No one should soft soap the position Scottish Labour are in. The vote's in freefall and are likely to come third at this year's Holyrood elections, again. Could this predicament have been avoided? After all, Richard was elected leader with the winds of enthusiasm gusting about his sails. Following the 2017 general election, the idea Scotland was irredeemably lost to the unionist parties appeared, for the moment, something of a premature declaration as the Tories surged forward and Labour and the LibDems posted a modest recovery. There was hope the leftism of the Corbynist prospectus might cut across the politics of independence and preface an insurgency. Alas, alas. In the end, while Richard tried his hand at Corbynism with Scottish characteristics he was hemmed in by two realities of much-reduced Labourism. The over-preponderance of councillors, officials, and MSPs who are so far gone that they treat the SNP as a greater enemy than the Tories. And the second is the base of Scottish Labour itself. The scab wing of the party can get away partnering with Tories because the bulk of the base is wedded to a unionist politics whose material wellspring has long vanished.
Historically, Labourism in Scotland, as it did elsewhere, grew out of industry. To cut a very long story short, from the Second World War onwards the relationship between industrial strength and the union was obvious: the commitment to full employment was delivered by nationalised industry and state intervention in the economy. In the various permutations of the very British form of Keynesianism following the war (ad hoc, constantly changing, (naturally) erring to employers over employees), labour had a clear stake in the maintenance of the union. Where the radical left had influence, above all in the old Communist Party, this was based on an economistic conceptualisation of class politics, an economism fed by the everyday industrial life of Scottish proletarians. Before the 1990s, it's therefore unsurprising Scottish nationalism was an ideological hodge podge swinging from the far right to the left, the electoral nourishment of the SNP provided by the self-important heft of the petit bourgeois.
When Thatcher came to power, she began her assault on the labour movement by shuttering nationalised industry and forcing others to the wall by imposing strict market-led criteria on them. This stoked mass unemployment which provided favourable ground for the open warfare her government was to declare on the miners. Scotland naturally suffered too as joblessness bit. With the miners dispensed with and having foisted the government's authority over the civil service, teachers, and the public sector, she came for local government. Keen to apply the whip of market discipline and consumer satisfaction to local authorities, the Poll Tax - raising more funds through local taxation - was imposed as a steep flat tax. Scotland was the pilot a full year ahead of England and Wales and sparked off a mass movement of resistance and non-payment. In a two-step move in the space of a decade, the Tories had destroyed the economic basis for working class unionism in Scotland and compounded their difficulties by stirring up resentment against them and the UK state. The clock was ticking, unless it could be replaced by something else. It wasn't. New Labour introduced the Scottish Parliament and created new opportunities for a layer of careerist Labour politicians, but also opened the door for the SNP too. As Tony Blair and Gordon Brown refurbished the public sector with their PFI scams and public/private partnerships, this delivery of shiny new buildings and services from above was not matched by the kinds of interventions necessary for rebuilding Scotland's economic base. This paternalism was, itself, a consequence of the labour movement's decline and growing estrangement from the party by working people, which primarily benefited the SNP. And so when the Tories returned to office with the LibDems and, again, struck at the supports of the union with their austerity programme and confected rows with Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, Labour accelerated its demise by throwing their lot in with the Tories against Scottish independence. They even tailed all their arguments in favour of the union, including threatening to take Scotland to the cleaners in post-independence negotiations. As night followed day, Scottish Labour were eviscerated at the subsequent general election. Funnily enough, over six years later this disaster authored and owned by the Labour right has dropped right down the memory hole.
Where does this leave Scottish Labour now? With an ageing support base who are not getting replaced, like for like. And meanwhile the new base built by Labour in England and Wales, and who should power Labour to future victories provided they're not frittered away, are not available in Scotland because the rising class of workers, our natural support, thoroughly back the SNP. The Corbynist moment of mass movement activation we saw in England between 2015 and 2017 came a year early during the independence referendum in Scotland, and it was the SNP who benefited. Scottish Labour then has two choices. Staying as it is, which ultimately was the strategy Richard also ended up pursuing, means we're locked in a death grip with a Tory party fighting over the same fast diminishing Tory base. There is, however, something else. It could think more strategically about the voter coalition of the party, the kinds of people it needs to win over if Scottish Labour is to be renewed, and the strategy that goes with it. There was a beginning under Richard Leonard because, like Jeremy Corbyn, he recognised the importance of community organising to winning back trust and building new support. However, trying to contest the SNP for their core vote is outside of Labour's comfort zone. For one, it means thinking about issues around hegemony rather than just offering a dish of nice policies - something Labour is congenitally ill-equipped to do thanks to the dead hand of the Fabian tradition. It means consistent anti-Toryism, which Scottish Labour are completely hopeless on and, painfully, it means bidding farewell to a section of the unionist base. In other words, the course that can re-establish the party in the long-term is going to be awful in the short. Things have to get worse before they can start getting better.
