Build a Better Boat


Paul Sinclair was the senior advisor to the leader of the Scottish Labour Party for three years and in this opinion piece for The Times he sets out a case explaining why Labour in Scotland is in terminal decline.

Now I agree with much of what Paul Sinclair has to say and I think he hits the nail on its head when he points to a culture where talent and merit are far less important than the tribal support of powerful party figures or one of the big Labour affiliated trade unions.

I wonder which of Jim Devine's Unison colleagues spoke about the union saving itself a redundancy payment by sending Jim to Westminster, but the truth is that Westminster is full of over-promoted, untalented Scottish Labour MPs who are in Parliament because of who they know, not what they know.

And while the trade unions are supposed to represent the interests and outlook of all their members, in reality the unions reflect the views of a very narrow group of Labour activists which means that the 'gene pool' of Scottish talent is shrinking all the time.

So while some in the Party seem to think the good ship Labour is just in need of a 'refit', if you ask me the real challenge is to build a bigger, better and fit for purpose boat. 

Scottish Labour needs to confront its identity crisis

By Paul Sinclair - The Times


The party knows it is against the SNP but not what it is for. The May election looks like a gathering storm

Compliments are not the common currency of the Scottish Labour party. But I got one when I left after three years as adviser to the outgoing leader, Johann Lamont. A rather sad one. A senior member of the party, having failed to persuade me to stay, said: “Thank you anyway. You did a remarkable job over the last three years in persuading the press that the Scottish Labour party actually exists.”

Sparing my own blushes, that is where we are. Is there actually any substance to the mirage of the Scottish Labour party? The party that once boasted the intellectual heft of Smith, Cook, Dewar and Brown now looks lightweight.

It knows what it is against – the SNP. But it doesn’t seem to know what it is for.

And there is a learned helplessness among too many of its elected members expecting someone else to sort it out. A party of commentators rather than competence.

How did this come about? While the SNP sought to recruit over the past twenty years, the Labour party was too quick to repel. Alex Salmond has many attributes but for me the cleverest thing he did was 25 years ago when he made it known that he wanted to recruit anyone under 35 who had talent and was interested in politics.

He pursued talent relentlessly and while his strike rate may not have been high, it means that now the SNP have an intellectual and strategic capacity that outstrips the opposition.

And what was the Scottish Labour party doing at the same time? Nothing. Precisely nothing. Those were the days when you just had to weigh the Labour vote. Days some thought could never end.

New Labour reform did not need to come to Scotland because Scotland already voted Labour in droves.

It was said at that time, of the two constituency Labour parties in Enfield, that one had more members than the entire city of Glasgow, the other had more than all of Edinburgh. And why, if you ran a CLP in Scotland, would you recruit – that would only dissipate your power when you could choose the candidate.

Convinced that Scotland would never vote SNP, the Scottish Labour party looked in on itself. And it took the people of Scotland for granted. How could they possibly believe that replacing Robin Cook with someone like Jim Devine was something no one would notice? As a journalist at the time, I asked one of Mr Devine’s union colleagues how they thought they would get away with it. “It is saving us a redundancy payment,” I was told.

And that is one of the key problems. Seats at Westminster and Holyrood have become prizes for time servers, or places to put problems, rather than opportunities for people of ability.

The young talent in the Scottish parliament – people such as Kezia Dugdale, Jenny Marra and Neil Bibby – are only there by accident. Unable to get constituency nominations, they were elected in the slaughter of 2011 on the top-up list system precisely because Labour lost so many constituencies.

The massacre of that election should have been more than a warning. A referendum was guaranteed and even if it was won by the No side, clearly Scotland and the UK were to be changed for ever. But while the wind of home rule blew, the Scottish Labour party was revealed as the most Westminster-centric of all Scottish parties – and even then riven with division.

Rather than grasp the initiative on the agenda of new powers for the Scottish parliament, the Labour leadership saw the reforms through the prism of what it would mean for a future Labour government at Westminster. The future of the United Kingdom was at stake, but for Labour the future of the party was more important.

It speaks to a belief that too many of our Scottish MPs regard Westminster as a way to escape Scottish politics rather than a way to represent Scotland.

So, having gone through a referendum campaign with an unconvincing devolution offer, Labour has been forced to come round to something closer to the original offer from Johann Lamont, then the Labour leader, which so many at Westminster railed against.

Opinion polls suggest that the Labour party will pay a price for that reluctance in May’s general election. Some say the party has been damaged by joining with the coalition parties in Better Together.

I think the real damage is that the Tories and the Liberal Democrats saw first-hand that the “Labour machine” didn’t exist. They even saw that some Labour figures were more willing to share a table with them than share the same airspace with their own Labour colleagues.

The Labour party doesn’t seem to know what it is for – it just knows it is against the SNP. The difficulty is, the voters of Scotland don’t seem likely to fall out of love with the SNP anytime soon.

The Scottish Labour party needs to define itself and give a new purpose to the United Kingdom if it is to come back. It needs to start by addressing the intellectual deficit it faces with its opponents.

Arguing – as the leadership at Westminster did – that Scotland is “caught between two governments” is a soundbite without meaning. The only possible explanation is that if Scotland is caught between two governments, it is caught between the one Scots elected and one we didn’t. Hardly an argument for the Union.

New Labour was no PR gimmick. It was a carefully thought through philosophical construct. The Scottish Labour party needs to do the intellectual heavy lifting to come up with a new construct for Scotland’s future. And it needs to be given the space to do so.

Currently the only senior person in the Labour movement who seems to be thinking seriously about the future of the UK is Carwyn Jones in Wales. London should not disregard him as an outsider but put thinkers like that at the heart of a new strategy.

I am proud of being part of Johann Lamont’s team and the job she did over the past three years. A devastated party became competitive and we won the referendum.

But at times it has felt like we were merely bailing out the boat. Labour faces a looming storm in the May general election. It has just 20 weeks to keep the boat intact so it can be refitted after then. If Labour comes second to the SNP it will be reduced to driftwood.

Paul Sinclair is a former adviser to Johann Lamont, the former Scottish Labour leader

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