Scottish Labour: do you want to ******* win?

A thought experiment for Scottish Labour: do you want to ******* win?

That big question is one that was put by a senior SNP figure with regard to the independence referendum.

Of course, Yes Scotland didn’t win. But we did increase support for independence by 20 points. And that “******* win” focus drove our extremely successful grassroots and social media campaign (of which I was head and which delivered unprecedented levels of engagement with undecided voters). The SNP have continued with that kind of campaigning. Judging by 7 May, it seems to be working out OK for them.

But let’s talk about you. Do you want to ******* win? Because you’re not behaving like it. The one sure thing that ensures Scottish Labour’s extinction is business as usual. Newsflash: business as usual includes fratricidal in-fighting. You’ve had four leadership elections since you last won at Holyrood. Does that sound like a formula for victory?

Oh I know, inside the party it feels like a struggle between the Cavaliers and Roundheads, or the Crips and the Bloods, but, to the rest of us, it’s like one of the less exciting scuffles of the Bash Street Kids. On the deck of the Titanic. After it had sunk. Into Vesuvius.

Wake up. Blairite, Bennite, Brownie or tevers: there simply aren’t enough of you left to afford the luxury of civil war.

I’m not saying Jim Murphy is the perfect leader for you – or indeed necessarily the right one for now. I’m saying that what is needed is not a new leader but a completely new way of being Labour in Scotland. It’s the only way to survive. You have less than 12 months to do this before the Holyrood elections. Do you think the SNP might be up for that fight? Do you think they’re squabbling about who should be leader? Do you think their campaign machinery is a backwards, shoddy mess?

I’ve worked with the SNP at Yes Scotland. I’ve seen their focus, organisation and discipline. I’ve seen the talent they’ve got on their side. I’ve seen the vast numbers of enthused volunteers they have. You should be afraid. Be very afraid. Because the UK general election was not the main event for them.

The biggie for the SNP is May 2016. They’re coming for you again. Are you ready?

So on the Left, you should find a way of working with Team Jim. On the Right, ditch the “we know best” Blairite/Brownie arrogance because it’s that which has got you where you are right now.

Your problems go much deeper than mere policy issues. Your party is broken. Your activists are despairing. You have forgotten how to organise. You have forgotten how to campaign. You have lost the trust of your supporters. All these things will be for ever unless you make a radical commitment to change Labour.

I’m not in your party any more. (Here’s why I left Labour.) But I care enough for Scottish social democracy to offer some words of advice (even though I should be working on social media strategy for a client).

UDI for Scottish Labour

You need to have different policies from the English Labour Party. The desires of the swing voters they need to reach and they ones you need to reach are radically different. Nouveau Blairism may play well in the swing seats of middle England but it will kill you stone dead in Scotland. Sorry, stone deader. Get wiped out in May 2016 and the UK Labour party might start to think of Nicola Sturgeon’s party as being a bit like the SDLP. Some down there might start to ask why should they waste resources on a lost cause when there’s a party they could kinda, maybe work with. It’s not like UK Labour did its Scottish operation any favours in the general election, is it?

Vision

When did you last excite us? When did you last envision transformational change? When did you last think about what social democracy means in the globalised 21st century? When will you realise that it’s not enough to tinker around the edges (x more nurses, z more modern apprentices, y on earth should we vote for you). You can only beat the SNP by out-thinking them on the level of strategic policy depth. Attack them on their record at Holyrood by all means (especially around civil liberties and the UCRN) but you need to actually have a better product.

Devolution

If there’s a weakness in the SNP’s constitutional platform, its full fiscal autonomy. In my view, it’s not a shortcut to independence but a booby-trapped, quagmired cul de sac, which combines the worst of both worlds. Come up with a better plan that goes far further than anyone could imagine – a vision of devo maximus with sums that add up in Scotland’s favour. The SNP outflanked you on the Left, why not outflank them back on devolution? Also, go where the SNP does not and promise to devolve far more powers to the local level.