Unfortunately for the branch office, recent pronouncements by Keir Starmer about matters Scottish doesn't fill one with confidence, especially with his strategy, such as it is, driven by the perceived electoral calculus south of the border than helping the party stage a come back. Therefore, for comrades in Scotland, and watchers of Scottish Labour generally, the candidates who come forward for the leader's post have to show they understand the hole the party is in before offering a way out. If they don't, if we're going to get promises of "taking the fight to the SNP", banging on about the NHS and education, the status quo on the referendum question, and a load of bilge about the "priorities of the Scottish people", then in several years there'll be another resignation and another downshift in expectations. The new contest presents an opportunity for fresh thinking, and it says everything about Scottish Labour that even before would-be leaders declare their intentions, having this moment squandered because they cannot even recognise the task is the most likely outcome.
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10 comments:
Oh dear, let’s look at this part
“ With an ageing support base who are not getting replaced, like for like. And meanwhile the new base built by Labour in England and Wales, and who should power Labour to future victories provided they're not frittered away, are not available in Scotland because the rising class of workers, our natural support, thoroughly back the SNP.”
That sound I hear is the main problem being rendered invisible.
Are you implying that this new base only supports the SNP because it wanted a version of the English Labour Party but can’t get it because of the dead hand of the time served remainder of the Scottish Labour Party?
What is missing, let me sketch an outline.
1) country A has a union with country B
2) country B has a large mass of voters who want to end this.
3) country B and its “proletarian” party actually opposes this, although god knows when this was actually discusses internally and voted on. This is assuming that this “proletarian” party is actually democratic. Even although, the party did acknowledge the democratic right of said unified state to decide to leave a larger union.
I could go on, but I suspect you’re not listening, so I’ll use an anecdote. I had a long conversation with two, young, well paid Scottish professionals recently. One was responsible for IT in a big way, one was the head of HR in a large company. They represent the new class of rising workers if anybody does. They vote for the SNP. They will vote for independence. They want to unshackle themselves from an England which votes Tory although the Tories haven’t won a majority in Scotland since the 1950s. They think the LP is terrified of losing Scottish MPs, even although it has not needed them to form a government except once in the 1970s. They wanted to stay in the EU. They note, wryly, that quite a big minority of Labour voters, and apparently members are in favour of independence. They will not be won over by a policy tweak here, a “holding the Scottish government” to account” there, or, a refurbished LP speech in favour of “federalism”. They believe that the LP is irredeemably Unionist because it can’t stomach the democratic right of a small nation to decide for itself how it should be governed.
In that sense, the LP is on the same page as the Tories, if not the same, literal platform.
What a new leader should do, is run a real debate about whether Scottish Labour is simply going to sit on the coat tails of the Tories on this issue. But, he or she won’t, so the long, slow, decline will continue.
«It is suggested a number of would-be Labour donors were never going to open their wallets had he remained in position. Murky.»
Actually it is crystal clear: finally the "worst" legacy of corbynism has been eliminated, which was the financial and political independence of Labour from donors, because of the "unacceptable" large increase in membership subs. The "illegittimate" situation where nominations of potential Labour PMs and ministers are not made by donors has been erased.
Characteristically "The Guardian" saluted Keir Starmer's leadership as putting once again New Labour under the control of big (often likudnik) donors:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/aug/08/former-labour-donors-returning-to-party-under-keir-starmer-jeremy-corbyn
«Big Labour donors returning to party under Keir Starmer
This article is more than 5 months old
Several former financial backers report rejoining, with some ‘ready to give again’ in wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s departure
Juliet Rosenfeld, whose late husband Andrew was one of Labour’s most generous donors under Ed Miliband’s leadership, said she had rejoined the party to vote in the leadership contest. “I voted for Keir and am delighted he has won,” she said.»
