"Doomed, DoomedI"
Philip Collins writing in The Times has a doom laden message for the Labour leader Ed Miliband which is spot on if you ask me, but the greater significance of what Philip has to say lies in the following paragraph about the nature of the Labour Party north and south of the border.
"This is partly Labour’s own fault. The Scottish National Party (SNP) has run hard on the supposed threat to the NHS from the London Tories. The only way to save public healthcare, they say, is to secede. Unfortunately, Labour is in no position to dispute the SNP calumny that the NHS is on the verge of collapse because this has been precisely Andy Burnham’s position as shadow health secretary. The long years of intellectual dullness, in which Scottish Labour has remained opposed to public sector reform, statist and bereft of imagination, are catching up with it now."
Because when the party is serious about government Labour quickly ditches the empty slogans and faces up to the hard choices of being in power which are not always easy and require a degree of political maturity.
But when Labour is in opposition, as it is in Westminster, shadow ministers predict disaster at every turn and accuse the government of the day of all kinds of heinous political crimes, which is what Labour's Andy Burnham has been doing over the NHS of course.
So Labour can hardly com pain when the Yes campaign turns this to their advantage during the Scottish independence debate while the SNP have outflanked Labour on its home turf by becoming even more implacably opposed to public sector reform.
Hence all the silly slogans about 'no privatisation' in the NHS when in fact the bedrock of the service, the GP service, is provided by a network of GPs who operate as private contractors to the NHS in Scotland.
Now Labour is not quite 'Doomed' as Private Fraser in Dad's Army was fond of saying, but if they go on like this, I think they soon will be.
Ed better persuade the Scots or he’s doomed
By Philip Collins - The Times
If Labour loses its Scottish MPs after independence it can wave goodbye to winning a general election
Imagine if the Tories had won the 1964 general election and, from that platform, proceeded to win again in 1966. Liberal laws on censorship, abortion, divorce and homosexuality and the abolition of capital punishment would all either not have happened or, more likely, be the crowning achievement of the Tory home secretary Quintin Hogg.
Imagine the Tories carry on until, in February 1974, they win again, albeit as a minority. Imagine a country in which uninterrupted Conservative government is feasible from 1951 to 1997. Imagine this country. It isn’t hard to do. That country is Great Britain with Scotland taken out.
It is not certain, without the support provided by Scottish seats, that the Labour party would have held off the Social Democratic Party in 1987. From the moment Keir Hardie stood in the Mid-Lanark byelection in 1888 all the way through to Ed Miliband’s speech yesterday not far away in Blantyre, South Lanarkshire, the Labour party could hardly exist if it were not for the support of Scotland.
This is a phenomenon with a long heritage. The best historian of modern Scotland, Tom Devine, shows in The Scottish Nation: 1700-2007 that in nine general elections between 1832 and 1868 the Tories won only seven seats there. Later a brief surge over Home Rule fizzled out in the 1960s as the skilled Protestant working class stopped voting with their religion and started voting with their social class.
Labour has had a majority of the seats in Scotland at every general election since 1955. These days the Tories have just one MP in Scotland, something of a recovery from 1997 when they had none. Were it not for the 41 Scottish Labour seats, the residual Britain would now have a Tory government with an overall majority. If 2010 had brought no coalition, there would have been no defections from the Lib Dems to Labour. Reform of the parliamentary boundaries would have passed. Even with Ukip in double figures, an outright Tory victory would be likely in May of next year.
That is why, with the polls drifting towards independence, Ed Miliband belatedly gave a speech of existential importance yesterday. His brand of Labour politics will die if Scotland votes for independence on September 18. Note that is not the same as saying that the Labour party need disappear in a residual Britain. It is not quite true to say, as George Galloway put it, that breaking up the union would “doom the English working people to permanent Tory rule”. Moderate Labour can win regardless and the loss of Scotland would only have reduced Tony Blair’s majorities from huge to merely viable.
It is very unlikely, though, that any offer pitched to the left of Mr Blair’s Labour could prevail without the insurance of Scottish seats. Mr Miliband’s political strategy has been, explicitly, to do just that — to win a vintage Labour victory, to the left of the compromise-too-far Blairism of those traitorous years of success.
