Owen Jones
The old political order is a dying patient: each week
brings new convulsions, more symptoms of approaching morbidity.
All three main party leaders have ample reason to spend the next six months howling in the foetal position in some lonely corner of Westminster.
Nick Clegg: the man who went from Churchillian popularity levels to the walking, talking personification of political opportunism in a matter of weeks in 2010, prompting the mass defection of anti-Tory voters from Lib Dem ranks.
David Cameron: the leader of a party in long-term decline who failed to win an election against a disintegrating Labour government in the midst of economic calamity, losing voters and MPs alike to ex-City broker Nigel Farage’s “people’s army”.
Ed Miliband: the leader who disastrously fails to inspire with a coherent alternative, even as living standards plummet, who now faces the implosion of the Labour party in the nation to which it owes so much of its existence, Scotland.
It’s springtime for Ukip, and the Greens show occasional tentative signs of a mini-surge. First-past-the-post seemed to freeze the old system in aspic. Another indecisive election result could do for it.
The three Westminster parties are in crisis, but the resignation of Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont brings us back to Labour woe.
Scottish Labour is not simply in one of those ruts parties occasionally get themselves into, before dusting themselves off, having a few policy reviews and then rebounding back into office.
As things stand, the political grim reaper is hammering away at the party’s doors.
The party believed Scotland was theirs for keeps, that voters could go nowhere else (whoops); and, in turn, Westminster Labour saw Scottish Labour as its vassal, too.
Long before the referendum, the Scottish Labour party had been emptied of its activists.
From the diminished ranks of a once mighty movement, the most talented opted for Westminster; no wonder the Scottish party in Holyrood – with a few striking exceptions – is so barren of ideas, of ability, of inspiration, of anything.
With much of the party reduced to an exhausted rump, a catastrophic strategic decision was made to link arms with the Scottish Tories and run a joint campaign of fear, rather than an optimistic independent Labour campaign pledging a federal Britain and a Scotland of social justice.
The result? “Labour” is a word spat out in contempt by all too many Scots, including a sizeable chunk of its own former voters.
Speak to prominent Scottish Labour figures, and they know the abyss beckons. They just don’t have the vaguest idea what to do about it.
If Scottish Labour does indeed die, historians will ponder just how the party of Keir Hardie allowed itself to be outflanked on the left by a Scottish National party committed to George Osborne-style cuts to corporation tax.
But that is indeed the party’s quite remarkable achievement.
And that brings us to the next act in the possible demise of Scottish Labour. Labour’s crisis owes so much to an embrace of Blairism that left a progressive vacuum the SNP was able to fill.
It is seen – as Lamont put it herself – as “like a branch office of London”. The yes campaign repeatedly conjured up the Iraq war as a bitter memory of Westminster injustice.
So who is being lined up as Lamont’s successor? The arch-Blairite, staunchly pro-war Westminster machine politician, Jim Murphy.
It is not so much a loss of senses; it raises questions as to whether there are senses to lose in the first place.
There are signs of life: Labour’s education spokeswoman Kezia Dugdale has proved a doughty campaigner, in some areas, particularly when challenging the legal loan sharks circling over ever-struggling families, though she seems reluctant to say the least.
Scottish Labour needs someone who understands that it must become a progressive alternative to the SNP to survive: the national Labour party’s fate may well depend on it, too.
Step forward, then, Neil Findlay, the party’s health spokesman. He is little-known now, but that may be about to change.
“Anyone who thinks that we can take on the SNP from any other position than firmly to their left needs to re-enter this world from cloud cuckoo land,” he wrote last week.
He calls for a national house-building programme, including council housing, desperately needed in Scotland, which has about 180,000 families trapped on waiting lists; a policy of full employment; the living wage and rights for struggling workers treated as commodities to be hired and fired; an industrial policy to support the industries of the future; and a new generation of apprenticeships and college places.
Under Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP will present a more radical prospectus than that offered by Alex Salmond: Findlay offers the possibility of a charismatic, inspiring alternative.
The SNP should fear him.
Though much of the Scottish Labour elite may be a technocratic black hole, full of climbers and never-has-beens seething with contempt for each other, ideas for a renaissance can be found within this battered, broken party.
The Red Paper Collective has been championing the sorts of policies and ideas you might expect from a genuine Labour party.
If they’re adopted, perhaps it won’t only be the likes of the SNP and Scottish Greens enjoying surging memberships.
Will Scottish Labour revive? I’m no betting man, but even if I was, I would not be quick to part with my dosh.
In the 1950s Scotland voted en masse for the Tories’ sister party, the Unionists; Labourite hegemony may prove a passing historical episode, too.
Labour’s problems, after all, are hardly confined to its Scottish trauma.
Perhaps the old political order won’t collapse after all: perhaps “remember that bloke Farage and his real ale?” will be all we say about Ukip in 10 years; perhaps the SNP tide will retreat, the Greens will return to political irrelevance, and first-past-the-post will return to delivering stable majority governments.
It hardly seems likely though, does it?
Voters are bored with on-message technocrats with no vision, with vacuous political promises that don’t even begin to address the everyday problems of modern life in Britain.
Perhaps we’re now witnessing a new order – offering a more diverse range of political ideas and parties – colliding with a defunct electoral system.
The warning to Labour’s leaders in London is clear. Your fate in Scotland could well be the harbinger of your future south of the border, too.
