After its ill-fated dalliance with the Tories, Scottish Labour needs a real change

Scotland is an old heartland of the Labour Right. But if all was well in these heartlands, Corbyn would not now be Labour’s leader. Nor would the Corbynista candidate Richard Leonard be within touching distance of the Scottish Labour leadership.

In 2014, as Scotland’s independence referendum began, Labour was still the biggest Westminster party in Scotland. But it had been in trouble for some years, having been beaten into second place by the SNP in the Scottish parliament in a shocking 2011 landslide. Its polling was weak, its leaders (Iain Gray; Johann Lamont) bland and gaffe-prone. In 2012, for example, Lamont, then advised by deputy leader Anas Sarwar, tried to attacked the SNP from the right on welfare, denouncing the “something for nothing culture.” The SNP ran rings around her.

There were bigger problems, too. Of course, Labour was always going to be Unionist. Its strategy for implementing social democracy depended on the unity and power of the British state, its international competitiveness, and its role in NATO. But campaigning alongside the hated Tories was a disaster waiting to happen.

Nonetheless, as the referendum campaign began, Scottish Labour threw everything at shoring up support for the Union. Nominally, it had its own Unionist campaign, coordinated by Anas Sarwar, but its major efforts were organised through Better Together, a cross-party campaign chaired by Labour’s Alistair Darling, alongside campaign director Blair McDougall, and fronted by Blairite shadow development secretary Jim Murphy. It was a conservative, status quo campaign, exemplified by the “no thanks” slogan. Murphy addressed crowds from Irn-Bru crates in imitation of John Major’s soap box routine, but this was populist as it got.

In the end, a raucous independence campaign peeled off almost forty percent of Labour voters, especially in the poorest constituencies. Scottish Labour responded by rewarding Murphy, a working-class boy made good who was fawned over by the media, with the leadership. He was to ‘save’ the party. In triumphalist mode, he pledged not to lose a single seat to the SNP in the general election.

But the idea that hard-line Blairism could ‘save Scottish Labour’ was ruthlessly tested and refuted. In 2015, Labour was demolished in Scotland, left with only one MP—the same as the coalition-disgraced Liberals. Murphy lost his East Renfrewshire seat. It was as though Scottish Labour had been trailing along the abyssal plain hoping to be lifted by the currents, only to disappear down the Marianas trench.

And subsequent polling showed that the result was not a one-off. It wasn’t just that Labour’s image was affected by its Unionist alliance with the Tories in 2014. The Referendum also indirectly pushed Miliband’s 2015 campaign to the right on Trident and spending cuts, as he ran scared of a Tory campaign linking him to the SNP. It was as though Labour had set out to prove the SNP’s point: all the establishment parties in it together, on the side of militarism and the multinationals.

Worse, Scottish Labour’s collapse contrasted with incremental gains made by Labour in England. These losses, knocking out a string of leading right-wing Labour MPs, created such a profound existential crisis for Labour that for the first time in its history it elected a leader from the Bennite left. The Labour Right had proved itself comprehensively inadequate to the new situation.

And yet, Scottish Labour seemed determined to learn nothing. In the 2017 snap election, it tried to fight the battles of 2014 again, emphasising Labour’s role as the main party of the Union. Meanwhile, their constant attacks on Corbyn’s leadership gave the Tories ample attack material. Labour’s record gains in England and Wales thanks to Corbyn’s national campaign were only mediocre in Scotland, where it went from holding one seat to a still-meagre seven.

Murphy’s successor in East Renfrewshire, Blair McDougall, traded largely on his role as chair of Better Together, positioning himself as the slick, besuited candidate to “beat the SNP”—as though they were a bigger problem than the Tories. He lost by more than Murphy, and the Conservatives took the seat for the first time since 1997.

In the current Scottish Labour leadership election, one can only wonder why anyone gives the continuity candidate, Sarwar, the time of day. A leading author of Scottish Labour’s disaster, he predictably has the backing of Labour’s clapped out old establishment figures. He is even using their cast-off lines, accusing his rivals of merely wanting a protest party, rather than power—as though the June election didn’t happen.

Even if he could read the now-obvious appetite for real change, Sarwar would be a dismal choice. A bland centrist millionaire who owned shares in a tax haven? Just how lemming-like would one have to be?

If Scottish Labour ever wants to stand another chance of winning, it will pick Leonard, the trade unionist who has far-sightedly backed Corbyn and his policies through thick and thin. Not the living embodiment of everything that has driven them to the brink of ruin.

This article has been amended to clarify that Blair McDougall was the campaign director of Better Together. He was previously listed as chair.