In an interview with the Labour Party think-tank “Progress” Labour MP and shadow foreign secretary Dougie Alexander has given his verdict on why Labour did so badly in the Scottish Parliament elections a fortnight ago.
Alexander speaks with some authority on such matters.
As co-ordinator of the party’s general election campaign in 2010 he played a leading role in Labour’s defeat in that election. And as David Miliband’s campaign manager in the subsequent leadership contest he helped his boss lose that election as well.
Judging by his analysis, Alexander should get out more.
According to Alexander, Labour lost because it campaigned as “traditional Labour”. In the past, Labour had won the votes of the middle classes because “they believed it understood their lives and aspirations.” But this time it failed to do so because it lacked the politics of “national purpose and personal aspiration.”
Correctly – even a broken clock gets the time right twice a day – Alexander criticizes the lack of political substance to Scottish Labour’s campaign. The party had only “bite-sized individual policies” which were insufficient to “defeat a different narrative and a different sentiment.”
If Labour is to win elections, concludes Alexander, it needs to define “where we stand and what we stand for.” But what should Labour stand for? Alexander’s answer: it needs to be in “the future business, the aspiration business” and demonstrate that it shares people’s “aspirations for their families, community and country.”
Problem number one with that analysis: Alexander makes no mention of the 50% of the Scottish electorate who did not even bother to vote. They did not fail to do so because none of the parties expressed their aspirations for a yacht on the Clyde and a second home in Spain.
Most of them did not vote because they saw politicians as ‘all the same’ – on the make and on the take, in it just for themselves – and doing little or nothing in terms of mounting a real challenge to the Lib-Dem cuts of which they are the victims.
Problem number two: Alexander’s analysis is inconsistent with the facts.
Can anyone seriously believe that Labour lost Glasgow Shettleston – in parts of which life expectancy is lower than in the Gaza Strip – and other inner-city seats because it failed to express middle class aspirations?
And how does Alexander’s analysis square with the fact that Labour retained its seat in Eastwood, a leafy suburb where middle class aspirations run rampant (and have often been achieved)?
Problem number three: Alexander makes no mention of the cataclysmically poor performance of the Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray. When he fled from half a dozen protestors a fortnight before election day he became a laughing stock of the ‘aspirational middle classes’ as much as anyone else.
Who could take seriously Labour’s promises to protect Scotland against Lib-Dem cuts after that incident? In other words: the problem was not the policy itself (we will fight the Lib-Dem cuts); the problem was that Labour was manifestly incapable of delivering on it.
Problem number four: Alexander sidesteps the question of how it came about that Labour fought the Holyrood campaign on the basis of “bite-sized individual policies.”
Scottish Labour was forced into that approach because its leadership – like Alexander himself – lacked both the will and the politics to mount a comprehensive fightback against the Lib-Dem cuts (needs budgets by councils, strike action by workers, community-based campaigning, etc.) and offer a positive alternative (an attack on social inequalities).
Problem number five: Alexander’s plea that Labour should be the party of the aspiring middle classes is at odds with Labour’s basic reason for its existence.
Labour stands for collective values or it stands for nothing. It was formed and existed for most of the twentieth century as a vehicle for implementing political and social reforms to improve the situation of the working population.
Its answer to poverty and poor health was social reform, not creating opportunities for individuals to escape such conditions through pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, one by one, and by dint of their own efforts.
Only with the advent of Blair were notions of equality and collective advance, however vaguely expressed they may have been, eclipsed by the rhetoric of promoting individual ‘choice’ and individual ‘self-improvement’.
Alexander’s critique of Labour’s defeat in the Holyrood elections, in other words, is a factually inaccurate plea to return to the policies which helped bring about Labour’s defeat at a national level in 2010.
Instead of accepting a plea for a return to New Labour, the Scottish Labour Party needs a proper debate on the reasons for its defeat on 5th May. “Proper debate” means: one open to input from Labour Party members and affiliated unions, and one which incorporates democratic decision-making processes for determining outcomes.
Instead, all the signs are that Labour will be carrying out a behind-closed-doors review.
The terms of the review are being drawn up by the Scottish Labour Party General Secretary. Ed Miliband has appointed three Westminster MPs to be part of the review. Some MSPs (or ex-MSPs) and individual party members are also due to be appointed by Miliband to conduct the review.
The control over the review being exercised by Labour in London has been criticized by party members in Scotland, on the grounds that the review should be conducted by the Scottish Labour Party itself.
Although this is true, it fails to tackle a more fundamental shortcoming: there is no guarantee that a review run from Glasgow will be any more democratic than one conducted from Westminster.
The following motion is on the agenda for the next meeting of Unite’s Scottish Region Political Committee. Party members and members of affiliated unions are urged to get their CLPs and unions to pass motions along similar lines:
“The Unite Scottish Region Political Committee:
*Notes with dismay Labour’s defeat in the 2011 Scottish Parliament elections;
*Believes that there should now be a proper discussion and debate, involving the membership of the Labour Party, affiliated unions and affiliated societies, about the reasons for Labour’s defeat;
*Further believes that the most democratic forum for deciding the outcomes of such discussion and debate is a special Scottish Labour Party conference, which takes, debates and votes on motions submitted by CLPs, affiliated unions and affiliated societies;
*Therefore calls on the Scottish Labour Party Executive Committee to organise such a conference for the autumn, drawing up a timetable which allows adequate time for the submission of motions to that conference.