After surviving a no confidence vote by 17 votes to 14 at the meeting of the Scottish Labour Party Executive Committee (16 May), the Party’s leader Jim Murphy tendered his resignation.
Murphy’s election as Scottish Labour leader last December was the product of a carefully orchestrated plot by Blairite MSPs and Scottish Labour MPs. Last summer Murphy was given the lead role in the Better Together campaign, in order to raise his profile. The Blairites then triggered the resignation of incumbant leader Johann Lamont’, reportedly by circulating a statement of no confidence in her.
With Lamont gone, Murphy was presented as the “big hitter” (never mind the politics!) on the basis of his role in Better Together. That was also the basis on which he secured his election.
The left – in the Labour Party and in the affiliated unions – warned that his election as leader would be a disaster for Scottish Labour. And so, unfortunately, it proved to be, with the party losing 40 of its 41 seats on 7 May.
True that the scale of that defeat cannot be attributed to just one person. Nor can the scale of the defeat be attributed to the politics embodied in that one person. Those politics had been sapping the life out of Scottish Labour for years before Murphy took up office, resulting in an ongoing decline in electoral support.
Given his typical Blairite arrogance, Murphy was — and is — someone who believed that he was right and the rest of the world was wrong. He refused to take responsibility for the defeat and instead attributed it to weaknesses within the party which he had not had time to remedy.
In the days following Murphy’s declaration that he was staying on as leader, a campaign among rank-and-file Labour Party members got off the ground. At two days notice over a hundred members attended a teatime meeting in Glasgow convened by the Campaign for Socialism.
This was a rank-and-file revolt by Labour Party members, not a manoeuvre instigated by Len McCluskey in London, as claimed by Murphy in announcing his resignation.
Murphy’s own politics doubtless precluded him from understanding that the Labour Party membership was not a passive body whose role in life was to be manipulated by Murphy and bossed around by his sidekick John McTernan, but one capable of asserting its will.
According to an unnamed spokesperson quoted in the Observer, Murphy’s resignation is “not a Farage”, i.e. Murphy is not handing in his resignation only for it to be refused by the Executive Committee (more akin to the withdrawal of the Tsar’s abdication by popular demand in Eisenstein’s ‘Ivan the Terrible’ than to the Farage scenario).
Even so, there is no room for complacency, and no reason to exclude the possibility of backroom manoeuvring by people who believe that presentation is more important than politics (even though their presentational skills have proven to be even worse than their politics).
Murphy could have resigned on the spot on Saturday. He could have said that his resignation would come into effect at the next meeting of the Executive Committee. He didn’t. He made a point of saying that the next meeting of the EC could refuse to accept his resignation.
The EC currently has a majority so out of touch with reality that they voted on Saturday against the no confidence motion. If they have so much confidence in Murphy, why should they accept his resignation at the next meeting?
(The 17 who backed Murphy included Murphy himself and a Labour peer unconstitutionally drafted in (by whom?) to take up one of the two seats on the EC reserved for Westminster MPs. The vacancy arose because Scottish Labour has only one MP left in Westminster.)
The following scenario is therefore not outwith the bounds of possibility:
• Big Jim Murphy offers his resignation for the good of the party, even though only a troublesome minority under the control of Len McCluskey opposes him. In the following weeks the silent majority in the CLPs rallies behind him.
• When the EC next meets, it decides that it would be in breach of the wishes of the majority of the party membership to accept Murphy’s resignation. Murphy then remains in the post on the back of supposed popular acclamation.
CLPs should keep up the pressure on the EC by passing motions which welcome Murphy’s resignation as an opportunity to move on from the disaster of 7 May and to concentrate on defining the politics needed to win next year’s Holyrood elections.
And when Murphy goes, he should take McTernan and all his bag-carriers, flunkies, wasters, spin doctors, hangers-on and has-beens with him.
