Why Scotland's poor are left at a loss

were talking on the eve of the 1987 General Election; it was clear that,

the following day, the Tories would be returned by a landslide. It was

equally clear, in Scotland, that voters would mass behind the surest

losers in town; that the irrelevant, impotent Labour Party would sweep

the nation.

Margo answered this by telling me a story. Govan voters, in 1974, were

surveyed on the eve on the February General Election, as she fought

frantically to defend her slender majority. Who did they consider the

ablest of the candidates? Margo MacDonald. Who appeared to care most for

local needs? Margo MacDonald. Which candidate had they met most often?

Margo MacDonald. Who would be the best MP for Glasgow Govan? Margo

MacDonald. For whom were they voting come Thursday? Why, wee Harry

Selby, the elderly Marxist barber, and the British Labour Party.

''It's not rational,'' she said, ''it's a deep, emotional thing . . .

absolutely embedded in working-class culture. At the crunch, in a

General Election, they simply could not break with tribal tradition and

vote for me.''

Harry Selby duly won, and was never heard of again. In 1979 he was

brutally ousted in an internal Labour coup.

But why do the poor vote Labour?

A then Scottish Labour MP, Jim Sillars, campaigning in Govan in 1973

against the woman he would one day marry, was traumatised by what he

found. Street after street of slum housing, one with an abandoned car

lying wrecked in the middle. (He asked Harry Selby to have it removed.

''But we use it to stand on for speeches,'' said the Labour candidate.)

He was shown flooded backcourts, where wifies could only reach their

washing lines with homemade pontoons and duckboards. Sipping tea with a

heroic Govan woman, he saw enormous rats bolting about; they dared not

leave their babies out in prams, said Govan mothers, lest rats attack

them.

Would he himself, living here, vote Labour? They had a Labour

Corporation, long years of Labour representation in Parliament,

disillusioned memories of remote Labour Governments. Sillars was forced

to admit he would not. ''That's right,'' said the ladies, ''we're all

voting for Margo.''

Later, Sillars heard Willie Ross, doyen of Labour in Scotland, touring

the seat in an election-car, roaring, ''Noo's the day and noo's the

hour, for Govan tae boot out Tory power . . .'' But, saw Sillars

dismally, it was Labour power and what was done with it that really

mattered to the voters of this division.

Yet Margo, having won, could not hold. Nor, nearly two decades later,

was her converted nationalist of a husband able successfully to defend

his grip on the much larger successor constituency. Sillars was beaten

in 1992 by one Ian Davidson; I wonder what has become of that tribune of

the people, or in what like of street he lives?

AS I write, it is mildly gratifying to sense that the nationalists

have at present the edge in the looming Monklands East by-election.

Euphoria is dampened by their unimpressive candidate (my memory of Kay

Ullrich, whom I met in that same General Election campaign seven years

ago, is of a vague chain-smoking cailleach in eccentric garb and heavy

henna), and by the certain knowledge that, win on Thursday though they

might, the SNP has not the slightest chance of saving the seat at the

next dissolution.

But the Monklands contest raises fascinating questions. Already some

people are wondering aloud if the mawking hagiolatry anent John Smith's

sudden death was entirely appropriate. No-one should minimise the human

tragedy of his loss, nor his undoubted talents. But to sober appraisal

of his minimal achievement in government is added the realisation that

he was scarcely beloved in his constituency.

Though admired, even liked by those who knew him, there is clear

resentment now apparent of his absentee status. John Smith's

constituents lived, for the most part, in phlegm-coloured council

schemes of chilling anonymity, amid the rusty dumps of post-industrial

Lanarkshire; he himself lived on a nice leafy street in nice posh

Morningside. (I dared to point this out when he died; more importantly,

I said it volubly when Smith was alive.)

But then, Donald Dewar (MP for Drumchapel, among much else) lives in

the pleasant West End. And George Robertson, MP for Hamilton, is in

Dunblane. This is part of rotten Labour in Scotland; the remoteness of

its ruling class. Harry Selby, poor soul that he was, at least lived in

the seat he aspired to represent.

On this the SNP are justly capitalising. Then, of course, there is

Labour's midden in Monklands. It does not matter whether substantive

charges of sectarianism or nepotism can be proven. What has long been

apparent is the utter contempt of Labour rulers for Monklands' ruled. In

their one-party state, a tiny claque passed its writs from a

smoke-filled room. In Monklands and elsewhere, a Labour councillor is

under the cadres' whip. In Glasgow, he is forbidden to speak publicly on

any aspect of council policy -- even in defence of the Labour

administration -- without the express authority of his masters. In

Edinburgh, councillors who defied the Whip to censure a detested chief

executive were promptly suspended -- as a spokeswoman arrogantly

insisted they were yet obliged to vote on party lines.

Besides, there is Labour's candidate. Helen Liddell I have never met.

But she has a track-record as a ferocious anti-nationalist -- so

partisan in her advocacy of the 1978 Scotland Act that she only served

to alienate the broad support it desperately needed. She has

subsequently written one or two airport novels which I found tawdry. And

in her day she toiled for Robert Maxwell's gold, a PR apparatchik for

one of the most evil men ever to darken Scottish commerce.

What have these delightful people wrought in Scottish affairs?

Mesmerised by the chimera of British power, they have kept our country

in bondage for 15 nightmare years to an alien and wicked Government.

Enthroned throughout our municipal landscape, they have moved further

and further away from the toiling and dispossessed they claim to serve.

Enthusiastically they clawed in the poll-tax. Glamorously they mingled

and sipped white wine in the foyers of wondrous new theatres, shopping

malls, and concert halls. Remorselessly, even as they cut back on

schools and policing and left public housing to damp and rot and

tenants, they have expanded the public payroll, laying on ever more

meaningless noddy-jobs for middle-class nothings.

Think, for a moment, of the reality of the average Lanarkshire Scot.

Of the brutal, alienating housing block in which he lives -- street

after street, estate after estate, and them all make of ticky-tacky, and

they all look just the same. Dad has no job; you have no job; you will

never have a job. Your wee brothers cannot play outside, because of

broken glass, and needles, and dog-filth, and perverts. Crime, to you,

is not a middle-class neurosis but ever-present reality; you are

constantly burgled, incessantly threatened.

All about you is the ugly. All above you is oppression; the wild-eyed

fear of teachers, the insolence of social security clerks, the contempt

of police, the patronising we-know-best mantras of social workers. There

is never the sight of beauty; there is no experience of love. Who, in

such an environment, the third generation in such a cosmos, might not

turn to drink? Or drugs? Or laying some concrete blocks on the railway

line?

This is the reality for him, the voter, of Monklands East. There is no

nice suit for him; he will have no fair obituary, nor lie in the piety

of Iona. Come Thursday, and may he vote in fury, and 10,000 brothers, as

one in judgment on their lords and masters.