Battle for Britain: The Union needs a Scottish Labour revival – fast
This is Iain Martin’s latest newsletter for Reaction subscribers.
In the latest opinion polling from Scotland, the Labour party is on just 16% (-2) of the vote in the constituency section and 18% (-) in the regional list. According to Savanta ComRes for The Scotsman the Conservatives are on 23% (+4) and 21% (+5), presumably boosted by the early vaccines effect. It is more difficult for the SNP to say that Britain is irredeemably useless, and only worth leaving, now that Kate Bingham and the UK vaccines taskforce have done their work. The British Army is helping with vaccinations across the UK. The NHS, separately run in Scotland and England, is cooperating frutifully cross-border. To the grievance-inclined question “what has the UK ever done for us?” Unionists now have an even clearer answer. Look at early vaccinations and the power of combined borrowing clout. Look what we can achieve together as the UK.
While the vindication of shared national endeavour is encouraging from a pro-UK perspective, what the Union forces desperately need this spring is a revival in the fortunes of the Scottish Labour party, combined with a low turnout in the Holyrood elections due in May.
If the SNP fails to get 50% of the votes and 50% of the seats in that election, and turn out is little more than half the Scottish electorate, then the SNP will sound ridiculous claiming there must be a referendum soon. There isn’t such a clamour, anyway, as the polling makes clear. Floating voters may say they are prepared to consider independence – they are being dubbed “indy curious” – but they are in no hurry for it to be decided soon. “Lord, mibbe make me independent, but not yet.”
You may say, incidentally, that this doesn’t matter and that England has had enough of the squabbling anyway. Fine, look away, although the likely costs in terms of defence, security, and geopolitics arising from the messy end of the UK are considerable.
If you do care about the continuing existence of the United Kingdom, as a positive force for good internationally, then get ready for the fascinating, brute, raw political battle that will be fought in the next twelve weeks until polling day. This is the key, defining political battle right now – what cabinet ministers refer to as the Battle for Britain.
Unionists are fighting to ensure the Nats fall short and the guaranteed way to deny the SNP a majority in May is for Labour to knock five, six or seven points off the SNP vote share. In that new poll the SNP is on 54% (+1) for the Holyrood constituency contest, and 43% (-) for the list voting intention.
In that context, the latest low Labour numbers are just dire. They would have been difficult to compute even a decade ago, and two decades ago almost impossible to imagine with Donald Dewar as First Minister and devolved Holyrood newly established. Scottish Labour was scandal-prone, true, but it was powerful and seemingly secure behind a wall of votes in the formerly industrial central belt that blocked the SNP. In its pomp, Scottish Labour’s main characters tended to see Scottish politics as something to be mediated internally, and then they would tell the rest of us what the party had decided. A lot like the dominant, though internally riven, SNP does today.
Much of the blame for the rise of the SNP and the latest threat to the Union is accorded to the Tories, especially in England. The flavour of English politics not being to Scottish tastes, the departure of Ruth Davidson (temporarily returned to stand in at Holyrood), and perceptions of Boris Johnson, have all played their part.
Nonetheless, it is the virtual collapse of Scottish Labour as a serious entity that has made SNP dominance under Alex Salmond and then his nemesis Nicola possible. Fuse together the longstanding core SNP vote, of about 30%, and half of the vote that used to be Labour, say 20% of the electorate, and you get to about half of Scotland no matter what the other parties do. That has been a calamitous combination in the last decade for the Unionist parties. It is the big, salient, seemingly unalterable fact of Scottish politics.
The ruination of Labour in England, post-Blair and Brown, helps explain why it happened. The question “which party stands up for Scotland best?” has long influenced voting north of the border, but Labour no longer being a serious contender at a UK level meant that voters in Scotland looked elsewhere.
What was the point of Labour if it could not – as Blair did – form a British government? If you are a Scottish voter in a former Labour stronghold, now controlled by the SNP, and you see that Labour is unserious, that under Corbyn it cannot beat the Tories in England and change the governance of the UK, then why waste a vote on Labour in Scotland at a Westminster election? The habit – voting SNP, thought of as Scotland’s party and a barrier to the primarily English Conservatives – becomes established.
Is there any chance the situation might be about to change? Remember, Labour does not need to double its vote share (though that would longer term solve the problem). This May it just needs to take a decent chunk out of the SNP vote in central Scotland to deny Sturgeon that majority.
Time is tight, but in a few weeks things are about to get competitive for the first time in many years.
On Saturday 27 February Scottish Labour will get a new leader, presumably Anas Sarwar, a moderate, a former dentist, a member of the Scottish parliament. Ordinarily, this would be a minor story. When so much rests on how Labour performs in Scotland in the next few months, it is a major national story, or it deserves to be.
Sarwar is not without his problems. The Nationalists will attack him with everything they can find early on, partly because the SNP’s strategists will know the risk of him getting established. When Labour chose Jim Murphy in the aftermath of the 2014 referendum I wrongly thought that his skills as a street fighting campaigner would give him a chance of engineering a revival. He got flattened by the SNP machine and the voters.
Sarwar though cannot be derided as a Westminster imposition. His arrival – if he wins – can be presented by Labour as something fresh and interesting, a great asset when trying to get the attention of jaded voters looking for a new story.
Imagine an election rally (socially distanced) or televised campaign event clipped for broadcast news in late April. Anas Sarwar is speaking, criticising the squabbling SNP’s record, defending devolution from the threat of Nationalist destruction, and celebrating the UK shared endeavour. On the platform are Sir Keir Starmer, a credible candidate for Prime Minister, and former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, a mighty campaigner. Also featuring is Jackie Baillie, deputy leader in Scotland who has been so impressive in the Holyrood inquiry into Scottish government wrong-doing over the Salmond affair.
Sarwar plus Baillie, plus Starmer and Brown, is by some distance the best offer Labour has made in Scotland for a decade at least. It is a dramatic improvement from the days of Corbyn.
Unionists must hope that the voters are listening and that time is not too short for Sarwar to make an impact. If it works, knocking those vital points off the Nats, then the media narrative about Scotland will shift quickly from the supposed brilliance of Queen Nicola to a Nationalist argument over how she fell short, with the anti-Sturgeon grouping in the SNP led by Salmond organising her removal. Everything to play for.
PS My old newspaper The Scotsman in Edinburgh has a new editor. The new owners could not have made a better choice than Neil McIntosh (ex-BBC, WSJ and Guardian). I worked with Neil at the WSJ a decade or so ago. He is hugely talented, with a love of newspapers and a deep understanding of digital. Like many formerly great newspapers, the Scotsman has suffered badly in recent years, with its editors and journalists battling to save it from poor management. The chasing of programmatic advertising, small amounts of money from big tech to chase clicks, has been a disaster, cheapening the site and ruining the experience. The answer – as The Times and other titles have demonstrated – is in building a strong online subscription base, a direct relationship with readers paying monthly or annually because they value journalism. The Scotsman needs to do similar, and if anyone can rebuild the title Neil McIntosh can. If you are reading this, you are a paying subscriber to Reaction and you know what we do. Thank you from our expanding team. Lots more to come from us, soon.
Iain Martin
Reaction Editor
and publisher