Emerging from the debris of the Scottish Parliament election has been a painful process for the Labour Party.
Stunned by the scale of defeat there has been a series of necessary discussions -- many of them local and many of them personal -- about exactly what went wrong. And it did go wrong.
In fact it seemed to be a tale of three elections. The SNP received an endorsement similar to Labour’s of 1997; Labour had its worst election result since 1931 and only returned 15 constituencies out of 73; and, for many, it seemed Labour was fighting the campaign based on the rhetoric of 1983.
On the way to that final list of defeats Labour lost iconic seats that are part of its proud history. From my own, which contains the communities served by John Wheatley and James Maxton and fired by the radical vision of a Labour Party shaping Home Rule and providing opportunity for all, to the communities of Ayrshire and Lanarkshire; from John Smith’s old seat of Airdrie to Donald Dewar’s in Anniesland and culminating in the cruel choreography of the SNP claiming an overall majority when it took Gordon Brown’s seat of Kirkcaldy.
The reasons for defeat will be part of the major review being undertaken by Jim Murphy MP and Sarah Boyack MSP but, put bluntly, the truth is self-evident -- we failed to give people a reason to vote Labour. More worryingly, we failed to understand that it is about who runs the Scottish Parliament, not who is in power in Westminster -- even if both major parties made reference to the dangers posed by the Conservative-led Coalition.
All across Europe the self-evident truth is that elections which are part of a sub-national structure are viewed differently by voters who will make consciously different choices than in national elections. It is no surprise that an electorate like ours, shaped by tactical voting in the 1990s to target Conservative MPs, was able to demonstrate a similar level of sophistication when the opportunity arose.
The question for Labour is why it positioned itself so badly -- and why so many seats ended up, even in a nominally five party system, into a Labour versus anti-Labour situation. It was an endgame of incredible naivety with devastating effects for Labour as voters coalesced against us. So confused is this coalition that Tories and Trotskyites joined forces with Nationalist true believers and disaffected Liberal Democrats to defeat Labour candidates. But the tipping point was that Labour voters also switched over -- and the Labour vote fell in working class and middle class neighbourhoods in all the seats lost.
The key lesson for Labour, from its very inception, is that it only achieves success when it pulls together the common interests of different sections of society. It was as true for Clement Attlee in 1945 as it was for Harold Wilson in 1966 and Tony Blair in 1997. But those were elections for who governs Westminster.
The challenge for Labour is what it has to say about who governs Scotland. It is remarkable that the Labour Party which was central to the Constitutional Convention of the late 1980s -- when the SNP was too precious and too fundamentalist to be involved -- and which legislated for a parliament in Scotland in the late 1990s, has been outgunned by an SNP leadership that is actually moving away from the central tenets of its party to a position of “Independence Lite.”
The SNP wants its narrative that defines us by our nationality and not our experience of life to be the central feature of our political discourse over the next few years. The Tories want their ideology of deficit reduction and a consequentially smaller state to take hold. Neither narrative is what I came into politics for. I want politics to be about creating opportunity for people. I want Labour to have a purpose in Government for the future. It was said often enough during the last election that “Ed Miliband gets Scotland”.
We will be in a much better position when “Scottish Labour gets Scotland.”
l Frank McAveety was Labour MSP for Glasgow Shettleston.
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