Waiting for Godot
It was only a matter of time before Owen Smith said something ridiculous about Labour’s situation in Scotland. Last Sunday he delivered. After declaring that Scottish Labour had “failed to grasp national pride”, Smith suggested that Corbyn’s leadership was a reason behind our continued decline. Notably Smith did not reference the current state of the Scottish Labour Party. In that piece, Owen Jones criticised Corbyn for his lack of a Scotland strategy without even acknowledging Scottish Labour’s existence. That attitude is not confined to South of the border. Scottish Labour’s partisans joyfully rip shreds from their national leadership, yet the endless crisis closer to home appears to have passed them by.
What was striking about Scottish Labour’s recent catastrophe in the Holyrood elections was that we bypassed our customary period of mourning and introspection. A couple of black-tied hacks (and Thomas Docherty) flailed on the airwaves as they tried to pin the blame on a “leftwards shift”. Corbyn and our policies on Trident, tax, and immigration were alternatively cited as the architects of our demise. However this narrative was unceremoniously ditched after it became clear that nobody cared. Aside from a few banal hot takes on why we didn’t campaign hard enough, the inquiry into the nightmare on the 5th of May was non-existent. Within a week Scottish Labour had returned to business as usual and had sent its organisers onto the EU Referendum campaign trail. We are left questioning whether Scottish Labour lacks the intellectual resources to understand its latest defeat, or whether it simply doesn’t want to.
Scottish Labour’s painfully unsubtle manoeuvres against Corbyn suggest the latter. The difficult truth is that the responsibility for rebuilding the Labour Party in Scotland starts and ends with Scottish Labour. And it means accepting that our current strategy isn’t working. We are now polling our worst figures since universal suffrage. Even the GMB — one of our closest supporters — decided against balloting its members over the national leadership because of our irrelevance in Scotland.
When you ask voters to take a “fresh look” it helps to have something “fresh” to offer. Yet we have squandered every opportunity for renewal.
Re-opening the Scottish Parliament lists was intended to invigorate the parliamentary party with younger and telegenic “fresh talent”. However, a combination of name-recognition and local fiefdoms saw the same old faces rise to the top. Instead of seizing the opportunity to elect principled, socialist parliamentarians, the Left was poorly organised and split its vote across multiple candidates.
Pledging to raise taxes offered us the opportunity to break the dull, technocratic consensus at Holyrood. It gave us the chance to recast the Scottish Parliament as a tool for the redistribution of wealth. We could have argued that a Labour administration would use these powers to create benefits and to give people dignity, security, and more control over their lives. Instead we framed it as a penalty for the protection of public services, when the public are overwhelmingly satisfied with the SNP’s record in government. We positioned ourselves as the nicer managers of a glorified council budget.
The North Sea oil crisis strengthened the case for a proper diversification strategy and the full nationalisation of the industry. Rather than developing a case for how a Labour administration would transform the North East’s economy, we focused on “upskilling” North Sea workers. The delusion that “education is a silver bullet” runs through the heart of our politics.
When we could have made the effort to engage Corbyn-supporters in our party structures and build our activist base, the “rising stars” and seasoned hacks of the Scottish Labour Party instead spent countless hours complaining about them on Twitter.
The sad irony is that Scottish Labour’s institutions have turned on the very politics that can give it a purpose. Dugdale has broken precedent by calling for Corbyn to resign and she degraded her position by spreading the bizarre smear that he secretly voted Leave. The appointment of Ian Murray to her cabinet after he walked out on Corbyn showed disrespect for the hundreds of members who signed a letter critical of his behaviour. She endorsed Johanna Baxter, a moderate candidate for the NEC, claiming that Scottish Labour needed a voice and yet she ignored the only candidate who actually lives and works in Scotland. These were irresponsible and provocative actions for the leader of the Scottish Labour Party to take.
Dugdale’s leadership has been less of a fresh start, and more a fresh lick of paint on a rusted hulk. If we are to spend the next two months debating Corbyn’s strategy and leadership credentials it is only right that we apply the same scrutiny to the Scottish Labour Party itself.
This leadership election is distracting from the fact that Scottish Labour is staring over the precipice. It should be the spark for a serious discussion about our purpose, platform, and strategy going forward. Encouragingly Scottish Young Labour have taken the lead on this and their Open Forum event on Saturday 13th is open to all members. The onus is on us to kick-start the process of rebuilding Scottish Labour. Waiting on Jeremy Corbyn, Owen Smith, or Kezia Dugdale to do so alone is like waiting for Godot.