Does anyone want to be Scottish Labour leader ?

Labour are in crisis following the May 2011 Holyrood elections that saw the SNP win an absolute majority

John McAllion Posted by on September 2, 2011. Filed under Holyrood,John McAllion,Opinion,Scotland. Posted with the tags:,
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Does anyone want to be Scottish Labour leader ?

Labour MP Tom Harris

Shortly after Labour’s disastrous performance in the last Scottish elections, Tom Harris became the first of the Party’s Scottish MP’s to announce that he would not be using his vote in the electoral college to elect the party’s new Scottish leader.

With MPs outnumbering MSP’s in the Party’s Electoral College, he argued that their continued involvement in the election of Labour leader in the Scottish Parliament could no longer be justified.

Three months later he announced that he would not only now vote in these elections as an MP but would stand himself as a candidate if the Party was interested in having him.

Harris is not well known outside of his own constituency. He had recently failed to get elected to Labour’s shadow cabinet in London.

He strongly supported the illegal invasion of Iraq, backed foundation hospitals and ID cards, and was a robust advocate of tougher asylum rules and anti­terrorism legislation.

So what made this self-confessed, dyed-in-the-wool and largely anonymous Blairite suddenly believe that he had the political vision to spark a revival that would see Scottish Labour rise phoenix like from the ashes of last May’s electoral mauling?

If those who knew him, his fellow MPs, did not rate him as Shadow Cabinet material, why should those who knew little of him, the Party membership, entrust him with leading the Party out of the Scottish political wilderness?

The answer to these questions lies in the near chaotic state of Labour’s current efforts to find a replacement for Iain Gray who is scheduled to stand down as Labour’s Scottish leader this autumn.

In announcing his own candidacy, Harris himself bemoaned the absence of credible MSP candidates and worried over the bizarre possibility that, with Gray set to go, there would be no leadership campaign to select his successor.

If nobody else wanted the job, he at least was up for it.

His concerns are well-founded. More than 3 months have passed since the catastrophic defeat with little or no public debate about the way forward for Scottish Labour.

An internal party review led by Jim Murphy MP and Sarah Boyack MSP is grinding away behind the scenes.

Occasionally, it surfaces into public view via press leaks that serve only to stir up the dinosaur tendency lurking in Scottish Labour ranks.

A suggestion that Scottish Labour might develop its own separate identity and even new policies that were “made in Scotland” was publicly slapped down by one senior Scottish MP as “the slippery slope to separatism”.

He described those in the party who harboured such thoughts as “deluded”. Labour was and only could be a British party.

Meanwhile Lord McConnell began by calling for MP’s to neither nominate nor vote as MPs in the election of the Scottish leader.

Within a few months he about turned and conceded that an MP could even stand as Scottish leader so long as he or she was willing to serve in the Scottish Parliament after the 2015 election.

McConnell was now echoing a party line coming from Westminster that an MP rather than an MSP would be the likely next leader. Douglas Alexander, while making it clear that he was not interested in the job, broke cover to support the MP for Scottish leader line.

Clearly, Scottish Labour’s hierarchy shared Tom Harris’ view that their current crop of MSPs were not up to the job of leading the party in Scotland.

Harris’ intervention at least provoked the friends of Labour MSP Ken McIntosh to let it be known that he “absolutely intends to stand”.

They explained that, like other possible MSP candidates, he will only declare his candidacy after the publication of the party’s internal review in September.

So, is the stage set for a fierce internal battle between Scottish-based and London-based Labour?

Will the “deluded” party members who believe in an autonomous Scottish party dare to challenge the British perspective of the leading Scottish MPs in Westminster?

Will we now witness an open struggle for the soul of the Scottish party?

Based on the history of past contests for Scottish leader the answer can only be no.

Donald Dewar, Jack McConnell and Wendy Alexander were all elected unopposed to the Scottish leadership. Henry McLeish and Iain Gray were opposed only by candidates who shared their same New Labour credentials.

Scottish Labour simply does not do ideological struggle.

This time there may well be a contest. MP may even stand against MSP.

But there will be no open fighting over the future direction of the party.

The internal party review will endorse neither full fiscal autonomy nor devolution max as Labour’s answer to independence.

The likes of Murphy and Alexander, who hunger for a seat in a British Cabinet, will not tolerate an autonomous Scottish party pursuing independent policies.

Scottish Labour’s role is to help elect a Labour Government in London.

It exists to strengthen, not to weaken the union. Whoever emerges as the new Scottish leader, that will not change.