Mr Miliband has been alerted to this nuclear threat. He could win a victory in 2015, before separation, that would be instantly anomalous and illegitimate because it was gained with votes from a foreign nation, but he could never win again. Not unless he entirely reinvented who he is. That is why Mr Miliband broke the fragile consensus of the Better Together campaign and made a concertedly political speech about social justice. He needed to show that he can deliver Scotland from Tory rule at Westminster because, in the right light, independence can look like the high road to socialism.
This is partly Labour’s own fault. The Scottish National Party (SNP) has run hard on the supposed threat to the NHS from the London Tories. The only way to save public healthcare, they say, is to secede. Unfortunately, Labour is in no position to dispute the SNP calumny that the NHS is on the verge of collapse because this has been precisely Andy Burnham’s position as shadow health secretary. The long years of intellectual dullness, in which Scottish Labour has remained opposed to public sector reform, statist and bereft of imagination, are catching up with it now.
Which is why Mr Miliband had to thump the tub on social justice. Without such an intervention, the case for independence is drifting along on a gentle tide of utopian hope. The grave problems of cross-border pension liabilities, a finite oil supply and a lost currency are all wished away. Independence is a vague idea that, left undefined, covers a range of current ailments. Scorn for far-away elites, a hunger for local power, disenchantment with politics. Independence is a cure-all.
Just as long as no specific question is ever asked. What currency will the new nation have? Do we have a defence strategy? Will science funding flee? Will Berwick-upon-Tweed become the new Calais? Will the EU override the objections of Spain and admit Scotland? Will we join the euro? Who bails out RBS the next time it crashes? Can we stay in Nato? Never mind all those tricky questions. The case for Yes reads like extracts from Hugh MacDiarmid’s Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry. Independence is just so cool. Irvine Welsh thinks so and he’s so cool he lives in America.
Taking the sane case is proving a psychological burden for the Labour group running the Better Together campaign. The team is comprised of smart political veterans and their organisation is good. The message, though, doesn’t catch fire. Labour people are better when they are arguing indignantly for change, fired by social injustice. With the exception of the admirable Jim Murphy, touring 100 towns on his Irn-Bru crates, they have been less comfortable with a passion-free case for the status quo. Yesterday Mr Miliband was trying to give them a script for the last days of the war.
For someone more at home with the Blairites in the Labour party than the blah-blah-ites who usually run the show, flirting with Scottish nationalism is a guilty pleasure. A Labour party that was not anchored to the left by Scottish seats would be a Labour party more to my taste.
But this is a trivial reason to break a union of three centuries’ standing. To wish away a settlement for meagre sway within a party is just too pathetic. Breaking the Union buys romantic illusions at exorbitant cost. Labour strategists are convinced that their canvassing returns, which tell them old people will stick with No, are more accurate than the narrowing polls. They are probably right. They’d better be, for their own sake, let alone Scotland’s.
If Labour loses its Scottish MPs after independence it can wave goodbye to winning a general election
Imagine if the Tories had won the 1964 general election and, from that platform, proceeded to win again in 1966. Liberal laws on censorship, abortion, divorce and homosexuality and the abolition of capital punishment would all either not have happened or, more likely, be the crowning achievement of the Tory home secretary Quintin Hogg.
Imagine the Tories carry on until, in February 1974, they win again, albeit as a minority. Imagine a country in which uninterrupted Conservative government is feasible from 1951 to 1997. Imagine this country. It isn’t hard to do. That country is Great Britain with Scotland taken out.
It is not certain, without the support provided by Scottish seats, that the Labour party would have held off the Social Democratic Party in 1987. From the moment Keir Hardie stood in the Mid-Lanark byelection in 1888 all the way through to Ed Miliband’s speech yesterday not far away in Blantyre, South Lanarkshire, the Labour party could hardly exist if it were not for the support of Scotland.
This is a phenomenon with a long heritage. The best historian of modern Scotland, Tom Devine, shows in The Scottish Nation: 1700-2007 that in nine general elections between 1832 and 1868 the Tories won only seven seats there. Later a brief surge over Home Rule fizzled out in the 1960s as the skilled Protestant working class stopped voting with their religion and started voting with their social class.
