Such is the scale of the catastrophe that may be about to engulf the Labour party in Scotland that commentators and analysts are now deploying apocalyptic imagery to measure it. Labour is facing “annihilation”, “wipe-out”, “meltdown”.
The word “decapitation” has even been deployed to convey the disaster that is about to occur on May 7. The shadow of the pale rider has loomed over all the opinion polls that have been published since the independence referendum last September.
Lord Ashcroft’s poll last week, though, showed that the tolling of the distant bell can now also be heard in Labour’s 16 safest Scottish seats. The arguments of those of us who thought that Jim Murphy was the wrong man at the wrong time to lead Labour in Scotland have now, it seems, been rendered irrelevant; if the polls are right, then history will show that nothing could have saved the party.
Eight weeks have elapsed since Murphy became Labour’s Scottish leader and you cannot fault his effort or much of his strategy since then. Not a day has passed without a Murphy-inspired story dominating the Scottish news agenda. Paranoid SNP supporters will say that such high visibility is yet more proof of the wicked anti-Nationalist media, but it’s not really. Murphy and his backroom team have simply pored over policy areas where they deem the SNP to be weakest and that§ resonate deeply with working-class voters and come up with some eye-catching declarations.
Thus there will be more nurses funded by Ed Miliband’s mansion tax; there will be more power devolved from Holyrood to local authorities; and there will be an end to gambling machines in betting shops — the crack cocaine of the industry. Shrewdly, they also opposed plans for a new women’s prison, though it would have been better if they had acknowledged that the campaign was an initiative by the formidable Women for Independence group.
Murphy and his team have also made some howlers. Who among them thought that it was a good idea to wheel Gordon Brown back into action with ludicrous talk of a Vow Plus? Not even no supporters now believe that the original Vow was anything other than a back-of-a-fag-packet piece of jiggery-pokery packaged to look like the Ten Commandments. Meanwhile, their ‘Vote SNP and get Tories’ campaign might have worked if it were not for the pesky fact that many in Scotland these days think that Labour effectively are the Tories.
In truth, the new Labour high command in Scotland must face up to the fact that what they are dealing with here is nothing short of a revolution that has little to do with conventional politics. The embers of revolt have been smouldering beneath the foundations for several years now and the independence campaign gave them the oxygen to become a full conflagration. Even if Labour are reduced to a mere rump of Scottish seats after May 7, they ought to draw some comfort from the fact that the flames may soon also engulf the SNP. Anyway, an extended period of self-analysis and meditation may be just what Labour in Scotland needs.
The phrase most favoured by the forces of conservatism to convey alarm when events seem to move too quickly for their comfort is “instant gratification”. What we are witnessing in Scotland is an attitude of “instant gratification” towards the issues that confront the country, but here it’s the sign of a culture reawakening.
Traditionally, we have taken a curious pride in our gradualist approach to politics. Thus, even those of us on the left slowly are impelled to cool our radical jets and accept that on the road to curbing inequality we must work within a democratic framework and make many compromises. By the time in our lives we come to understand that entitlement and privilege are sewn into the fabric of Westminster politics it is too late to do anything about it. By then, we will have acquiesced in the deceit ourselves, by living a life on tick to those who fund the great Westminster deception.
What I saw on the road during the referendum campaign was the development of a “fast politics”. And we should avoid ascribing to it the negative connotations associated with “instant gratification”. For, at times, it was lovely to behold and ought also to scare every professional politician in Scotland. Many of our young people, adept in collating, processing and sharing information, seek rapid answers to the problems that gather around them.
Fed by images and messages on social media and discovering that they are far cleverer than the ragged clutch of paper qualifications by which the rest of us will judge them for the rest of their lives, they have grown resentful at why older generations seem happy to tolerate inequality in an affluent land.
In my extended family, I have watched parents and grandparents being evangelised before my eyes and having the old fury rekindled by their grandchildren. This occurred all over the country. Decades of political disengagement, weary cynicism and acceptance of their lot simply evaporated before this onslaught.
Why are there food banks? Why is the gap between rich and poor so vast? Why do so few people own half of Scotland? Why are 250,000 Scottish children living in poverty? Why do we treat our elderly and our infirm like animals? It happens, yet it shouldn’t happen, so why did we all allow it to happen?
Labour in Scotland simply didn’t read the runes and were contaminated by association with Westminster and its bankers and lobbyists, its cheating and corruption. So the party has become the first victim of the new fast politics. The SNP have learnt the language of this new force in Scottish politics far more quickly and can read the signs of the times better.
For now, they hold the dreams of the young and the previously disengaged. But if they don’t back up their words with action and continue to deploy the filibuster and retreat of the old politics in the face of social inequality then they too will reap a bitter harvest.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Kevin McKenna is a former deputy editor of the Herald and executive editor of the Daily Mail in Scotland.