Donald Trump was also "intolerably" independent from the will of donors, and actually he was one of the bigger donors himself, so he had delusions of independence from the whig/globalist/financialist "consensus".
«his strategy, such as it is, driven by the perceived electoral calculus south of the border than helping the party stage a come back.»
The calculation seems indeed to be that unionism is a lost cause in Scotland, and New, New Labour therefore cares only about supporting english supremacist sentiment among the authoritarian, rentier tory voters that Keir Starmer is targeting in order to take back seats from the Conservatives in England, where they have a commanding lead.
Overall the Keir Starmer strategy, which seems to prominently feature taking back the 50-70 "red wall" seats lost, tells me that is is to position New, New Labour as based on tribal/geographic allegiance, like the LibDems, rather than based on political and material interests.
The implicit notion is that from the "Sierra man" story from Tony Blair (and the "Southern discomfort" essays by Giles Radice): that as parts of the traditional base of Labour have risen into the propertied middle class, New, New Labour must keep their votes, by offering them a more competent management of whig/tory policies.
Switching from a political to a tribal/geographic base is the precise recipe for PASOKification, and the supporters of upper class rentier politics, within New New Labour or in the wider establishment, seem to consider the PASOKification of Labour an important aim to ensure that "There Is No Alternative".
«The calculation seems indeed to be that unionism is a lost cause in Scotland»
The other point about Scotland is that it is also even more europhile than independentist, and Keir Starmer's hard-exit euroscepticism is also a lost cause there.
As to that, the other calculation that seems to have been made by Keir Starmer and the donors "sponsoring" him is that europhile politics are a lost cause in England, thus the hard-exit support as “Labour wants to get Brexit done” and excluding any future support for the softer form of exit proposed by Corbyn as a compromise between Labour eurosceptics and europhiles.
The problem with endorsing both right-wing economics and right-wing euroscepticism to win more tory votes in England is that after that the majority of current "corbynist" voters then have somewhere else to go: if New, New Labour is both thatcherite and eurosceptic, the LibDems are also thatcherite but at least are not eurosceptic. But that could be precisely the goal of the Mandelson Tendency entrysts: to weaken Labour and strengthen the LibDems, so that Labour can never again govern alone. My usual quote from T Benn, 1993-05-16 which is still quite realistic today:
“I think, candidly, what is happening is that the party is being dismantled. The trade union link is to be broken; the economic policy statement we are considering today makes no reference to the trade unions. Clause 4 is being attacked; PR is being advocated with a view to a pact with the Liberals of a kind that Peter Mandelson worked for in Newbury, where he in fact encouraged the Liberal vote. The policy work has been subcontracted. These so called modernisers are really Victorian Liberals, who believe in market forces, don't like the trade unions and are anti-socialist.”
«the LP is on the same page as the Tories, if not the same, literal platform.»
New, New Labour policy offer: mildly austerian, hard eurosceptic, hard unionist. A combination that seems designed for maximum effectiveness in Scotland :-).
"Switching from a political to a tribal/geographic base is the precise recipe for PASOKification,"
Keir Starmer is simply pursuing the policies that he believes in, i.e. Tory policies.
If the 'base' are so easily distracted by tribalism then that 'base' is the problem and not Starmer.
How he goes about implementing his Tory policies is secondary to the actual policies. If the 'base' can't discern these policies and need Sun headlines in order to grasp anything then again its the 'base' that is the problem.
My view is the 'base' know exactly what is being offered, have not been hoodwinked by Tribalism and are simply responding positively to Tory policies as befits a thoroughly petty bourgeois, imperialistic and chauvinistic nation.
The politics of Britain perfectly match its composition and place in the world market.
The left in Britain should not look to a mass movement because one doesn't exist, they should take a leaf out the Trump supporters book and make the country ungovernable.
On Trumps supporters, among all the gloating from the liberals I didn't quite catch if that woman they shot dead was unarmed or not?
