The road to Scottish Labour's recovery?
| Author | Govan, Dexter |
| Position | FOOD AND FARMING |
Winter had still not loosened its grip on Scotland by 6 May. Across the north, harsh winds left snow on the roads, ignorant of the election taking place. We Scottish Labour members woke in the cold and the dark and felt at once at home. We have grown used to such conditions in the fourteen years since we lost power in Holyrood. Setting out for polling stations, it is sometimes difficult to remember what pushes us to continue along the road. It would be easier to curl up off to the side; to wait for the illusory warmth of hypothermia and, ultimately, death. We continue along though, knowing well we may succumb to it anyway.
There are many parallels between the Scottish Labour Party and the terrible beauty of American novelist Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The novel maps the journey south of a man and his son, fleeing an apocalyptic winter through dead countryside. Along the way, they encounter the worst vestiges of humanity: slavery and cannibalism. Scottish Labour has plenty of the latter, but before coming to the meat of the issue, I should offer up the facts of the most recent election.
In the 2021 Scottish Parliament elections, Scottish Labour lost two seats on our 2016 performance, taking our total down to just twenty-two out of 129. This is our worst ever return. In the Scottish Parliament seats are divided between constituencies, such as Dumbarton, and lists, representing larger areas such as the West of Scotland. These seats are combined through the additional member system to make up the Parliament. Scottish Labour held on to only two of Scotland's seventy-three constituency seats, and of the fifty-six list seats, acquired only twenty. Across Scotland, our constituency vote dropped by 1 per cent to just 21.3 per cent. This is our worst ever performance in the constituency ballot. In the list, our vote dropped by 1.1 per cent to 18 per cent. This is our worst ever performance in the list ballot.
In the aftermath we have been told, truthfully, that new leader Anas Sarwar had a good campaign. Taking his post ten weeks before the election, our party's leadership now points to an opinion poll by Ipsos MORI/STV taken shortly before his arrival which had Labour on 14 per cent. (1) Within this context, then, Scottish Labour's performance was a marked improvement. We were 'back on the pitch', or so the soundbite went. (2) In fact, by any reading, the poll was a low outlier. Of the six major opinion polls including Ipsos MORI/STV taken between the beginning of the year and Sarwar's election on 27 February, Labour in fact averaged 18 per cent of the vote. (3) So despite Sarwar's good campaign, Labour failed to achieve any real swing in the intervening weeks.
But I am less concerned by this so much as by Scottish Labour's wider travails and our journey through the bleak wilderness of Scotland's political periphery. In The Road, McCarthy's protagonists are forced to flee the north. But, beset by horror, they do not give up. In their journey the nobility of humanity shines through 'the light', as McCarthy calls it, which they carry. This perhaps marks a point of difference from the Scottish Labour Party, whose light, our hope, grows dimmer with each passing election.
We are never told what apocalyptic event threw McCarthy's world into chaos. In the Scottish Labour Party, we make up our own myths. Perhaps the gravest of these is that it was the Independence Referendum that changed our environment and divided Scottish politics such that Labour was cast into the wilderness. In truth, in each of the five Holyrood elections since the foundation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, Labour's vote share has declined.
It was not the independence referendum of 2014 that caused Labour's fall, it was the creation of Holyrood itself. The Scottish Parliament is an ossuary, politically as well as architecturally. Its warrens and nooks hide damp and skulls and relics of potential. It is not where politics dies, but rather where it is buried by the hands of third-sector executives brought in to manage political challenges. (4) And yet, out of power since 2011 (three years before the independence referendum), Labour has struggled to challenge this depoliticisation, perhaps because we were its architects. In a crypt of our own making, our twenty-two MSPs now say prayers over the bones of our party.
The decay has spread from Holyrood to Westminster and to local government, too. In 2015, Labour lost all but one of our Scottish MPs, and despite a brief rally in 2017, Ian Murray now once again sits unaccompanied in the House of Commons. A frightening prospect for everyone. In 2017, Labour lost control of Glasgow City Council for the first time in almost forty years. Surely this was a clear symbol of our decline and a moment to take stock, to plan a new course.
Instead, our gaze remained fixed on Holyrood's chamber, each failure in turn bringing a leadership crisis, adding more bones to the pile while outside and unnoticed our habitat turned against us. In one of the more recent leadership crises, following the 2019 general election, Jackie Baillie became deputy leader of our party. She had run against Matt Kerr on a decidedly unionist platform and offered a centrist rebuttal to Richard Leonard's more left-leaning leadership. Many, including myself, warned of the folly of tacking to a hard-line unionism, but Baillie went on to win with 58 per cent of the vote in April 2020. (5)
Nine months later and plagued by the live leaking of Scottish Executive Council meetings to the Daily Record, Leonard himself resigned in January 2021. (6) This triggered a leadership contest between Anas Sarwar and Monica Lennon. Sarwar, again the more unionist and centrist candidate, triumphed with 58 per cent of the vote. This shows us that Sarwar and Baillie's brand of politics clearly still appeals to Scottish Labour's members. It is a fiction of the left that our membership is far to the left of the party leadership. Despite having both been present throughout our dreadful journey, Baillie and Sarwar hark back to that veneer of Blairite vitality and efficacy which still has the power to entice us, despite its failures. These were the grounds on which they guided us into the 2021 Scottish Parliament election.
From the beginning of the campaign, it was clear that our pitch to voters would be centred on our new leader. Leaks to the Daily Record stopped abruptly when Sarwar took up his post, and the paper's coverage of the leadership team became generally positive. Any connections between these events will be left to the reader's speculation, but the Record's role in shaping opinion in Scottish politics should not be underestimated. Attaching Sarwar to a message of COVID recovery, the campaign sought to avoid the constitutional question and associate Labour's new leadership with Scotland's...
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