Someone on my Twitter feed directed me to this article by Richard Baker, which is hardly interesting in itself, except that he, as a candidate for Deputy Leader of Labour in Scotland, appears to wish to stay subservient to London (maybe because it has been so successful in the past, or maybe not! More probably because he has been told by London that that's what he has to say, or they will brief against him).
Far more interesting than his article was this reply post by Annette, which I have lifted from the original site, without her permission. I hope she will forgive me. It seems to me that maybe someone is Labour should read this carefully and maybe act upon it.
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Annette says:
I am so tired of the word “nationalism” being branded about
by Labour. And, oooh, they inserted the word “patriotic” in their constitution,
how quaint. Personally, I don’t give a toss about patriotism and nationalism. I
am an EU citizen living in Scotland and I voted YES because it is my firm belief
that every country has a right to political self-determination and should not
be ruled by another country.
This is something that I suspect most Labourites
would in theory agree to, because it makes them sound noble, but when applied
to Scotland, they suddenly get a hissy fit at the notion of someone “wanting to
break up our country.” The only explanation I can find for this behaviour is
that they believe Scotland is not a country.
I’m going to help you out here, Labour, because I have
watched your decline for a long time and it seems clear that you have not the
foggiest idea where you have gone wrong. That is why almost everything you did
to improve your prospects has only made things worse. So let me try to explain,
and let me tell you in advance that everyone I have spoken to over the last few
days agrees with me. Not because I am so super-clever, but because it is
blatantly obvious. Only Labour seem to be unable to see it.
Forget Blairism. The con Blair pulled off worked once, but
it will not work again in our lifetime, because there are things people don’t
forget. Blairism gained Labour the support of a certain number of swing voters
and that helped you as long as your core supporters loyally stood by you.
Whatever made you think, though, that you could give up the goals and values of
your real clientele and that nevertheless they would keep voting for you
indefinitely?
Sure, many people feel loyal to a party and are patient with it,
and there is a certain inertia that needs to be overcome before some voters
desert their traditional party. But if that party continually fails to
represent their supporter’s interests, these supporters will eventually walk
away. The sentence I heard again and again and again these last few months was
this: “I have not left Labour, Labour have left me.” That is the core of the
problem.
So listen to me well, Labour Party, because if you get this
wrong again you will be done for, once and for all: Don’t try to appeal to Tory
voters. Tory-leaning voters might vote Labour as a one-off protest vote, but by
pandering to them you alienate the people that are your natural clientele. For
a few years that might work out, but eventually the Tory-leaning voters will
return to the Tory fold and your own supporters will decide you’re just not
worth it anymore.
If they have any sense, they’ll move on to the Greens, and if
not, there’s always UKIP. If they feel seriously conflicted, they might just
stay at home and not vote at all. In Scotland, they have serious alternative
now. In any case, you’re unlikely to gain back their trust as long as you
present yourself as a paler copy of the Tories. Nicola Sturgeon did give you
the heads-up in the leadership debate. She said that of course there is a
difference between Tories and Labour, but the problem is that the difference is
not big enough. It is nowhere near big enough.
There are several ways in which this failure to be properly
Labour instead of Tory-lite has played out.
1. You have failed to be an effective opposition.
Instead of challenging the Tories’ brutal austerity policies, their
hair-raising incompetence with the economy, their blatant favouring of the rich
elites, you have done little else than bicker about details. You have allowed
the electorate in England and Wales to believe against all evidence to the
contrary that the Tories have is basically right. You voted with them for more
austerity cuts. You voted with them for Trident renewal. You voted with them
for more foolish military interventions in the Middle East, even though you must
know by now how the Iraq War has damaged you. You abstained from the vote on
the fracking moratorium which would have succeeded had you not been so
cowardly. You have not been a counterweight to the nasty coalition, you have
enabled them.