Independence

Some 40% of your (former) voters support independence. If you ever want me and people like me to vote for you again, find a way to include support for independence in Scottish Labour’s culture and narrative. If your reaction is: “sod off and vote SNP” then you’re doomed because most of those voters have already done that. Wouldn’t you like them to come back? Don’t be the party of the Union. In the eyes of many of your voters, it stands for privilege, corruption and a status quo that does not benefit them in the slightest.

Balance the economy

Some people have far too much money – and some don’t pay their taxes. Many people live in poverty despite working. Others cannot find secure employment. Scotland’s economic infrastructure is poor and this is not an easy country in which to start a business. Find a way to balance the rights of employees, the responsibilities of the very wealthy, the requirements of the environment and the needs of small and medium-sized businesses, which are, after all, the engines of the economy. Seek to simplify the tax system to close loopholes and iron out anomalies. The Tories are the party of big, bureaucratic business. Why not be the environmentally-friendly, socially-just party of SMEs? Will, it be easy? No. But what’s easy is slipping the oblivion which is beckoning to your party the way it is now.

Reinvent party membership

When I was in the Labour Party, membership largely meant meeting once a month to discuss the previous meeting’s minutes, leavened by odd bouts of canvassing with a clipboard and out-of-date voter information. (From reports I heard of the No campaign’s grassroots work, it sounds like not much has changed in Labour.) Also, as a constituency delegate to conference it was very, very apparent that the members’ views were irrelevant to decision-making. (An additional illustration, my ballot for the 1994 leadership election arrived a couple of days after Tony Blair won.) Devote time to reinventing what it means to be a member of the Scottish Labour Party. Give your members meaningful and enjoyable involvement, a trick the SNP seem to manage. And for the love of Pete, bring your data systems up to date PDQ.

Trident

It’s gotta go. We can’t afford it. It’s immoral. End of.

Be patient

Finally, unless Nicola Sturgeon is caught on camera singing Tomorrow Belongs To Me in a Margaret Thatcher wig, you’re almost certainly not going to be in government in Scotland until at least in 2020. That’s a long time to be in opposition but that’s the price you pay for decades of organisational incompetence.

Fix it now or die. 

I have a few words of comfort for my Labour friends at what must be a very difficult time.

First of all, I didn’t vote Labour. Sorry but it didn’t even occur to me for one second to vote Labour.

Part of me would have liked to have had at least some small tug at the heartstrings. I was in the party for ten years but nope, nothing.

And I really believed in you. I was secretary of my branch, on the CLP executive, the chair of Edinburgh University Labour Club, a candidate in a council election. More times than I can remember, I trudged the doorsteps of people with no hope and told them to vote Labour one more time.

You failed them. You failed in 1987. You failed in 1992. Worse, you failed in 1997 and beyond.

I’ll spare you the “Labour left me” spiel. You’ve heard it before. Thousands of times. But perhaps you should have listened.

When I phoned up Labour HQ to cancel my membership the response I got was a tired “OK, then”. Nothing else. No interest in why. The other week I changed broadband provider. Virgin were very interested in why I was leaving and offered me all sorts of reasons not to. If only Labour cared about its members, activists and voters that way.

Back to now.

It wasn’t just your lacklustre campaign that didn’t call to me, although, that said, the grim Westminster arithmetic of Vote X Or You’ll Get Y didn’t appeal. I spent two and a half years campaigning to get Scotland away from that anti-democratic nonsense.

And what was all that “when was the last time the largest party didn’t form the government” guff? You need to base your campaigns on something more inspiring than a particularly nerdy pub quiz question.

So here we are. The party of Nye Bevan and Barbara Castle has been outflanked on the Left by the party of Gordon Wilson and Fergus Ewing. Well played.

You got yourself in such a fankle that the SNP’s claim that a vote for them would make Labour be Labour actually made sense.

Don’t blame the SNP for your failure. That’s how losers think. It’s not time to blame the SNP. It’s time to don sackcloth and ashes and crawl to your former voters on your knees saying: “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea ultima culpa.”

