One of the many reasons that I never lose my appetite for politics is the menu of lip-smacking ironies it serves up. A particularly tasty dish — a cordon bleu irony, an irony worthy of a rating from Michelin — is produced by the important contest to be the next leader of the scunnered Scottish Labour party.
For Ed Miliband, the stakes could not be much higher. The defeat of independence removed one mortal threat to Labour, only for it to be swiftly succeeded by another. The party is panicking that it will lose a slew of seats to the Nationalists next May. Labour desperately needs a champion who can revive a demoralised and divided party north of the Tweed. At the very least, it needs a leader with enough energy and wit to stem the haemorrhaging of support before it becomes so severe that Miliband is denied any chance of emerging from the general election as the leader of the largest party in the Commons. What irony that those hopes are now pinned on Jim Murphy.
The MP for East Renfrewshire was one of the campaign managers for David Miliband. He was never reconciled, to put it mildly, to the younger brother’s ascension to the Labour leadership. And he did not much care who knew it. The last time that Miliband reorganised his parliamentary frontbench, he targeted Murphy by trying to shuffle him into obscurity.
What goes around comes around. There is a fair bit of talent among a rising generation of Scottish Labour politicians, but none of them is ready to quaff from the poisoned chalice that is leading the party north of the border. So it is that Murphy is the candidate the Labour leader’s office devoutly hopes to see installed as the new leader in Scotland. They will not say so explicitly for fear of further aggravating sensitivities, which are already inflamed after Johann Lamont, the ousted leader, noisily departed with the complaint that the Labour leader treated Scotland “like a branch office”. So Miliband will not overtly say that he wants Murphy to get the job, but that is his desired outcome. I can see why, having listened to the two Holyrood-based alternatives who have declared themselves candidates: Neil Findlay, Labour’s health spokesman and the candidate of the left, and Sarah Boyack, the Lothian MSP. Neither sounded assured when interviewed on the Today programme; neither appeared to fully fathom the level of threat to the Labour party north of the border. Murphy sees that Scottish Labour is in a fight — maybe a fight for its life. Unveiling his campaign team yesterday, he said bluntly: “I want to apologise because twice Scots have said they didn’t think we were good enough to govern… We didn’t listen to them.”
The general expectation is that he will win. He has name recognition. He is an impressive interviewee and debater. He can turn a phrase. “Changing your passport never put a penny in anyone’s pocket” was one of his lines during the referendum campaign. Another zinger was: “All Nationalists are patriots but not all patriots are Nationalists.” He was one of the few pro-unionists who managed to best Nationalists in TV debate. He is a teetotaller. Interestingly, he forswore drink not because he has ever had a problem with it himself but because he had seen too many of the men in his family succumb to one.
He is also a vegetarian. But there is nothing tofu and soya milk about the way he does his politics. He may have a soft voice in conversation but he has sharp teeth. We saw that during the referendum when he was the street-fighting star of the no campaign with his gutsy “100 Towns in 100 Days” tour of public squares where he used an Irn-Bru crate as his soapbox and made himself a martyr to Nationalist egg-throwers.
The less attractive dimension is that he has a reputation among colleagues as “a plotter, and a brutal plotter”. That’s not in keeping with the “new politics” Miliband says he favours, but it may be that only someone capable of ruthless manoeuvre can sort out the faction-ridden Scottish Labour party, a poisonous world in which it is hard to keep up with all the hatreds unless you possess an MA in Advanced Scottish Feuding Studies. This is a party that has managed to chew through six chiefs since the establishment of the Holyrood parliament.
The manner of this leadership election will matter. It will be watched keenly, by the Tories and their media allies, and by the Nationalists and their media friends, both hoping the contest will bring Labour into disrepute. The reforms to how the party elects its leaders do not start to kick in until 2015, so this will be decided by the antiquated three-part electoral college. Party members in Scotland will have a third of the votes. Scottish Labour MPs, members of the Scottish parliament and members of the European parliament will together have another third. The final third belongs to members of trade unions and affiliated organisations.
It is not quite true to say that Murphy will have no support among the unions. Usdaw, the shopworkers, is likely to endorse him. So is the smallish union that represents steel and textile workers and now calls itself Community. Like insurance companies and tampons, unions have got into a daft habit of acquiring meaningless names. His camp also has some hopes that the Scottish GMB might back him. But the executives of the big boys, Unite and Unison, will bitterly oppose him. There is a history of intense animosity between Jim Murphy and Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite.
It will be important that the unions do not behave as badly as some of them did in the Labour leadership contest of 2010, when membership lists were denied to candidates that union bosses did not like and literature endorsing their preferred candidate was included with ballot papers. Ed Miliband, the beneficiary of that underhand tactic in 2010, needs to make it clear that this should not happen again. He cannot instruct the unions; they control how they conduct their ballots. He can issue stern guidance about how a fair election ought to be conducted.
If Murphy is to win in a fashion convincing enough to give him real authority over Scottish Labour he must deal with the charges against him that are already being hurled with vigour both by Nationalists and some of the Labour left. The first charge is that he is a “Blairite”, regarded as a terrible crime by those who think that not being left wing enough is the root cause of Labour’s decline in Scotland. This claim is based on the widely retailed myth that New Labour was always wildly unpopular with Scots. It was certainly disliked by some left-wing Scots but not by voters as a whole. At the 1997 general election, Tony Blair’s Labour won 56 of the 72 seats in Scotland, the best result in the party’s history north of the border. It won 56 again in 2001. The tally fell to 41 in 2005, which was partly down to the backlash against the Iraq war but is mainly explained by the “devolution discount” that reduced the total number of Scottish seats to 59. There are many reasons why Labour is in so much trouble in Scotland: Taking its core voters for granted, allowing its organisation to atrophy, too many lacklustre or accident-prone leaders, and being outclassed by the Nationalists. None of those problems is answered with the simplistic cry: “Move to the left!” When Labour triumphed in Scotland in the past it was because it had the knack of appealing to both its traditional supporters and more middle-class voters.
The next charge against Murphy is that he is “London Labour”. He may have been born in Glasgow and represented East Renfrewshire for 17 years, but for the parochialists in his country it is an unforgiveable sin to have wanted to be a Scot serving in a UK-wide government. As one former senior Labour official puts it: “Four or five years ago a big figure coming up from Westminster would have been embraced. The difficulty is that Westminster is now so toxic. He will have to play it very well.”
This brings us to his most serious handicap. It is a practical one: He is not a member of the Holyrood parliament. Unless he can find a way to remedy that, he will be endlessly mocked by Nicola Sturgeon and the Nationalists as an absentee leader.
One recent opinion poll suggests that a massive swing to the Nationalists at the general election could reduce the number of Scottish Labour MPs to a rump of just four. I do not buy that. I do believe the Labour Scots who tell me they fear they could lose anything between 10 and 20 seats — enough to make a decisive difference in a tight election.
Miliband’s chances of becoming prime minister are now hugely dependent on what happens in Scotland over the next six months. That he is hoping salvation is at hand in the person of Murphy is the most delicious of ironies.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
