 | 'These by-elections for the Westminster and Holyrood seats held by Donald Dewar will be remembered for the low turn-out at the polls. The lowest in living memory and a disgrace for Scottish democracy. Those responsible have to be those who have exercised power in Scotland over the years. Yet New Labour leaders rejoiced as if all this represented a miraculous victory.' Jimmy Reid in the Herald,, 27 th November 2000. |  |
Membership of the House of Lords is used today as a pay-off by New Labour. I know a Labour MP who was bribed to save the party from a nasty by-election with a peerage. A similar offer was made to a sitting MP whose seat they wanted for a Blair acolyte. Some radical liberals have gone the same way. Lord Steel, a radical when I first met him, picked up a peerage on his way to becoming an MSP. He became the Scottish Parliament's first Speaker. He presided over the opening ceremony. Who can forget Sheena Washington's Is There for Honest Poverty and the lines: Ye see yon birkie ca'd a lord/ Wha struts, and stares, an'a'that/ Tho' hundreds worship at his word, he's but a cuif for a' that? Lord Steel didn't even blush. Ordure, ordure.
Why such a stooshie about the by-election results in Anniesland? There was no threat to Labour in this constituency. I heard some BBC reporter say that Drumchapel is one of the poorest urban communities in the UK. He could have extended that to western Europe. He was mystified that such poverty didn't spark off an electoral rebellion against the party that has presided over their deprivations. For as long as I can remember, through all the deprivation this constituency has been solid Labour. The BBC man obviously didn't know that the long-term poor are more likely to be demoralised than revolutionised. Militant trade unionism was rooted among the relatively well-paid workers and not the ill-organised poorly paid. If the ill-organised poorly paid had been well-organised too, they wouldnot have been poorly paid in the first place. If extreme poverty signalled rebellion then Africa and the Indian subcontinent would be permanently convulsed with uprisings. In Anniesland the nationalists were always on a tanking to nothing. They improved their percentage of the vote by something like six or seven per cent. There was never much more than that in it for them.
Even so, the SNP is nowhere near learning how to deploy the class argument in Scotland's Labour strongholds. Its social-democratic credentials place it further to the left than New Labour, which means the SNP is potentially more attractive for the non-demoralised poor than Labour, whose policies, in government, are basically Thatcherite. The SNP has failed to communicate this new reality to the Scottish punters, who do not as yet know that in today's political context the SNP is a party of the left and New Labour is a party of the right. Could it be that the SNP has a problem in trumpeting its modern left credentials in the central belt lest it antagonise zealous supporters in the north whose nationalism has a bourgeois tinge? The SNP cannot win Scotland without winning the lowlands. That's the arithmetic of Scottish politics. The SNP and the SSP have got to be in there with the punters and the demoralised poor, between elections, helping them fight back on issues that impinge on their everyday life.
These by-elections for the Westminster and Holyrood seats held by Donald Dewar will be remembered for the low turn-out at the polls. The lowest in living memory and a disgrace for Scottish democracy. Those responsible have to be those who have exercised power in Scotland over the years. Yet New Labour leaders rejoiced as if all this represented a miraculous victory. You got the impression that if only one person had voted in each polling station, but had voted New Labour, the party leaders would have been ecstatic. They simply don't give a damn for anything except winning and will chuck everything overboard to attain that goal.
New Labour had no public campaign in Anniesland. No public meetings. No public debate. No hustings. Two press conferences at which party apparatchiks were in control. As polling day came upon us New Labour offered some kind of explanation for this bizarre non-campaign. The candidates, we were told, had been doorstepping the constituency. One of the candidates said on radio that he and his colleague had been to 24,000 doorsteps in four weeks - 6000 a week, 860 a day, 430 a day for each candidate. To allocate one minute to each doorstep would only give you time to shout a slogan. As anyone who has ever doorstepped knows you need to allow, at the very least, another minute to get from one doorstep to the next and knock the door, even in tenements. You have to walk from one tenement to another. You are talking at the very, very least, 1000 minutes or something like 17 hours a day for each candidate, every day. To do that you would have to be fitter than the late Emile Zatopek at his very peak. And even he couldn't have done it. The reason I'm going on about this is that the doorstepping was advanced to excuse a campaign that never was. The truth lies elsewhere. One of Labour's candidates was chairperson of the Scottish Campaign for Socialism. This meant he was opposed to the main thrust of government policy. Such a candidate, given public exposure, would have had to acknowledge his disagreements with government policies or recant his principles in public. I think we can only interpret this as meaning that he privately toed the line and henceforth will find it well-nigh impossible to toe any other line.
This is reflective of what is going on within Scottish Labour. With a general election looming, the party leadership wants to tie up what left MSPs remain by putting them in positions of innocuous power and then insisting that they too must toe the line. Threats, of course, are also lurking in the background. Elaine Smith, Labour MSP for Coatbridge, has registered her opposition to the stock transfer of council houses on the grounds that it is simply another form of privatisation.
Significantly, she was supported only by the Liberal Democrat MSP Donald Gorrie, who, unlike Lord Steel, has remained true to the traditional radicalism that was always an element in Scottish Liberalism. Elaine has bottle, for New Labour will have the knives out for her, and it's ruthless. Constituents in Coatbridge should rally to her defence, as should trade unions that oppose stock transfers. Mind you, if these by-elections are anything to go by, then in future New Labour membership might be confined to long- distance runners.
- Nov 27
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