Scottish Labour: How the Mighty are Fallen
31 Oct 2014
For an English MP the recent calamitous polling results on the Scottish Labour party are extraordinary. One poll indicated that Labour might hold on to only four seats in Scotland. One can only observe “how are the mighty fallen!”When I entered parliament in the late 1980s, the Scottish group of Labour MPs was a powerhouse. This was partly because there were so many of them. Scots were one of the largest single regional groups of Labour MPs. They were certainly the most cohesive. And they were the inheritors of an imperishable Labour movement tradition. The secrets of Gordon Brown’s socialist heart can be found in his admiring biography of the blazing Scottish socialist seer John Maxton.
And I will never forget the passage in EP Thompson’s Writings by Candlelight where he describes being editor of the New Left Review and editing the essays of a brilliant young Fife miner, Lawrence Daly. He recalled that the sheets of paper would always have a sprinkling of coal dust, because Daly was writing straight after a shift down the pit. Daly is sadly forgotten now. But he became a hugely influential general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers when it was the Brigade of Guards of the Labour movement. The EP Thompson passage summed up everything about the Scottish Labour movement that held the rest of us in awe: the powerful autodidact tradition; the integral relationship with industrial workers; the commitment and the passion.
But Scottish MPs were also a power in the Parliamentary Labour Party for a simpler reason. In those days, Labour MPs voted for the shadow cabinet. Scottish MPs always voted in a block. And they used those votes to power a generation of Scottish MPs to the top of the party. Among them were: Donald Dewar, Robin Cook, George Robertson,John Reid, Des Browne, Gavin Strang and, of course, Gordon Brown. They all owed their ascendancy in the party, partly due to their undoubted merits, but also because of Scottish MPs’ block vote in the Labour shadow cabinet elections.
They were, of course, all men, and the Scottish Labour movement had always tended towards the patriarchal. One might wonder how much support Johann Lamont received. And perhaps, if she had not felt she was going to be bundled out of her role unceremoniously, she might not have exited hurling verbal hand grenades.
If Scottish Labour was in its ascendancy a quarter of a century ago, London MPs (particularly leftwing ones) were pariahs. It was London, and our loony left ideas about women’s rights, racial justice and LGBT issues which were judged to have lost Labour the 1987 general election. Now these ideas are mainstream, London has proved a stronghold against Ukip and the media describes Scottish Labour as in meltdown.
It is not for an outsider to judge exactly what has gone wrong. But we live in interesting times when a Conservative prime minister pilots gay marriage through parliament and the birthplace of the founder of the Labour party, Keir Hardie, is in such turmoil.
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