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From 1959 to 2010 Labour could be sure of one thing. It would win the majority of Scottish seats in a general election. It never won 50 per cent of votes cast, for there were parts of the country which never elected a Labour MP, but in the cities and across the central belt Labour was dominant. Labour Governments with small majorities – in 1964, 1966 and 1979 – were made possible by the party’s control of Scotland. So important was Scotland to the party that it was frequently said that, if Scotland became independent, there would never be another Labour Government in England.
Labour’s dominance in Scotland has melted, like snow off a dyke in a thaw. This was in part the consequence of economic change, the decline and then virtual disappearance of heavy industry and the weakening of trade unionism. Even so, the increase in the number of white-collar public sector jobs went some way to compensate for this.
At the same time the unpopularity of Thatcher Toryism led many in the established professions – the Law, the Church, Medicine, the Universities and the Civil Service – to vote Labour, a drift that was also reflected in the greater diversity of Labour candidates.
In the Labour landslide of 1945, few Scottish Labour MPs had university degrees. They were foot-soldiers, not officers, at Westminster and were rare birds in the Attlee and Wilson Cabinets. This changed. Scottish Labour MPs such as John Smith, Donald Dewar, Robin Cook and the young Gordon Brown kept the party on an even keel when it seemed in danger of moving so far to the Left as to be unelectable. When Labour at last won again in 1997, this time with a commanding majority, Tony Blair’s Cabinet was packed with Scots. Scottish Labour dominated British politics to such an extent that Jeremy Paxman spoke in a 2005 interview with The Sunday Times about “the Scottish Raj”. It even looked as if Labour had, thanks to Scotland, become what Harold Wilson had prematurely claimed it was: the natural party of government.
Yet, within twenty years, Labour’s support collapsed in Scotland. In 2015 it won only one Scottish seat, in 2017 seven, all but one with slim majorities. What had gone wrong? During the eighteen years of Tory Governments – Labour’s long years in the wilderness, 1979-97 – Scottish Labour committed itself, irrevocably, to devolution and the establishment of a Scottish Parliament. There were two reasons for this: first the determination that a Tory government with little electoral support in Scotland should never again impose Tory policies on domestic Scottish affairs; second the belief that devolution would be enough to halt the rise of Scottish Nationalism.
As Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland in the last years of John Major’s Government, George Robertson rashly declared that devolution would “bury the SNP”. Few heeded the warning from the veteran backbencher, Tam Dalyell, that on the contrary, it would put Scotland “on a motorway to Independence with no exits”.
The devolution legislation provided for a dual system of election to the Scottish Parliament. MSPs, 73 of them would be elected by the first-past-the-post system, 56 from party lists, every elector having two votes, one for the individual constituency, one for a regional list.
This apparently generous concession by Labour (which regularly had around two-thirds of Scottish seats at Westminster) was necessary if the Liberal Democrats and the SNP were to campaign for a Yes vote in the devolution referendum that took place in 1997. Neither would have supported a scheme which seemed likely to guarantee a permanent, or at least long-lasting, Labour majority in the new Scottish Parliament. With their support, the referendum was comfortably won, with only the Tories opposing devolution, and the first two governments in 1999 and 2003 were indeed Labour/Lib Dem coalitions.
Then in 2007 the SNP emerged as the largest party, only a few seats short of a majority in the Parliament. It formed a minority government, which was deemed moderately successful, and then in 2011 won an outright parliamentary majority. So surprisingly, we had a one-party government.
This wasn’t supposed to happen, and had indeed been thought so unlikely as to be almost impossible. That it did come about pointed to a significant difference between Labour and the SNP.
Labour’s support was concentrated. There were, as I wrote in the first sentence of this article, areas of the country where a Labour MP had never been elected. Indeed by the turn of the century, there were constituencies in the Highlands, the North-East and the Borders, where Labour candidates now came third or even fourth. In contrast the SNP attracted votes from all over the country, and where they didn’t win constituencies, they picked up MSPs elected on their party list.
There were other reasons for Labour’s electoral decline. By 2007 the party had been in office at Holyrood for eight years, at Westminster for ten. The feeling that it was time for a change was natural. Moreover, Tony Blair’s wars, in Kosovo and especially in Iraq, had not been popular in Scotland. There was also the perception that the brightest and best Labour politicians had opted to remain at Westminster, leaving only the second-raters for Holyrood, a perception sharpened by the early and untimely death of Donald Dewar, the first First Minister of Scotland.
