AS the UK staggers to the end of 2019, its politics have become a cruel and heartless spectacle, a theatre of misery populated by food banks, disabled people left without income, and the avaricious wealthy in search of tax cuts. It’s like watching a live action remake of Scrooge, only without the redemption or change of heart.
Scotland’s role in this mess is a hapless victim of a script over which we have no control.
The UK is a union state, but it has no union structure. There are no constitutional safeguards or bulwarks to protect Scotland from the malign effects of English nationalism, the force which has delivered a huge majority for the Etonian Scrooge who dominates the UK political stage. The result of the General Election exposed the stark truth. Until December, anti-independence politicians could hide behind the fig leaf of SNP losses in the General Election of 2017, 2019’s unimpeachable mandate for the party seeking another independence referendum leaves them naked.
And I’m terribly sorry for putting the image of a naked Boris Johnson and Alister Jack in your mind, but we must all suffer for the cause.
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Although much of the recent focus has been upon the Tories, the Labour Party in Scotland is the one which has some serious reflection to do. The Tories don’t do reflection. They do knee jerking, saying no, and relying upon the strength of their victories south of the Border. In order to reflect upon a party’s future, there has to be some significant synaptic activity.
The Conservatives in Scotland surrendered any of that for the monotonous chant of we said no and we meant it. When you’re so intellectually and morally bankrupt that not even the loss of more than half of your MPs can make you realise that you’re doing Scottish politics wrong, all hope has long since evaporated away for you. The Conservatives in Scotland are no longer a political party in the normal sense of the word as understood in a democratic society. They’re simply the Scottish apologists for an occupying political force.
So that just leaves the Labour Party, if we’re seeking some substantive change in anti-independence politics as a result of a crushing defeat in the General Election. Of course we’ve been here before with serious reflection in the Labour Party in Scotland, which doesn’t bode well.
Most likely what will happen is that after a period of time, the branch office manager will pop up to announce that yet again it’s the voters who got it wrong, and Labour’s going to continue to do everything that it has been doing to date, only this time with a pretty picture of the Federalism Fairy as the new party logo. Sadly for the Labour Party in Scotland, the Federalism Fairy is as mythical as Richard Leonard’s wit and charm.
Labour promised a period of reflection after it lost the Scottish elections in 2011. It promised another after it was almost wiped out in the General Election of 2015. It promised yet another period of reflection after it went down to another humiliating defeat in the Holyrood elections of 2016.
On each of these occasions we were assured that the Labour Party in Scotland was going to take a long hard look at itself and see what needed to be changed in order to reconnect with the voters.
Unfortunately up until now what has passed for reflection in the Labour branch office in Scotland has consisted of the party grandees looking in a mirror and telling themselves that they still look pretty damn fabulous.
The result has always been that Labour in Scotland has decided that it’s the voters who got it wrong, and they just need to do the same thing as they’ve been doing until now, only with a leader who is even less charismatic and appealing than the one before.
Labour in Scotland cannot shake itself from its core belief, which is that it owns the Scottish electorate, and that it merely has to bide its time until voters flock back to it.
In Labour’s view, it is not the political vehicle for the working classes of Scotland, the working classes of Scotland are the electoral vehicle for the Labour Party. And it’s this sense of entitlement which has delivered more humiliating defeats for the Labour Party in Scotland than the Scottish fitba team.
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Actually it’s worse than that. Scottish fitba manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, Labour in Scotland can’t even find victory using a SatNav and Google Maps. Yet again it has been reduced to lonely Ian Murray in that socialist bastion of Morningside. Yet even now there are those within the Labour Party who are insisting that it needs to promote a message of stronger Unionism – to out Tory the Tories.
We have the peculiar spectacle of a party that believes that the best way for it to regain the favour of voters in Scotland is by proclaiming even more loudly that the will of voters in Scotland should be ignored.
You don’t need to be a mental giant in order to perceive the illogicality of this position, but then the Labour Party in Scotland isn’t exactly noted for its intellectualism. It’s noted for James Kelly boring us all into submission and Jackie Baillie’s arithmetic.
Yet there is a way for Labour in Scotland to claw its way back into a semblance of political relevance, and that’s for it to become a truly Scottish Labour party. It’s for Labour in Scotland to recognise that a large and significant chunk of its supports in Scotland are in favour of independence, and an even larger segment support the right of Scotland to decide for itself when or if it should revisit the topic in a referendum. There are some voices within Labour in Scotland who, although they may still not be in favour of independence, recognise that if democracy in Scotland is to be defended, then the mandate given by the voters to the SNP in the General Election must be respected.
That’s the only way back for Labour in Scotland. 2020 will not only be the year of crucial importance for Scotland’s future, it will also be a year of existential importance for the future of the Labour Party in Scotland. They can either support the democratic right of Scotland to make its own choices, or they can die as a party. They can either move on with Scotland, or Scotland will move on without them.
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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