Oh, I forgot the words of comfort. Here they are: every disaster is an opportunity. Failure hurts but it is the best teacher.

Feeling better? Good.

There are more words of comfort coming but first you need to read on.

You are facing an extinction level event and if you make a single mistake your party is toast. You’ve wandered down the primrose path to 7 May for years and now you stand right on the very edge of the precipice.

You’ve had opportunities to change and ignored them all.

In 1988, you lost Glasgow Govan to the SNP. You could have sorted out the sorry state of your local parties then but, no, you blamed the candidate and tinkered with selection procedures.

In 1997, you had the chance to change Britain as radically as Thatcher did (but in a progressive direction) but, no, you ran out of ideas, bottled it over the House of Lords and PR, and dragged us into Iraq.

From 1999, you had the chance to make devolution sparkle but you had minimal ambitions, rewarded donnert loyalty over edgy ability and saw your talent trudge off to Westminster, with its fat expenses.

In 2007, you received fair warning that the SNP were a credible threat when they formed a government. In 2011, that was reinforced, when they got an absolute majority.

Still, Scottish Labour was treated as a branch office – and Scottish Labour supporters treated as vote fodder. Apparently it was OK if they lived in poverty for generations, as long as they trudged through the polling stations to put their X in the right box. Far better to focus on swing voters in Tory marginals in England than worry about your base, eh? Who else are they going to vote for?

I think you have your answer now.

The last, the greatest, failing came during the independence referendum. I worked for Yes Scotland. (I’m not a “Nat”. I want to live in a modern, social democratic country, you see?) You could have killed independence stone dead if you’d come up with strong devolution proposals. But you gave us Devo Nano – an embarrassing farce. I can’t tell you the relief we felt in the Yes office when we saw the paucity of what official Labour had to offer.

See the geniuses who advocated Devo Nano? Hunt them down and expel them the way you hunted down and expelled the Militants in my time as an activist.

Also, the answer is not Gordon Brown. Unless, that is, the question is: “Which New Labour archiect with a PFI obsession trashed the economy with his light touch on banking regulation?”

Carrying on as you were guarantees total oblivion. If you think what’s just happened is bad, just wait and see what the Scottish electorate have in store for you on 5 May, 2016. It’ll make 7 May, 2015, seem like a children’s tea party.

Oh, and you’re on your own. UK Labour made it clear during the General Election that they don’t give a flying one about you, with Jim Murphy being hung out to dry more than Alex Salmond’s Declaration of Arbroath tea towel.

Mind you, how will you cope without the electoral genius of Ed “The Stone” Miliband? “I’d rather have a Tory government than work with the SNP” was one of the most striking political moves I’ve seen.

English Labour will need to tack to the Right to win voters in England. That will destroy you.

Remember how entrenched interests blocked Barbara Castle’s “In Place of Strife”? Remember how the failure to address problems with the trade unions festered and let Margaret Thatcher impose a viciously anti-union solution? Remember how that doomed you? Learn from history.

If you want to survive. If you want to be more than a punchline in 2016 it’s time for courageous reinvention. And you will need those Blairite qualities of being best when you are boldest and thinking the unthinkable.

• It’s time to take a leaf from Murdo Fraser’s book and declare UDI.
• It is time to reinvent what being a social democrat means in the 21st century.
• It’s time to develop a separate policy platform on which to engage the SNP. You didn’t do that in this election campaign. If you had offered an independent vision maybe it would have been different.
• It’s time to reinvent what being a party member actually means.
• And it’s time to make your peace with independence. I campaigned with my comrades in Labour For Independence. You treated them like the enemy. Yet, it turns out, they were more in tune with 40% of your voters than you were.

When the hell did you become the party of the Union?

I am a social democrat. I am a proud trade unionist. I believe in the labour movement. I passionately believe Scotland should be independent.

I am your target voter. Those are the only words of comfort left for you.

If, with heads uncovered, swear we all to bear it onwards til we fall, will you make the leap of imagination necessary to make me vote for you again?