Labour has had a majority of the seats in Scotland at every general election since 1955. These days the Tories have just one MP in Scotland, something of a recovery from 1997 when they had none. Were it not for the 41 Scottish Labour seats, the residual Britain would now have a Tory government with an overall majority. If 2010 had brought no coalition, there would have been no defections from the Lib Dems to Labour. Reform of the parliamentary boundaries would have passed. Even with Ukip in double figures, an outright Tory victory would be likely in May of next year.
That is why, with the polls drifting towards independence, Ed Miliband belatedly gave a speech of existential importance yesterday. His brand of Labour politics will die if Scotland votes for independence on September 18. Note that is not the same as saying that the Labour party need disappear in a residual Britain. It is not quite true to say, as George Galloway put it, that breaking up the union would “doom the English working people to permanent Tory rule”. Moderate Labour can win regardless and the loss of Scotland would only have reduced Tony Blair’s majorities from huge to merely viable.
It is very unlikely, though, that any offer pitched to the left of Mr Blair’s Labour could prevail without the insurance of Scottish seats. Mr Miliband’s political strategy has been, explicitly, to do just that — to win a vintage Labour victory, to the left of the compromise-too-far Blairism of those traitorous years of success.
Mr Miliband has been alerted to this nuclear threat. He could win a victory in 2015, before separation, that would be instantly anomalous and illegitimate because it was gained with votes from a foreign nation, but he could never win again. Not unless he entirely reinvented who he is. That is why Mr Miliband broke the fragile consensus of the Better Together campaign and made a concertedly political speech about social justice. He needed to show that he can deliver Scotland from Tory rule at Westminster because, in the right light, independence can look like the high road to socialism.
This is partly Labour’s own fault. The Scottish National Party (SNP) has run hard on the supposed threat to the NHS from the London Tories. The only way to save public healthcare, they say, is to secede. Unfortunately, Labour is in no position to dispute the SNP calumny that the NHS is on the verge of collapse because this has been precisely Andy Burnham’s position as shadow health secretary. The long years of intellectual dullness, in which Scottish Labour has remained opposed to public sector reform, statist and bereft of imagination, are catching up with it now.
Which is why Mr Miliband had to thump the tub on social justice. Without such an intervention, the case for independence is drifting along on a gentle tide of utopian hope. The grave problems of cross-border pension liabilities, a finite oil supply and a lost currency are all wished away. Independence is a vague idea that, left undefined, covers a range of current ailments. Scorn for far-away elites, a hunger for local power, disenchantment with politics. Independence is a cure-all.
Just as long as no specific question is ever asked. What currency will the new nation have? Do we have a defence strategy? Will science funding flee? Will Berwick-upon-Tweed become the new Calais? Will the EU override the objections of Spain and admit Scotland? Will we join the euro? Who bails out RBS the next time it crashes? Can we stay in Nato? Never mind all those tricky questions. The case for Yes reads like extracts from Hugh MacDiarmid’s Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry. Independence is just so cool. Irvine Welsh thinks so and he’s so cool he lives in America.
Taking the sane case is proving a psychological burden for the Labour group running the Better Together campaign. The team is comprised of smart political veterans and their organisation is good. The message, though, doesn’t catch fire. Labour people are better when they are arguing indignantly for change, fired by social injustice. With the exception of the admirable Jim Murphy, touring 100 towns on his Irn-Bru crates, they have been less comfortable with a passion-free case for the status quo. Yesterday Mr Miliband was trying to give them a script for the last days of the war.
For someone more at home with the Blairites in the Labour party than the blah-blah-ites who usually run the show, flirting with Scottish nationalism is a guilty pleasure. A Labour party that was not anchored to the left by Scottish seats would be a Labour party more to my taste.
But this is a trivial reason to break a union of three centuries’ standing. To wish away a settlement for meagre sway within a party is just too pathetic. Breaking the Union buys romantic illusions at exorbitant cost. Labour strategists are convinced that their canvassing returns, which tell them old people will stick with No, are more accurate than the narrowing polls. They are probably right. They’d better be, for their own sake, let alone Scotland’s.
