No Great Loss

The amount of fuss being made over the possibility that Labour might lose control of Glasgow City Council is a heartbreaking demonstration of how Scotland, once one of the most outward-looking societies on earth, has become almost comically insular since devolution.

It is really only an aberration that any party has overall control of a council elected by STV in at least a four-party polity. If the SNP became that party, then that would be a story. In more ways than one, if the council in question were Glasgow, of all Scotland's cities. But No Overall Control would be no story. It would be, and it looks as if it will be, Glasgow's slightly belated conformity to the new norm. Nothing more than that. Where will be the story there? Especially since the balance of power looks set to be held by a body of deselected Labour veterans. When it comes down to it, will even the person, never mind the party, of the Leader of the Council be changed?

Glasgow had a Tory-run council into the 1970s. It found a parliamentary berth for Roy Jenkins after the SDP had been created and after Warrington has denied him a seat. It has never been a Labour stronghold, any more than Scotland as a whole has ever been a Labour stronghold. The truth is that the Labour Party nationally has already written off Scotland almost as much as the Conservative Party has. Under the new boundaries, Scotland will not really be returning very many MPs and the inbuilt bias towards heavily urban areas will largely have been abolished. I repeat that Scotland was never somewhere on which Labour could rely in the way that it could on many, many parts of England and Wales.

Three quarters of Labour MPs are now from the three Northern regions of England, and they now meet as a single group. The two most solidly Labour areas are, as they have always been, County Durham and the South Wales Valleys. Both rural, like the majority of safe Labour seats when such seats first became identifiable in the 1920s. Both examples, among quite a few, of the greater openness to Labour on the part of rural areas rather than their adjacent cities.

Even among the rolling fields of the South of England, Labour is now winning council by-elections with 60 per cent of the vote in villages where it had not stood candidates for 20 years, for 30 years, for longer than that, or even since the dawn of time. Tony Blair never won Labour places like that. He never even tried to. But Ed Miliband is winning them resoundingly. I see no reason why he could not do so in the formerly Liberal parts of Scotland. The rules are different now. The Glasgow result will be a signal to all concerned to take account of that changed reality.