Scottish Labour candidates need to fight the forthcoming general election on the basis of policies which challenge the inequalities of wealth and power inherent in capitalism, and which will mobilise the labour movement not just to vote Labour but to fight for those policies whatever the outcome of the election.
All Labour candidates throughout the UK should be campaigning on that basis. But the importance of such an election campaign is all the greater where specifically labour-movement and class-based politics have been squeezed out by competing nationalisms. And that is the case in Scotland, where opinion polls show the SNP on 41% (50% in 2015), the Tories on 28% (13% in 2015), and Labour on 18% (24% in 2015, and 42% in 2010).
Based on a now largely discredited and disowned White Paper, the SNP’s pro-independence campaign in 2014 polarised the Scottish electorate around national identities and attitudes to independence. The momentum from that initial polarisation carried over into the 2015 general election. The SNP ran a straightforward nationalist campaign, promising to “make Scotland stronger” in Westminster etc. Despite having lost the 2014 referendum, the SNP consolidated the bulk of “Yes” voters into its electoral base. Aided by the first-past-the-post system, it won 56 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster constituencies.
The same momentum and the same polarisation also helped the SNP win the Holyrood elections of 2016, even if it lost its previous absolute majority there. At the same time, British nationalism began to consolidate its own political base, in the form of a boost in electoral support for the Tories. Pitching themselves as the foremost champions of the Union, the Tories increased their representation at Holyrood in 2016 from 15 to 31.
As the nationalist polarisation of politics in Scotland intensified and day-to-day politics increasingly degenerated into a permanent referendum campaign, Labour was squeezed remorselessly between the two competing nationalisms. Despite standing on an election manifesto with a clear focus on social and economic issues, and one which advocated policies well to the left of the SNP, the 2016 Holyrood election saw the number of Labour MSPs collapse 37 to 24, leaving the Tories as the official opposition. Sturgeon’s announcement in March that she wanted to secure a Westminster section 30 Order, to allow a second referendum to be held on Scottish independence, added a further boost to political polarisation around national identities.
Scottish nationalists, only too happy to ignore the SNP’s actual record during its ten years of power at Holyrood and whose sole political purpose in life is to secure Scottish independence, were given a fresh lease of life. Inevitably, the SNP’s demand for another referendum, backed in breach of their manifesto commitments by Green MSPs, triggered a fresh surge of support for the Tories. Winning between eight and ten seats in the forthcoming general election is now a real possibility for the Tories.
It suits both the SNP and the Tories to transform the general election in Scotland into a referendum on a second referendum. Whereas Scottish Labour backs federalism and Corbyn would not oppose a second referendum, the Tories are standing as the most reliable opponents of independence and another referendum. This conveniently diverts attention away from the Tories’ actual record in power in Westminster since 2010, and also away from the policies which the Tories are fighting this general election.
The SNP initially wobbled on how to present the general election, before falling in line behind Alex Salmond and treating the election as a referendum on a second referendum. This likewise conveniently diverts attention away from the SNP’s record as a party of government in Holyrood: literacy and numeracy standards have declined, child poverty has increased, FE teacher and student places have been decimated, relative poverty has increased, inequalities in access to HE have increased, the NHS has suffered from shortages of doctors, nurses and GPs, the gap between rich and poor has increased, and Scotland’s economy now teeters on the brink of recession.
Scottish Labour candidates need to transform the terrain on which the general election is fought. But some candidates — all of whom were selected by a sub-committee of the Scottish Labour Executive Committee — seem to want to out-Tory the Tories. According to the first election campaign leaflet from Blair McDougall, former Director of “Better Together” and now Labour candidate for East Renfrewshire, for example: “I ran the winning campaign against independence. Now I want your vote to say No to a second referendum. On 8th June Vote Labour and Say No to the SNP.”
McDougall’s electoral strategy is to win over Tory voters to voting Labour. But if they were unwilling to switch to voting Labour under Blair, they are even less likely to switch to voting Labour under Corbyn. Support for Labour in Scotland can be built only by winning back Labour voters who switched to the SNP. To do that, Scottish Labour needs to tear off the “Red Tories” label which the SNP stuck on it after the “Better Together” campaign.
McDougall, on the other hand, boasts of his role as “Better Together” Director. Defining another referendum as the key issue in the election can only push ex-Labour voters further into the arms of the SNP, and also help boost support for Tory Unionists.
Scottish Labour candidates contesting seats in the general election includes members of the Campaign for Socialism/Momentum Scotland. They have the opportunity to campaign by placing basic class issues and labour movement politics to the fore. The ability of the labour movement in Scotland to continue to represent a political pole of attraction and an electoral force depends on how successful they will be in the coming weeks at doing that.
The pro-independence left, on the other hand, could do far worse than spend the election campaign working out how they could have got things so wrong. They campaigned for a “Yes” vote in 2014, pretending that they were putting forward a socialist case for independence as opposed to functioning as no more than an echo chamber for the SNP. They welcomed the defeat of labour movement politics by nationalism in 2015, deluding themselves into believing that it created a mass opening for socialist politics, only to be brutally disabused of such illusions when they stood candidates in 2016. And now, because one nationalism begets another, they would find that the space for advocating socialist politics has narrowed even further — if it were not for the fact that they have now adopted support for a second referendum as a surrogate for fighting for socialist politics.
