I’m rooting for Anas Sarwar, I really am. He’s personable, he’s bright, and he says a lot of the right things. But I just cannot get my head round the Scottish Labour leader’s choice of a new logo for his party. A thistle? Really? Is that it?
The first obvious problem with the idea is that the design of it is so old-fashioned. It looks a bit like the logo of a municipal leisure centre in Motherwell in the 1980s. The colours are all wrong as well: not red, not purple, not pink, not anything.
The second problem is that the logo has been inspired by focus groups. Put a group of Scots in a room with tea and chocolate digestives and they will moan about how crap everything is and this is what has happened with Labour. They’ve asked people what they think of their rose logo and they’ve said it’s a bit old, a bit tired and a wee bit English.
The third issue – and this one is the most annoying in a way – is that the thistle is also such a hackneyed way to represent Scotland. Why not go the whole hog and have the thistle held aloft by Wee Jimmy Krankie with a half-eaten scotch pie in her gub? These things, like the thistle, have done their bit; they have nothing more to give.
More seriously, the other reason Scottish Labour has ended up with a thistle is because of its existential problems. They are accused of being “Red Tories”, they are accused of being subservient to London, and they are accused of being insufficiently Scottish in the way that the SNP and many of its supporters would define Scottish; some Scots put our noses down to the Labour rose and smell England. And therefore Scottish Labour must be nationalistic (but not too nationalistic) and take action (but not too much action) and so they order a re-branding.
The problem for Mr Sarwar, however, is what to replace the red rose with. I guess he might have gone full-on nationalist and used a saltire, perhaps with a subtle wash of red – something, anything, to prove Labour is profoundly Scottish. But the problem with the saltire is it’s already been claimed by the other guys; it is already draped, like a bit of old tat, round Nicola Sturgeon’s shoulders. Labour also fears that getting too close to the saltire means getting too close to independence.
In choosing a “nationalistic” symbol, Mr Sarwar also has to strike a delicate balance with the rest of his party in the UK. He is trying to say that his party is nationalistically Scottish but also British and unionist and that’s a difficult concept for some Scots to get their heads round – many of them the kind of Scots Mr Sarwar needs to attract. The question now, after the rebrand, is whether a sign of difference with the rest of Labour, reflected in a new logo, will make the problem better or worse.
My instinct is that it will probably make things worse in the end and that Mr Sarwar could have made things easier for himself by choosing a logo that reflected something broader and more outward-looking – indeed, perhaps his more traditional socialist base and many liberals would have preferred it that way. The other problem for Mr Sarwar is that voters like me totally get the Scottish and English and British thing – the thistle and the rose in the same garden – but some voters with a narrower view of Scottishness may see Labour’s new thistle as Scottish but not Scottish enough.
I’m not pretending that the rebranding has been easy for Mr Sarwar – he has my sympathy. But ditching the rose was an opportunity to choose something progressive rather than nationalistic, modern rather than old-fashioned, something bigger than a nation. But instead we have the hoary old thistle, exhausted from its years of service as a metaphor. I have to say: the thistle doesn’t say much to me about my Scotland, but there’s a bigger problem: it doesn’t say much about Mr Sarwar’s Labour either.
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