The end of Scottish Labour: Introducing devolution was suicide

With two senior Scottish Labour apparatchiks – EU elections campaign manager and Brexit spokesman Neil Findlay and shadow cabinet justice spokesman Daniel Johnson – resigning within a few hours of each other, the post-European election crisis of the legacy parties continues to take its toll north of the Border, as everywhere else. Findlay’s resignation was widely interpreted as leaping out of the balloon in the hope that Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard could avoid crashing and burning.

Of Scotland’s six EU parliamentary seats, three were won by the SNP on 37 per cent of the vote, one by the second-place Brexit Party with 15 per cent, one by the Liberal Democrats on 13 per cent and one by the Conservatives on 11 per cent. Labour lost both its seats and is now unrepresented at Strasbourg. One of its defeated MEPs, David Martin, was the longest serving UK politician in Europe.

This wipe-out marks the final outcome of the falling trajectory that Scottish Labour has been tumbling down since it committed hara-kiri by introducing devolution at the end of the last century. This is the liquidation of a political culture that was once so dominant as to amount to a one-party state. For more than half a century Labour hegemony was so axiomatic in Scotland as to resemble a tartan Soviet Union. Its collapse has a resonance of the end of that other socialist empire, in character if not in scale.

The heyday of Labour hegemony was the reign of Willie Ross as Secretary of State for Scotland, a post he occupied throughout Harold Wilson’s premiership from 1964 to 1976, with a Tory interlude from 1970 to 1974. When Ross attended a Cabinet meeting he did so in a completely different capacity from any other minister around the table.

He came to Downing Street as satrap of Scotland, consistently supplying more than 40 parliamentary seats to Labour governments on wafer-thin majorities, to present his list of requirements to be rubber-stamped. He did not come to debate or request, but to announce his demands which would unfailingly be met.

Labour Scotland was a pyramidal system of patronage, as tight-knit as the feudal system, from ministerial down to municipal ward level. The mainly working-class population inhabited grey pebble-dashed, porridge-textured council houses or, as symbols of Ceausescu-style progress, nightmarish tower blocks.

Municipal tenants could not choose which colour to paint their front doors: the local authority – which meant Labour – decided that for them. Labour Scotland had the highest proportion of its population living in state housing of any country in Europe, apart from the then East Germany.

In fact, Labour Scotland bore a considerable resemblance to the German Democratic Republic, minus the spontaneous gaiety. Powerful commissars on education committees bestowed state school headmasterships on reliable Party men. The population, kept docile by benefits bribery, took refuge in gallows humour such as the maxim that no councillor’s niece had ever waited longer than an hour for a council house, or cynical quips (“We have the best councillors that money can buy”).

Pace Theresa May, anyone who wanted to see what a nasty party looked like might profitably have visited Scotland at the height of Labour rule – a steely nomenklatura. From the early 1970s, with the discovery of North Sea oil, its SNP challengers became equipped for the first time with an economic argument for independence: “It’s Scotland’s oil.” This competition added paranoia to Scottish Labour’s other unattractive features, but it was largely unwarranted.

In the general election of October 1974 the SNP won a record 11 seats, but between then and the end of the 20th century it fell back to six seats or fewer. In 1997 the nationalists won six seats while Labour, riding high on the Blair tide, won 56. The oil bubble would not last forever and the SNP challenge had successfully been contained. Scottish Labour looked set for a further century of hegemony; but hubris intervened.

Donald Dewar insisted a Scottish parliament must be established, with considerable devolved powers. Even the neophiliac Tony Blair hesitated, but Dewar persuaded him to agree. Dewar was a rhetorician who, prior to 1997, had held no government office except party chief whip. His ego proved more powerful than the caution of anti-devolutionists. Scottish Labour set merrily about the work of auto-destruction. For this Dewar was lauded as the “Father of the Nation”. The reality was that he was Scotland’s Kerensky.

Although George (now Lord) Robertson forecast that devolution would “kill nationalism stone dead”, the Holyrood parliament gave the SNP precisely the forum it needed to expand from a taxi-load of separatists heading pointlessly to Westminster, into a party of government, which it duly became at Holyrood in 2007. It has governed Scotland since then, either as a majority administration or with the support of Green loons.

At first the Scottish electorate took a “split screen” view of Holyrood and Westminster elections so that it awarded the SNP power at Holyrood, but continued to send the usual contingent of more than 40 Labour MPs to Westminster alongside half a dozen nationalists. That changed dramatically at the 2015 election, in the highly charged atmosphere post-independence referendum and with a Conservative-led coalition at Westminster, when the SNP won 56 seats and Labour, Lib Dems and Tories just one each.

The balance was slightly redressed in 2017 when the SNP share fell to 35 seats, but even then Labour won only seven, in third place behind the Tories. It was evident that the entire Scottish Labour political culture was in meltdown and past recovery, a diagnosis now confirmed by its expulsion from the European parliament.

Any faint hope of recovery is being eliminated by Labour’s knee-jerk reaction to defeat. A mindless “sauve qui peut” cry that the party must embrace a Remain policy and a second Brexit referendum has started a panic stampede towards electoral annihilation. No one in Scottish Labour has thought it through, nor is the immediate aftermath of defeat the best time to craft a future strategy.

Remain-supporting Labour voters who have defected to the SNP or Lib Dems are not guaranteed to return to a party too politically impotent to deliver a Remain policy. On the other hand, after the Brexit referendum a report by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) found that 36 per cent of Labour voters, as well as the same percentage of SNP supporters, voted Leave. Most of those voters are likely to have stayed with Labour since Jeremy Corbyn presented it as a soft Brexit party. But they are unlikely to do so if Labour turns Remainer, nor will Leavers desert the SNP for Labour if it adopts the same Brexit policy as Nicola Sturgeon.

This cunning plan amounts to a scheme to shed a second tranche of Labour voters, leaving the party non-viable. And how could Labour oppose Nicola Sturgeon’s demand for a second independence referendum if it supported a second Brexit plebiscite? Scottish Labour lemmings are in full stampede towards the cliff edge. It is another Dewar/Kerensky moment.

North as well as south of the Border, as it thrashes around in its death throes, Labour is exposing itself as a party devoid of principle or direction. It is scrambling into the dustbin of history.

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