 | 'The campaign is in increasing danger of spinning completely out of control, rising into cacophony of panicked, vicious smears and lies that touch at no point the essential issues in Scotland today.' SNP Chief Executive Michael Russell on Labour's negative campaigning in the North East, in the Scotsman, 16 th November 1998. |  |
A by-election is the political equivalent of a roller-coaster - campaigns go up and down according to the gossip from the streets, the feedback from canvassers and even the prejudices of journalists. But the proof of the campaign comes in one moment - when the returning officer gives the people's verdict!
Thanks to more and more effective ballot box sampling, and the use of lap-top computers to crunch the numbers at the count, the verdict can be known to the political parties sometime before that decisive instant. It was all the more surprising, therefore, that the other parties seemed not to bother with intensive work at the count, because they too could have had advance knowledge of what a triumph for the SNP the NE by-election was and how bad it was for all the Unionist parties.
By about two am on the Friday morning the SNP had enough information to be able to predict not just a victory, but one which would, at the very least, result in a majority as overwhelming as that which Allan Macartney had secured in 1994. The Courier - virtually the only newspaper left in Scotland that still regularly runs editions up into the early hours - was able to print that fact, and the possibility that labour would come third in its last issues off the press on Friday morning, because it bothered to keep asking the SNP Press office throughout the night. For other journalists who ambled into the count itself at about 10.30 am the show was almost over, and the boxes themselves as they piled up at the front of the stage told the full story.
Despite their attempts to claim something good from just below 20 % of the vote, the Tories actually did very badly. Their vote fell 4 % from their General Election total in the North east of Scotland - and 1997 was hardly a vintage year for Scottish Conservatives. There is no Tory revival as yet, and there will be none until they become a party that wants Scotland to do well, rather than one which pays only lip service to Scottish democracy.
The Liberals have even more grounds to worry - in a Euro seat that has two of their ten constituencies they managed only a poor fourth, dropping almost eight per cent on their General Election result. The detail is even worse for them - analysis of ballot box sampling shows that they came third in both those seats, with the SNP first. The bubble of NE liberalism has been burst by Ashdown's desperate wish to have a ministerial red box. Having been in Gordon and West Aberdeen during the campaign, I am convinced that vigorous SNP campaigning and vigorous recruiting can produce great dividends. Sandy Stronach and Maureen Watt are just the candidates to do it, too.
But Labour's performance was the worst of the three. There has been so much hype about the invincible New Labour machine that it can sometimes appear to roll over the opposition without much effort. But if the NE is anything to go by, those days are well and truly done. A poor candidate with no experience was supported by a poor campaign with virtually no workers. It was the first by-election of modern times to appear bereft of London Labour workers pounding the streets, or the London Labour poster team tumbling from a white van to fill councillors' gardens with the new Labour message. That was strange - but stranger still was the complete absence of Labour activists, with most polling stations unmanned and most leaflet runs unattempted or uncompleted.
Alex Salmond always dates his realisation that the Tories were in terminal decline in Scotland from the election in Banff & Buchan when they couldn't even get activists to stand at polling gates. That was true for Labour throughout the NE on NE Polling Day - even in the heartlands of Aberdeen and Dundee. Labour activists in Scotland are voting with their feet, disillusioned by Blair and by the control freak tendency that imposed a candidate, imposed a campaign, and crashed to their worst result in Scotland in a generation.
Proof of how impervious to sense the New Labour leadership is, however, came within hours of the result. Blair's tour of Wales was disrupted again and again by pleas from the Welsh Labour hierarchy to allow Wales to decide on who leads the party there. 'Of course' says Blair - and then proceeds to endorse with no subtlety whatsoever his own man who until a month a go had refused even to run for the assembly.
And within 24 hours Helen Liddell, nat-basher-in-chief to the Scottish Office (and paid to do so by the public purse) was on her feet at a Labour woman's conference, repeating the old nonsense about the SNP preferring embassies to education.
Helen has engraved in her soul the quality of the Bourbons - fated to forget nothing and yet learn nothing. Her visceral hatred of 'nats' was born out of the seventies, and still reeks of seventies' rhetoric - whilst the rest of us move into the new century, with new hopes and new oppurtunities.
But while Labour refuses to learn the lessons of the NE by-election, the SNP is already hard at work, garnering its information and making the most of what it has learnt.
Firstly, good candidates, chosen locally, are in a strong position. Ian Hudghton knew the area, and had the confidence and ability to relate to every voter he met, and every journalist who spoke to him. He will be a first class Euro MP, and a key player in the Scottish Parliament elections. And he will be supporting locally chosen candidates, whose ability has been proved by the testing election committee approval process.
Secondly, nothing substitutes for work on the ground. Telephone canvassing and door-knocking are vital in order to find support, build support, and encourage support to vote. There are only five months to the Scottish elections - but if you make a hundred calls every night, you can still speak to an awful lot of voters!
And finally confidence and hard work can see off even the worst smears and attacks. In the last six weeks the Prime Minister, the Chancellor, the Foreign Secretary, the Defence Secretary, the Secretary for Trade and Industry, the London Union barons and the Institute of Directors have all tried their hand at nat-bashing. There has never been a more sustained or high-pressure assault on the SNP in its history. Who would have imagined, even a year ago, that a Prime Minister would denounce the SNP in hysterical language even when speaking to the NATO assembly! And George Robertson spends more time on us than he does on Saddam Hussein!
Yet we have survived it - and indeed if the first of the polls from the by-election are to be believed we may even have grown in strength during it. This is partly because of the growing 'scunner factor' amongst Labour supporters, and partly because negative campaigning never works for more than a few days - as a way of life it is counter productive.
But it is also because the SNP is prepared now to believe in itself and its message. We are no longer in the bunker, convinced of our rightness but nervous of the sense and resilience of our fellow countrymen and women. We are prepared to tell the truth in a reasoned and constructive way, and trust those who live here to chose for themselves.
That is what we did in the North east and what we must do for every single day of the next five months. We can rest later - now we have the chance to change Scotland utterly, and to usher in real Scottish democracy. The chance at last to make our people free and our nation independent.
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