2. You have allowed the Tories to determine the
political narrative. Instead of countering their agenda with your own agenda,
you kept telling us you would do much the same as the Tories, only in a nicer
way, and you deluded yourself that this would keep everyone happy. All this
nonsense about cutting the deficit by slashing public services and restricting
government spending, when it is standard textbook economy that in times of
recession the government must increase spending to help the economy recover –
you could have called the Tories out on this, you could have presented the
figures of how the Tory approach had made the economy much, much worse. Why did
it have to be Nigel Farage of all people who pointed out in the leaders’ debate
that the Tories had doubled the national debt? That would have been your role,
you should have hammered this message home relentlessly instead of letting them
get away with their ludicrous claim that they had fixed the economy. You even
allowed UKIP to set your agenda: Instead of making it clear, like Natalie
Bennett and Leanne Wood and Nicola Sturgeon did, that immigration really,
really isn’t a relevant problem, you went about printing “Controls on
immigration” on mugs and even inscribing it on your ridiculous monolith.
3. Instead of fighting the Tories, you fought your potential
allies. This wasn’t so disastrous in the case of the Greens and Plaid Cymru,
given their small numbers, but I will say that having a big campaign to unseat
Caroline was not only mean-spirited but stupid; those resources should have
gone into targeting a Tory seat. However, it was your treatment of the SNP that
might well have cost you the election. Again, you let the Tories determine the
narrative. They crowed about a constitutional crisis, about a second referendum
which neither the SNP nor the wider YES movement are seeking within the next
few years anyway, about “breaking up our (sic!) country,” about chaos and
nationalism and England being held to ransom. They and their compliant media
outlets abused the SNP and the people of Scotland on a daily basis in the most
despicable terms. And all you did was parrot them. Nicola Sturgeon could not
have held out her hand any more sincerely, and yet you sneered at it.
What you could have done, should have done, was to challenge
the Tory narrative. The SNP have been riding sky-high in the polls since
September; and you had known for months that you could only form a government
with their help. Plenty time to come up with a constructive strategy. You could
have pointed out that the SNP are a moderate party of the centre left. You
could have pointed out that they have a track record of eight years of
competent and sensible and not-at-all-outrageous government in Holyrood. You
could have pointed out that they stood for the kind of temperate progressive
policies that many, many people in England would have been delighted to see.
You could have pointed out that in no imaginable universe would even 59 SNP MPs
be able to call the shots in a 650-strong parliament; that you would always be
the boss in any kind of arrangement.
You could have thrown all your might into
convincing the English electorate that a Labour/SNP team effort would be good
for the whole of the UK, as it undoubtedly would have been. Instead you
declared a week before the election on national television that you would
rather see the Tories return to power than work with the SNP. The stupidity of
this is mind-blowing. And all under the banner of “not working with a party
that seeks to break up the UK.” Tell me, what is your deal again with the SDLP,
a party that seeks to unite Northern Ireland with the republic? You don’t even
field candidates against them to give them a better chance? If you can work
with them, why not with the SNP? But even today you still harp on about “nationalism”
when in fact what the people of Scotland have opted for is the moderate social
democratic policies which you should have offered but didn’t.
4. Having alienated your core supporters and turned
your back on your potential allies, and with no progressive track record as an
effective opposition to show to the electorate, you have based your election
campaign on sound bites, PR stunts and silly gimmicks. Just after Nicola
Sturgeon presented her gender-balanced cabinet and promised to work tirelessly
on shattering the glass ceiling, you insulted the women of the UK by inviting
them to talk “around the kitchen table” about “women’s issues,” proudly brought
to us by a pink van. And you didn’t see it coming that people would call it the
Barbie Bus and laugh it out of town? You allowed Jim Murphy to run amok in
Scotland with one insane “policy announcement” after another – remember the
“1000 more nurses than anything the SNP promises?” Why not promise weekend
breaks on Jupiter for the over 65s? You wheeled out Gordon Brown at random
intervals to make meaningless promises and you expected people to be swayed by
the pledges of a retiring backbencher? You had some wishy-washy election
promises carved in a massive gravestone and you thought that was a good idea?
Yours was a hopeless, hopeless campaign from beginning to
end, without vision, without structure, without conviction. And yet I, like so
many, clung to the hope that surely people in England must be so fed up with
the Tories by now that they’d vote for you anyway and that surely once the
election day dust had settled you’d see sense and head a progressive alliance
with the SNP, SDLP, Plaid Cymru and the lovely Caroline Lucas who is worth her
weight in diamonds. We could have turned things around for the good of the many
rather than the few. Instead the Tories now have carte blanche to suck dry the
people of the UK and grin smugly while they feast on our bones. All thanks to
you, Labour Party. Now get your act together and make sure this will never
happen again. I cannot spell it out any clearer.