With a majority government the SNP was able to bring on a Referendum on Independence in 2014. The “No” campaign was actually led by Labour with Alastair Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer until 2010 in the government led by Gordon Brown. But it was also powered by the Tory/Lib Dem Coalition in Westminster, and the de facto alliance of Labour Unionists with the Tories dismayed and angered voters on the left-wing of the Scottish Labour party. Some were already inclined to nationalism and preferred the idea of Independence to what they regarded as English Tory rule.
The defection of Labour voters made the referendum much closer than had been expected. Indeed in the last days when the drift to the “Yes” camp seemed to be gathering momentum, it took Gordon Brown’s intervention and robust defence of the Union to arrest it, and ensure that Independence was defeated.
The surge in support for Independence was carried over into the 2015 General Election, the most remarkable in modern Scottish History. With the Unionist vote divided between Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, the SNP swept the board. It got 50 per cent of the vote and won 56 of the 59 Scottish seats. Labour went into the election with 41 Scottish seats. It emerged with one, Ian Murray’s in Edinburgh South. There could be no doubt that the accusation of having “got into bed with the Tories” in the referendum campaign damaged Labour.
The 2016 Scottish Parliament elections saw the SNP pegged back, able to form only a minority government, relying on support from the Greens. The 2017 General Election resulted in an SNP decline and a Unionist revival. Significantly, however, the Tories benefited more than Labour, winning 11 seats to Labour’s 7, and, for the first time in decades attracting a bigger share of the vote than Labour, whose own vote improved on the 2015 figures by less than 3 per cent.
Despite Labour’s modest recovery from the nadir of 2015, it was undeniable that the SNP had, for the time being anyway, replaced Labour as “the natural Party of Government” in Scotland.
How to account for Labour’s fall? Its de facto alliance with the Tories in the Scottish Referendum played a part, highlighting the ambivalence of many Labour voters on the national question.
Nevertheless there were other causes, some with their roots deep in historical change. Ever since the 1920s Labour had been sure of support from the majority of Scottish Catholics, just as for a long time the Tories got the Protestant/Orange vote in Glasgow and the west of Scotland. But the Catholic Church was itself in decline and there was no longer a block Catholic vote to be delivered. The SNP had reached out to Scottish Catholics while presenting itself as a non-Sectarian Party. (Forty years ago a former President of the SNP, Billy Wolfe, had close links with the Orange Order.)
The SNP, once dismissed by Willie Ross, Secretary of State for Scotland in the Wilson Governments, as “Tartan Tories” had re-modelled itself as a Social Democratic party, capable of eating into traditional Labour support.
Labour had also lost its grip on local government in the cities and across the Central Belt. Required by the electoral system and Scottish election results to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats from 1999 to 2007, it had consented to the introduction of a form of proportional representation in council elections. This loss of control weakened Labour’s long-exercised power of local authority patronage.
Labour lacked effective and attractive leadership too. Since the death of Donald Dewar in October 2000, the Scottish Labour leadership had been a revolving door. Dewar was succeeded by Henry McLeish who was soon succeeded by Jack McConnell. He resigned after the loss of the 2007 election. Since then the party has been led by a succession of politicians who, whatever their qualities, came and went with dizzy-making speed: Wendy Alexander, Iain Gray, Johann Lamont, Jim Murphy, Kezia Dugdale and the present incumbent Richard Leonard – six leaders in twelve years, and it’s fair to say that none made much of an impression. Scottish Labour has been a flock without a capable shepherd. I would guess that many Labour voters can’t even name the party’s Scottish leader.
Some thought that the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the parent party would bring back left-wing voters who might have defected to the SNP. But the truth is that Scottish Labour has hardly been a left-wing party since the 1920s and the days of the Red Clydeside.
On the contrary it has been a douce small-c conservative managerial party, and now finds it has little left to manage. It scarcely represents any recognisable interest. Its statist centralising ethos has been appropriated by the SNP. Consequently it is difficult to identify anything distinctive about Scottish Labour now, difficult indeed to see what is the point of the party, even more difficult to see how it can recover, and impossible to see why it should. And without a Labour recovery in Scotland, a UK Labour government with a majority in the House of Commons looks improbable.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.