Labour activists meeting in Glasgow over the weekend must be wondering how it has all gone so wrong, so quickly.
Just six months ago Anas Sarwar was a shoo-in for First Minister. Now he’s fighting for third place. At 18% Labour’s poll support in Scotland is at an all time low. If people voted in line with recent polls, it would be Labour’s lowest ever share of the vote at any parliamentary election since the introduction of universal suffrage.
This disenchantment is reflected on the ground too. I don’t place much store by council by-election results. Winning wards after multiple transfers on very low turnouts tells us little about what might happen in a general election. But in his recent interview in LabourList, Ian Murray cites local byelection successes as evidence that the polls are wrong. Even that straw can’t be clutched now as the SNP won a seat off Labour in East Ayrshire on the eve of their conference.
Labour’s victory in Scotland last July doesn’t feel as if it’s made much of a change in the body politic in the country. Nearly three dozen new MPs have been almost invisible. An infusion of political energy and ideas not.
I remember SNP MPS at Westminster getting stuck into multiple campaigns, often leading cross-party initiatives on drugs, human rights, poverty, electoral reform, Palestine, climate and much else. We said and did things, often going off party script.
I get this is probably easier in opposition. But still, the lack of any Labour MP – with the laudable exception of Brian Leishman attacking his government’s feet dragging on Grangemouth – having anything much to say about anything is remarkable.
As a consequence, they look like a sullen bunch of cheerleaders for a government Scottish people, indeed Scottish Labour supporters, don’t much like. The whole exercise is infused with as much enthusiasm and inspiration as a Taliban karaoke night out.
Labour’s woes are entirely of their own making. Global forces will always batter any administration but the central problem for Labour is that it has abandoned the social-democratic credo which the party represented for more than a hundred years. Even under Blair the mantra was for the many not the few. Not now.
Labour’s decision to protect the assets of the wealthy from social obligation now means they will tax the many, not the few. It is a bizarre political straitjacket which they have willingly put on.
Unwilling to charge the richest more, Labour have denied themselves the means to increase the proportion of the economy devoted to the public realm. That’s why they keep the Tory cap on welfare payments to the poorest. Why they’ve taken energy support off pensioners with incomes of more than £12,800. And why they are now planning to cut social support to disabled people.
Rather than review the policy of not taxing the rich, Labour leaders are doubling down. In Scotland, their finance spokesperson rails against the SNP government’s higher rates of income tax.
Meanwhile, losing support to Reform, Labour is now developing a cruel line on migrants. An erstwhile little known party pressure group Blue Labour has everyone’ attention. Now with its own parliamentary caucus, the group argues firmly against migration and demands the UK government take a much more hostile stance against people who seek to make Britain their home.
This is what is known in political theory as triangulation. When you perceive that the public has shifted its views towards your opponent, you move your policy towards them. You aim to reassure people their prejudices are safe in your hands – there’s no need to go anywhere else.
There are, however, some gaping holes in this theory. To begin with its advocates seem only to deploy it selectively, usually when trying to move policy to the right. There is for instance, considerable support in England for higher taxes for the wealthiest – but Labour policy is immune to that. In Scotland, you might think triangulation would encourage the Labour Party to respond to the growth in public support for independence by advocating more powers for Scotland. But no.
But the main problem with the theory of triangulation is that it takes the principle out of politics. Beliefs, attitudes, policies become flexible and fluid. Parties come to stand for nothing other than winning an election. Which is sort of where we are now.
In that hollowed out sphere the public give up in increasing numbers. Opt out. Abstain. To change this, to inspire and motivate people once again, parties need to represent something real. Something that offers conviction and change.
That seems to be lost on the Labour party just now. They are instead seeking to absorb and incubate every prejudice in the hope of building a majority against the SNP. Their problem is that others are doing the same, Reform and the Tories both have the same agenda. It’s a crowded room.
Not only that, but this approach will also leave increasing numbers of decent Labour supporters disenfranchised. People who don’t see their salvation in attacking migrants and minorities. People who want a fairer more equal society. These are the people the independence movement needs to be talking to.