Labour’s Scotterdammerung has been years in the making

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?