«If the 'base' are so easily distracted by tribalism»
I was not using that sense of "tribal", but a rather different one:
* Political parties, as a rule, do representation, in particular of the interests of one or more groups (as long as their interests are not fundamentally conflicting), and in particular material interests (parties are expensive).
* The group(s) can have a class base, or a geographic base, or an ethnic base, etc.
* Labour was the party of the class interests of, mainly, the group of workers in heavy (extractive or manufacturing) industries.
* It so happened that most of the workers in heavy industries happened to be in "the north" (that is, outside the Home Counties and London), and used to be irish or scottish or northern, that is belonging to the saxon or celtic "fringes" (the non-wessicians). So Labour was also, indirectly, the party of much of "the north" and of the "ethnic fringes".
* It has happened that a large part of those workers in heavy industries are no longer so, many because they are no longer workers, being retired, or because they are not mixed property rentiers and workers.
* The question is whether Labour should follow its "legacy" voter families, those who used to be workers in heavy industries, by adopting "rentier middle class" politics, and thus become in essence a club for a "tribe" defined mostly by geographic location and/or ethnicity, or should let the Conservatives and the LibDems take the legacy base and maintain its profile as being a workers party, acquiring a new set of voters.
PASOKification happens when a "left" (workers) party decides to continue to represent the same individuals and families even if their material interests change. It soon makes the party shrink a lot because 1) existing voters and members eventually die 2) affiliation by ethnicity and location is relatively weak in modern times, and many eventually switch from "tribe" based parties to parties based more directly on their material interests.
«responding positively to Tory policies as befits a thoroughly petty bourgeois, imperialistic and chauvinistic nation. [...] The left in Britain should not look to a mass movement because one doesn't exist»
I quite disagree with that, and the reason is that Conservative and LibDem politics are quintessentially extractive, and that presupposes that a small minority extracts from a large majority. In the current situation the 60-70% of property owners among voters think that they can live it large with big capital gains and rent increases by squeezing ever harder the 30-40% who are renters and buyers.
That is not sustainable, and that is demonstrated by property prices falling in the longer term in real terms outside the "golden" tory areas of the south-east.
The appearance of sustainability is given by booming levels of property and consumer debt "secured" by property *valuations*, thanks to fantastic levels of Treasury and BoE support, and the rewriting of accounting and regulatory rulebooks to allow most of the financial system to trade while insolvent.
There can be a mass movement of the left if that includes the "pushed behind" property owners and small rentiers.
«The left in Britain should not look to a mass movement because one doesn't exist»
Tony Blair's take on this in 1987, when he was still pretending to be a socialdemocrat:
www.lrb.co.uk/v09/n19/tony-blair/diary
“Post-war Britain has seen two big changes. First, and partly as a result of reforming Labour governments, there are many more healthy, wealthy and well-educated people than before. In addition, employment has switched from traditional manufacturing industries to a more white-collar, service-based economy. The inevitable result has been that class identity has fragmented.
Only about a third of the population now regard themselves as ‘working-class’. Of course it is possible still to analyse Britain in terms of a strict Marxist definition of class: but it is not very helpful to our understanding of how the country thinks and votes. In fact, of that third, many are likely not to be ‘working’ at all: these are the unemployed, pensioners, single parents – in other words, the poor.
A party that restricts its appeal to the traditional working class will not win an election. That doesn’t entail a rejection of socialism’s traditional values: but it does mean that its appeal, and hence its policies, must address a much wider range of interests.”
«Only about a third of the population now regard themselves as ‘working-class’. [...] A party that restricts its appeal to the traditional working class will not win an election.»
That point by Tony Blair is both true and somewhat misleading: the following graph shows that the percentage of employees among the working population has remained roughly the same at around 70% as an average between men and women:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/chartimage?uri=/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/employmentintheuk/december2020/24b60ee8
So 70% of people are workers. Why then doesn't Labour get 70% of the votes? In part it is non-voting workers, in part it is mixed rentier-workers (and women two often overlapping groups) which have increased in number as the decrease in natality and increase in median death ages means that a larger percentage of workers is older (and thus likely to own property, especially if acquired in the 1970s-1990s) than in the past. But Conservative politics
But it is easier to keep singing "El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido", or pandering to tory politics, than confronting Tony Blair's arguments and finding alternative political strategies.
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