All three main party leaders have ample reason to spend the next six months howling in the foetal position in some lonely corner of Westminster.
Nick Clegg: the man who went from Churchillian popularity levels to the walking, talking personification of political opportunism in a matter of weeks in 2010, prompting the mass defection of anti-Tory voters from Lib Dem ranks.
David Cameron: the leader of a party in long-term decline who failed to win an election against a disintegrating Labour government in the midst of economic calamity, losing voters and MPs alike to ex-City broker Nigel Farage’s “people’s army”.
Ed Miliband: the leader who disastrously fails to inspire with a coherent alternative, even as living standards plummet, who now faces the implosion of the Labour party in the nation to which it owes so much of its existence, Scotland.
It’s springtime for Ukip, and the Greens show occasional tentative signs of a mini-surge. First-past-the-post seemed to freeze the old system in aspic. Another indecisive election result could do for it.
The three Westminster parties are in crisis, but the resignation of Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont brings us back to Labour woe.
Scottish Labour is not simply in one of those ruts parties occasionally get themselves into, before dusting themselves off, having a few policy reviews and then rebounding back into office.
As things stand, the political grim reaper is hammering away at the party’s doors.
The party believed Scotland was theirs for keeps, that voters could go nowhere else (whoops); and, in turn, Westminster Labour saw Scottish Labour as its vassal, too.
Long before the referendum, the Scottish Labour party had been emptied of its activists.
From the diminished ranks of a once mighty movement, the most talented opted for Westminster; no wonder the Scottish party in Holyrood – with a few striking exceptions – is so barren of ideas, of ability, of inspiration, of anything.
With much of the party reduced to an exhausted rump, a catastrophic strategic decision was made to link arms with the Scottish Tories and run a joint campaign of fear, rather than an optimistic independent Labour campaign pledging a federal Britain and a Scotland of social justice.
The result? “Labour” is a word spat out in contempt by all too many Scots, including a sizeable chunk of its own former voters.
Speak to prominent Scottish Labour figures, and they know the abyss beckons. They just don’t have the vaguest idea what to do about it.
If Scottish Labour does indeed die, historians will ponder just how the party of Keir Hardie allowed itself to be outflanked on the left by a Scottish National party committed to George Osborne-style cuts to corporation tax.
But that is indeed the party’s quite remarkable achievement.
And that brings us to the next act in the possible demise of Scottish Labour. Labour’s crisis owes so much to an embrace of Blairism that left a progressive vacuum the SNP was able to fill.
It is seen – as Lamont put it herself – as “like a branch office of London”. The yes campaign repeatedly conjured up the Iraq war as a bitter memory of Westminster injustice.
So who is being lined up as Lamont’s successor? The arch-Blairite, staunchly pro-war Westminster machine politician, Jim Murphy.
It is not so much a loss of senses; it raises questions as to whether there are senses to lose in the first place.
There are signs of life: Labour’s education spokeswoman Kezia Dugdale has proved a doughty campaigner, in some areas, particularly when challenging the legal loan sharks circling over ever-struggling families, though she seems reluctant to say the least.
Scottish Labour needs someone who understands that it must become a progressive alternative to the SNP to survive: the national Labour party’s fate may well depend on it, too.
Step forward, then, Neil Findlay, the party’s health spokesman. He is little-known now, but that may be about to change.
“Anyone who thinks that we can take on the SNP from any other position than firmly to their left needs to re-enter this world from cloud cuckoo land,” he wrote last week.
He calls for a national house-building programme, including council housing, desperately needed in Scotland, which has about 180,000 families trapped on waiting lists; a policy of full employment; the living wage and rights for struggling workers treated as commodities to be hired and fired; an industrial policy to support the industries of the future; and a new generation of apprenticeships and college places.
Under Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP will present a more radical prospectus than that offered by Alex Salmond: Findlay offers the possibility of a charismatic, inspiring alternative.
The SNP should fear him.
Though much of the Scottish Labour elite may be a technocratic black hole, full of climbers and never-has-beens seething with contempt for each other, ideas for a renaissance can be found within this battered, broken party.
The Red Paper Collective has been championing the sorts of policies and ideas you might expect from a genuine Labour party.
If they’re adopted, perhaps it won’t only be the likes of the SNP and Scottish Greens enjoying surging memberships.
Will Scottish Labour revive? I’m no betting man, but even if I was, I would not be quick to part with my dosh.
In the 1950s Scotland voted en masse for the Tories’ sister party, the Unionists; Labourite hegemony may prove a passing historical episode, too.
Labour’s problems, after all, are hardly confined to its Scottish trauma.
Perhaps the old political order won’t collapse after all: perhaps “remember that bloke Farage and his real ale?” will be all we say about Ukip in 10 years; perhaps the SNP tide will retreat, the Greens will return to political irrelevance, and first-past-the-post will return to delivering stable majority governments.
It hardly seems likely though, does it?
Voters are bored with on-message technocrats with no vision, with vacuous political promises that don’t even begin to address the everyday problems of modern life in Britain.
Perhaps we’re now witnessing a new order – offering a more diverse range of political ideas and parties – colliding with a defunct electoral system.
The warning to Labour’s leaders in London is clear. Your fate in Scotland could well be the harbinger of your future south of the border, too.
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