Tom Harris, the sole MP in the – less a race than a meander in a bog – Scottish Labour leadership contest, has found the touchstone for the party’s loss of support in Scotland and has identified an instance that is proof of a protectionist parochialism it does not know how to leave behind.
Is a combative analysis, Harris has said – memorably: ‘We used to be a movement – now we’re a monolith.’
There could not be a more striking summation or one more succinctly put.
Harris’s metaphor sets movement against fixity and that is the disease. Scottish Labour, like Lot’s wife in the biblical story, has looked back in its unthought attempt to leave the bad old times – and has become Harris’s monolith.
Being a movement means both leading change and being responsive to it. Scottish Labour has been unable to deliver either.
Given two opportunities to lead, it was unable to shift its mindset from being the third division team in the provinces carrying out a given brief from London and neither able nor interested to think for itself.
Seeing genuine change instituted by another party, it has simply been mesmerised into paralysis by the SNP administrations’ confident and largely competent government of Scotland.
The strength of the SNP is that it has Salmond and Sturgeon on the bridge, Swinney as the chief engineer and Russell and Lochhead as joint First Mates. The rest of the ministerial team are well managed but run of the mill, no more and often less capable than any other member of the parliament in any party. That need not be an unassailable position but it has become one.
Had Scottish labour been capable of responding to change it would have sensed the rising strength of Scottishness, of a Scotland centred interest and would have led an equally Scottish focused march forwards but with a different destination. But, like the other unionist parties, they had bought into Alex Salmond’s most successful sleight of hand – that Scottishness and a focus on Scotland’s interests are the sole purview of the SNP. Monoliths indeed.
Harris’s other identification of moribundity in Scottish labour lies in his scorn for its failure to hold a hustings for MSPs, as the Labour party at Westminster did in the contest that saw Ed Miliband take the leadership.
He has pointed out that, in the undemocratic electoral college system adopted by Scottish labour, each MSP’s vote in the contest is worth 200 times that of the vote of an ‘ordinary’ party member. Harris is right that it is bizarre not to give this ‘high value’ element of the electorate enough knowledge of the alternatives to make their mind up on evidence rather than prejudice.
This is where the protectionist parochialism comes in.
The Scottish Labour MSPs of the moment are remarkable, beyond Malcolm Chisholm, Jackie Baillie and Sarah Boyack, for their mediocrity. But they hang together in resisting incomers and, as an MP, Harris is seen as somehow piratical.
The performance of the Scottish Parliament as a whole would benefit enormously from the wholesale repatriation of Scottish MPs of all parties. The talent pool at Holyrood is embarrassingly – cripplingly – shallow.
With the Scottish Labour leadership, the picture of the candidates’ respective nominations is interesting and accounts for concerns about both parochialism and imperialism.
- Harris has not one single nomination from an MSP. He has 12 from MPs (including himself), the most known of whom are Douglas Alexander and Michael Joyce; and he has one from the long serving Labour MEP, David Martin. This picture at once demonstrates the Holyrood barricades at work and the Westminster will to interfere.
- Lamont has 20 nominations from MSPs (including her own), which encompass the three genuinely able performers named above; and 7 MPs, the most notable of whom is Cathy Jamieson, the former Justice Minister at Holyrood. This picture shows the Holyrood Labour establishment and its traditionalist bread and butter Westminster equivalents backing the familiar.
- Macintosh has 13 nominations from MSPs (including himself), none of whom are household names; almost as many MPs, with 12, numbering Alastair Darling and Jim Murphy amongst them; and one experienced MSP, Catherine Stihler. This is the profile of the meritocratic ‘new boy’ – although Macintosh has been Glasgow Eastwood members since 1999.
Lamont also has heavy backing from the trade unions which, with the number and nature of her MSP nominations, makes her an almost certain winner.
Of the three, however, she is the one most likely to be no more than a caretaker. She is a capable party operative but no thinker, no leader and not someone who will excite the country.
Macintosh is a thinker but not a leader – and by leader we mean not just someone capable of leading the parliamentary party, which he might be, but of galvanising the wider electorate which the party must do.
Harris, who is destined to be the bottom-scraper in the votes, is the one most likely to do just that.
Most parties seem to forget that when they are electing a leader they are also electing the most likely winner, the one most capable of convincing non-party members to vote for the party.
There is something willfully self-destructive about this campaign, as if Scottish Labour is stubbornly determined to demonstrate that it will not change, believing that there is merit in that stance. There is, of course, historically speaking. What stays still, remaining in place, is at least there, aeons later, for archaeologists to discover – with all of irony of Shelley’s Ozymandias, where a traveller finds a broken statue in a featureless desert carrying the epitaph: ‘Look on my works, ye mighty and despair’.
Monolith.
It is a pity that a website with such potential is tainted by SNP bias. There is no reference to Argyll in this piece – just an unbalanced anti Labour rant.
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Theblokewiththebeard – Mick?
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theblokewiththebeard
…would that be mr cochrane????
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I’ve got a beard, however it is not me!
Do tend to agree with the bias and not with the contents of the anti rant.
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For David Graham: What support we have for the SNP – which is better balanced than we get credit for by more unequivocal criticism that it gets elsewhere – is earned by its competence in government which has, on the evidence, been something of a revelation for Scotland as a whole.
