Labour signals major effort to take Argyll and Bute

The Labour Party is pouring a very big deal into Argyll in an all-out effort to take the Argyll and Bute Holyrood seat from the SNP at the 2011 Scottish Election.

We have already seen the signs as pointing to the party putting up Hugh Raven as its candidate. The hope is that he can reheat the expanded vote he attracted as a New Labour enthusiast in the heyday of Tony Blair’s reoriented party at the General Election of 2001.

Now Scottish Labour has announced that:

• its annual party conference will be held in Oban at the end of October;
• this will involve around 600 delegates, booking the Corran Halls as the venue and several hotels in the town for accommodation;
• the new UK Leader of the party will make his first conference address at the event. (Let’s not pretend it might be Diane Abbott.)

This is the clearest of all signals that the party is determined to try to take Argyll. It is currently an SNP seat with the highly esteemed Government Minister, Jim Mather, who is not standing again. In 2007 Mr Mather took it from the Lib Dems, whose George Lyon had held it since devolution. His majority is just over 800.

The Westminster seat has been a Lib Dem hold now into its sixth parliament, with Ray Michie taking it from the Conservative John MacKay in 1987 and building her majority strongly over two more successive elections.

Her party colleague, Alan Reid, took over the candidacy and held on to the seat in 2001 against a powerful challenge from Hugh Raven – who then retired promptly from politics and became a quangocrat, while Alan Reid himself went on to hold the seat two more times.

There is no great affinity with Labour across Argyll, particularly for the now discredited New Labour with whom Hugh Raven is indelibly associated.

It will also be said of Mr Raven that his track record is of a political carpetbagger, standing against Alan Reid for Westminster when he was a new and untried candidate; and now standing for Argyll and Bute at Holyrood, in a situation with no sitting tenant and a small SNP majority.

The fact remains that Raven, having done so well in 2001, was uninterested in a repeat challenge in 2005, regardless of his party’s interests – although it is interesting to note that his successor as Labour candidate, Carolyn Manson, put over 1,000 more votes on Raven’s 2001 tally.

But the platform his party will offer Raven in Oban in October, side by side with the colourless Iain Gray and one of two Milliband androids, will nevertheless be trumpeted by the largely unquestioning media.

Anyone who imagines that a Milliband of either persuasion – or for that matter, a Balls – can lead Labour to victory in Westminster next time around, really is unable to see that the Emperor is naked.

David Graham, who may not now stand against High Raven in the party’s internal selection process, did Labour a huge favour in the work he did in the recent Westminster election, refocusing the party’s traditional base and getting it out to vote.

Hugh Raven is a differently able candidate whose address in 2001 appealed to people who, invigorated by the promise of New Labour, voted for that party for the first time.

This audience is unlikely to be as accessible this time, thanks to the failure of New Labour to live up to its promises and instead, over 13 years in power:

• under Blair, leading the UK into a wrongful war in Iraq with consequent oxygenation of terrorist threats not previously encountered;
• under Brown, leaving the UK burdened by unimaginable debt for generations to come;
• under both Blair and Brown, bequeathing to the UK a legislative inheritance that has seriously undermined civil liberties.

These are real obstructions to a revival of Labour fortunes beyond what David Graham achieved in the General Election.

At the Scottish Election, which ought to focus on devolved matters, it would be naive, on performance, to imagine that any of the parties will demonstrate the integrity to stick to the correct agenda – except the SNP which has no choice.

The Westminster Election should have focused on reserved matters but Labour were the first to kick the proprieties into touch and go for a full-on opportunist manifesto that showed no care for the consequences of adding to voter confusion.

Naturally, in varying degree, the other parties felt they had to follow that lead, rather then work to clarify the situation for the electorate.

This was one of the most dishonest election campaigns fought in recent memory. What have we to look forward to next May but more of the same?

There is – and will remain – a real social justice agenda to be pursued, given that the cost of bearing the cuts necessarily introduced to pay down the UK’s astronomical deficit will inevitably be socially asymmetric.

David Graham could credibly have pursued that agenda with the audience who are and will be most affected by it.

In 12001, in the Westminster election, Hugh Raven galvanised the Argyll intelligentsia who were then enamoured of Tony Blair and had an unknown alternative in Alan Reid, standing for the first time and, then and since, never quite held in equivalent status to Ray Michie.

His route to that audience, to whom he most naturally appeals, may have to be, in 2011, an appeal to the worried middle class, seeing erosions of their financial security by the cuts and the rebalancing of the economy that is the coalition government’s response to Britain’s financial predicament.

It would be an opportunist betrayal of the very real social justice issues coming to the fore if that agenda was transmogrified in electioneering into trying to frighten the relatively secure middle class into voting Labour.

The problem here is that it was Labour who presided over the financial collapse and it will be hard to present a convincing argument so close to that performance, persuading people in Argyll to put the even less competent Scottish Labour into power in Holyrood.

And where, in all of this, will devolved matters become the focus of attention the election is designed to give them?

Interesting times.