity for the left in the party and the unions to begin the task of cleansing the Augean stables. The left should sieze that opportunity with both hands.

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