In a country which has given the SNP an overall majority at Holyrood – against a system designed to prevent just such an eventuality, our perceived ‘bias’ towards the SNP is less than that demonstrated by the country at large.
It’s also necessary to distinguish between ‘Labour’ and ‘the Labour Party’. What you see fit to call ‘a rant’ is criticism of the Scottish Labour party and, if you like, of the UK Labour party. The first is largely talentless and has no discernible sense of direction. The second squandered unprecedented political opportunity to regenerate Britain by prioritising Presidential vanities, highly questionable patronage and internal strife. Where is the basis for respect in any of that?
‘Labour’ is a very different matter though – representing a set of social and political values any civilised society must respect, promote and use as enduring signposts. It is these values that the UK Labour Party itself damaged more than any other administration, except that of Margaret Thatcher.
Between them, the Thatcher/Blair continuum broke Britain’s spirit and taught it not to bother to resist Thatcher plotted the miners strike to break that union and went on to sequestrate union funds. Blair, with the eager help of David Blunkett enacted a series of laws more fascist than the media cared to consider. These saw the very elderly and frail Labour Party member, Walter Wolf, manhandled out of the Labour conference by a bunch of heavies and locked up because he shouted ‘Rubbish’ during a conference speech of Jack Straw’s. People were arrested and taken to Brighton Police station for wearing Anti-Blair T-shirts in the town. Even a protest as mild as Maya Evans reading aloud the names of soldiers killed in the illegal war in Iraq within half a mile of Westminster, was put beyond the law. And having the police deliberately trash the late protester, Brian Haw’s, peace camp in London…
This wasn’t ‘Labour’. This was the Blairite ‘Labour Party’, which became and left a disease. And the sharp reality is that whatever she was, Thatcher took a genuinely bankrupt Britain and left it strong; while the Blair/Brown continuum has bequeathed us the uncertain future we’re all facing today.
The Scottish Labour group shows every sign of being beyond contact with reality in, like the Tories, lacking any sense of itself and seeing just how badly they need to rethink themselves. There is no Lib Dem group to speak of left in Scotland and as we have recently said, the only parties who know what they’re for in Scotland today are the Scottish Greens and the SNP.
We don’t do ‘pretend’ balance. If there is none, it is the responsibility of the unionist parties who have utterly failed to offer any alternative directions or ideas.
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Scottish Labour party….there is no danger of them becoming anything other than a mouthy,weak opposition.
And I speak as a FORMER labour voter.
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For Morag: .
And so do I, Morag. And a FORMER lifelong one
The 1st May 1997 was the most dizzying day of my life – an exhilaration that was gone in six months – which was somewhere around the Bernie Ecclestone F1 cigarette sponsorship ban exemption that accompanied a £1m donation from Eccelstone to the Labour Party.
That was the big signpost to where we were really headed and it certainly wasn’t the road I voted for – hence, like you, FORMER.
Not a shared history we can celebrate with a high five but it could a good reason for a dram sometime.
Lynda
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I am not in the business of defending the Labour Party – although I will vote Labour in SOME elections.
Newsroom has just confirmed my observation about SNP bias and anti Labour rants.
Sadly you seem to be consistent in attacking people who do not want an independent Scotland or who dare to disagree with you. Whatever happened to that old idea of working together?
One of the problems in this day of electronic communications is the vitriol that people send from their keyboards.
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Nobody is attacking anyone on here.
Are you sure you are on the right website?
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I think the notion of people being attacked on here is blown out of all proportion, often by those who, if an article highlighted that the SNP made scrabble a more interesting game, would retort with ‘Yes but where are the ferries they promised.’
I can only speak from personal experience and that has always been that Newsroom is no more or less committed to their opinion than any of the rest of us. Just because they run the site doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be.
I have disagreed with Newsroom before on matters and, in my role with ARSN, been part of a group who received their support but also (as I am sure many recall) a fairly hefty keyboard lashing when decisions were taken which Newsroom did not agree with. Newsroom e-mailed me, not to apologise for what they had said, but simply to state that they have to be honest. I replied along the lines of saying I understood perfectly. I had no problem with that.
I can never really understand anyone who pins their colours so fast to a political party that they believe all one does is great and all the other does is atrocious. Some will follow the party that they believe, in aggregate, is the greater good, others (myself included) focus more on the individual I am voting for rather than the party they associate with. For me both are credible ways of being political. However blind faith and blind opposition can only be detrimental to the greater good of any country.
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Wasn’t sure where to put this so this seemed as good a place as any. If FA want to move it to somewhere more suitable then please do so.
Johann Lamont has been named the new leader of the Scottish Labour Party and I fear the party has another period of stagnation ahead of it. Lamont is a perfectly capable minister as are Harris and Macintosh however I can’t imagine any of the three being the strong and decisive leader that the Labour Party clearly need. Maybe of the three Harris might, and I stress might, have the leadership skills required (or at least develop them) but I can’t imagine either Lamont or Macintosh leading the ship out of very troubled waters.
They have been a party in transition for too long now and have had far too many changes in leadership in too short a time. They really need to take a good long hard look at itself and work out how it can build toward being a party that is one again electable. They need a leader who is credible in the political world and to the public, they need a clear and communicated vision for the party and they need a strong team around the leader which supports them and had candidates capable of succeeding the leader in future.
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