Defying the Dinosuars




Iain Martin wrote an interesting opinion piece for The telegraph the other day in which he invites Professor Brian Cox to answer the question, "Is there any intelligent life whatsoever left in the Scottish Labour Party?".  

Now Iain goes on to answer his own question by concluding that there is, or at least there could be, so long as Jim Murphy MP comes out on top in the contest that is currently underway to elect a new Scottish Labour leader.

If so, things can only get better for Labour in Scotland and Ed Miliband suggest Iain, but I have to say I'm not so sure. 

Miliband’s blunder – to think Scotland was all sewn up

In the battles ahead of the craziest general election for generations, the collapse of Scottish Labour matters a lot

Demonstrators protest outside a Labour gala dinner, which Ed Miliband attended Photo: Getty Images


By Iain Martin - The Telegraph

Professor Brian Cox has made explaining the inexplicable his life’s work. In recent episodes of his television series – Human Universe – the physicist has tramped from Ethiopia to Peru, via Morocco and Ohio, in an attempt to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos. He has asked whether we are alone in the galaxy, and speculated on whether there might be other life forms out there.

Perhaps for his next project, Professor Cox could go to Scotland and answer an even more perplexing question: is there any intelligent life whatsoever left in the Scottish Labour Party?

Last week, one opinion poll suggested that despite Labour's being the largest part of the coalition of parties that defeated the Nationalists in September’s referendum, in the aftermath it is being sucked into a black hole. A resurgent Scottish National Party was on 52 per cent of the vote ahead of next year’s Westminster elections, with Labour at a mere 23 per cent and the Tories on a distant 10 per cent. If those numbers were to be replicated in May, Labour would be reduced from 41 seats to four north of the border, while the Nationalists would have 54 MPs.

Ordinarily, this might not matter too much. For many years now, the Scots have seemed to live in a state of self-absorption and almost perpetual electoral upheaval. But in the context of the United Kingdom’s craziest general election for several generations, the collapse of Scottish Labour matters a lot, particularly to Ed Miliband in London.

Even before the results of last week’s nightmarish poll landed on Mr Miliband’s desk, the Labour leader needed every seat he can get in 2015, what with his UK-wide lead over the Conservatives having all but disappeared. His “35 per cent strategy”, which rested on scraping over the line thanks to an electoral system that favours Labour, was only going to work with him holding 40 or so seats in Scotland. The loss of even half that number could cost the Labour leader the general election.

Now Mr Miliband must expend energy desperately attempting to retain those seats – supposedly core vote seats – that the party thought were safely in its column. In doing so, Mr Miliband could be pulled further to the Left as he attempts to please deserting Scottish voters, which risks further alienating the middle-ground voters in England he needs (and is failing) to attract.

To put it politely, this is not the glad, confident position of a prime minister-in-waiting on the verge of victory.

But how to fight back? In England, Labour’s answer is to keep going and hope that it can out-campaign Ukip in the north of England – as it did during Thursday’s Police and Crime Commissioner by-election in South Yorkshire – while the Tories leak votes to Nigel Farage in their southern heartlands.

On the Scottish front, Mr Miliband’s hopes now rest with one of his enemies from his own shadow cabinet: Jim Murphy. Yesterday, the shadow development secretary, who was once sceptical about the wisdom of devolution, formally launched his campaign to become Scottish Labour leader, following the resignation 10 days ago of Johann Lamont. She left, accusing Labour in London of treating Holyrood like a “branch office”, a particularly toxic allegation in a country in which the nationalist impulse is so strong.

But as a Labour frontbencher puts it, blaming London for the failings of Scottish Labour is a “cheap shot”. The real blame lies with a Scottish party that has failed utterly to adapt to the constitutional changes it inflicted on the UK.

Not only did Labour introduce an asymmetric model of devolution in the late Nineties that ignored the rights of England, but the experiment was from the start doomed by a further fatal flaw. This was the arrogant presumption that Labour could continue to produce sufficient leading figures to send to Westminster to run the UK – and still have enough left over to run a devolved Scotland in perpetuity. The gene pool in a small country was always going to be too shallow. The predictable result has been decline north of the border under a succession of leaders and the rise of the SNP.

In addition, the Scottish Labour family’s senior figures have continued to pursue their personal feuds with a mafia-like intensity. Even now, as Labour sups in the last-chance saloon ahead of Nationalist potential Armageddon, the trade union Unite is setting about the lunatic task of blocking Mr Murphy – the party’s only hope – for the crime of being electable.

If he does defy the dinosaurs, and wins the contest and then becomes an MSP, Mr Murphy must from the wreckage somehow construct a winning proposition that restricts the number of SNP gains next year and makes Labour competitive in a tightly fought Westminster election. Then he will attempt to prevent the SNP winning a majority at the 2016 Holyrood elections, otherwise it will be able to push for another independence referendum.

It should be said that if anyone stands a chance of succeeding in this unenviable task, it is Mr Murphy, as he proved yesterday with a punchy speech in which he noted that the SNP does not have a monopoly on patriotism. As he says, the nationalist obsession with constitutional grievance has obscured the failure of the SNP’s First Minister Alex Salmond and his successor Nicola Sturgeon to reform public services and increase opportunity.

But Labour in London must understand that fighting back will not be easy. The squandering of the No campaign’s victory in the recent referendum has helped create the perfect conditions for the latest boom in nationalism.

While Labour strategists detect in recent polls an element of “buyer’s remorse”, as some voters who backed No in the referendum regret it, other voters see the SNP as the best means by which to secure yet more powers for the parliament in Edinburgh. Meanwhile, some voters see backing the Nationalists as the best way to kick the established UK parties, just as angry anti-establishment voters in England flock to Mr Farage.

The result of the insurgency in Scotland has been a rocketing SNP membership. It stands now at around 80,000 and the party is confident of reaching 100,000, against which Scottish Labour has a mere 13,000. To put that in context, while Ukip has in the region of 40,000 members, the SNP tally is equivalent to a UK party with a membership of more than 800,000.

If this rapid growth has made the SNP somewhat overconfident, it is perhaps understandable. Yet a party that only recently proclaimed that it was definitely going to triumph in the referendum and then lost has moved, shamelessly, straight on to predicting gleefully that it will soon hold the balance of power at Westminster in a hung parliament.

Mr Murphy will be particularly good at countering such hubristic chuntering and asking searching questions about SNP shortcomings on the economy, schools and the NHS. Mr Miliband must hope it is enough to save seats and rescue his chance of becoming prime minister.

Of course, before he began unravelling the mysteries of the universe, Professor Cox in a previous existence played keyboards in D:Ream, a pop band whose biggest hit was borrowed by New Labour as its anthem ahead of the 1997 landslide (in which Jim Murphy won his seat from the Tories). For Labour in Scotland, and Ed Miliband, things can only get better.

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