We’re not there yet.
Here’s some quick thoughts on where the General Election result leaves Scottish Labour and where we go next.
In Scotland there is clearly still progress to be made among left-leaning voters who are angry at the Tories economic vandalism and increasingly dissatisfied with Nicola Sturgeon’s moribund government. However the scale of the in-roads already made in winning back voters from the SNP in Scotland has been disguised by a seeping away of Labour votes to the Tories. Anyone who knocked doors in the election felt the movement from the SNP to Labour in the last couple of weeks of the campaign — but despite the SNP’s vote share falling by 13 points nationally Labour’s vote share increased by only 3 points. What happened?
There’s an argument doing the rounds in the Scottish Party that, with another referendum kicked not so much into the long grass as into the bushes beyond, the next election can be fought on the territory we’re more comfortable with: public services, jobs, worker’s incomes. This is obviously where we need to get the debate to eventually in Scotland. There’s no future for Scotland’s working people in nationalism. However, the Tories and the SNP, who both are now in a position of defending more seats than they are attacking in Scotland, have a shared interest in continuing the zombie debate on independence. While the SNP and Scottish Tories proclaim their opposition to each other as the core of their belief the reality is that they are now in a symbiotic relationship.
They have no other strategy than to talk about independence.
Labour does. But the comfortable misconception that the constitutional debate is behind us also ignores completely the new electoral landscape in constituencies across Scotland. It’s worth looking at the numbers.
Here’s a quick analysis I did this afternoon.
One striking fact is that in the 25 seats where Labour is now in second place to the nationalists in Scotland, 21 of them saw a surge in Tory votes which was greater than the eventual SNP majority. That surge was largely, if not exclusively, at the expense of Labour.
Those 21 seats were Glasgow South West, Glasgow East, Airdrie and Shotts , Motherwell and Wishaw, Inverclyde, Dunfermline and West Fife, Na h-Eileanan An Iar, Glasgow North, Edinburgh North and Leith, Glasgow South, Glasgow Central, West Dunbartonshire, Paisley and Renfrewshire South, Glasgow North West, Paisley and Renfrewshire North, Linlithgow and East Falkirk, Glenrothes, Edinburgh East, East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow, Livingston and Falkirk.
Had we been able to hold onto more of these tactical pro-UK voters in these seats the SNP may have been all but wiped-out in Westminster. And more of the brilliant candidates we had in those seats would now be brilliant Labour MPs.
Of course the dynamic is more complex than a simple transfer of unionist voters but look around and large parts of Scotland look something like three-way marginals, with Labour in second place.
In seat after seat in the central belt we saw the SNP vote fall by 10–15% and the Tory vote rise by the same amount. It’s obvious that Yes voters across Scotland haven’t become Tories overnight. What has happened is that what we gained from the change that Corbyn offered was almost perfectly cancelled out by what we lost to the Tories on the constitution.
In an election campaign where Jeremy Corbyn achieved what we have failed to do in the last two parliamentary elections — winning back large numbers of Yes voters — our net gain in votes across Scotland was less than ten thousand.
The energy that Jeremy Corbyn created was able to offset the large scale movement to the Tories by No voters, that’s remarkable, but fans and critics of Jeremy alike should be concerned that we didn’t see the results we should have given how successful he was in winning over SNP voters.
The Tory insurgency may have reached its high point (though there’s reason to believe it might have some way to go) but without a strategy to win back these No voters, and to stop further erosion of our vote, we will be limiting the speed of our recovery.
In the 2015 General Election Former Labour/Yes voters couldn’t see beyond the constitution to vote Labour. In 2017 a significant proportion of those voters moved past the constitution but, ironically, a significant proportion of Labour/NO voters didn’t find us convincing enough on the issue.
The key test for Yes voters who were attracted by change message in 2014, rather than those who were simply nationalists, is whether Labour represents clear change and difference from the Tories. Jeremy Corbyn has allowed us to offer that in a way that we failed to do in recent years, despite standing in 2015 and 2016 on a platform well to the left of the SNP on taxation & austerity. However the hygiene standard for a significant proportion of Labour No voters is still whether we stand firm on being part of the UK.
We may be able to win big in a General Election, whenever that comes, with a message about change, but unless we convince a big group of voters that we stand firm on the Union our central message of change may go unheard with them.
I understand why people in my party are so anxious to put the independence debate behind us. I spent 1000 days fighting the independence referendum and woke up every morning thinking that the campaign was a massive waste of political effort, a distraction from the causes that moved me to join Labour. Our party is stronger on the union than we’ve ever been but we see the world through our socialism not unionism.
None of this is a criticism of leadership. Nor I am seeking to re-write history: I was heading strategy for the party when we clumsily misjudged whether people were ready to move past their referendum vote. The mixed messages pre-date existing UK and Scottish leadership, but past mistakes are not an excuse for repeating them.
We need to stop sounding like we are answering “mibbe” to what is still a yes/no question if Labour is going to move Scottish politics past nationalism. We need to stop treating the only Scottish campaign which Labour has won in over a decade as something to apologise for. We saved working people from unthinkable austerity. We saved jobs. We protected the poorest in Scotland. We avoided the calamity of leaving the Union without a real plan for any of the fundamentals. We stood against nationalism just as it was poisoning the rest of the world. Labour led that campaign. It was Labour voters who secured Scotland’s place in the union. We should be proud of that.
Support for the Union isn’t an alternative to socialism in Scotland, it is a prerequisite for it.
We can probably easily win another handful of seats in Scotland with an appeal to our offer of change which has the momentum and media interest at the moment. However the real prize is returning Labour as the biggest party in Scotland and contributing to a Labour majority in the House of Commons . That can only be achieved with a strategy that is both unequivocally socialist and unambiguous on the union. It’s a more complicated job but it’s worth taking the time to work out how to do it.
No-one would love it more than me if we were able to put the politics of division behind, that’s within our grasp, but we’re not quite there yet.
