Originally posted in 2016
Scottish Labour’s demise in the mid 2010s was a sight to behold. I originally posted this as Scottish Labour was imploding in 2016.
Labour used to own Scotland. For generations it was their strongest heartlands. It was where votes for Labour were weighed rather than counted. It was where the old adage that even a ‘donkey with a red rosette would be elected’ was actually true.
Yet in a blink of an eye, everything changed. Labour, once the darlings of the working class in Scotland, are now viewed with sheet disgust. Their fall from grace was dramatic. In 2010, Scotland voted in record numbers for Gordon Brown’s Labour yet six short years later, Labour find themselves so disregarded by the Scottish electorate that they came being the hated Tories in the 2016 Scottish Parliamentary elections.
A lot had been spoken about and wrote about Labour’s demise in Scotland. It’s true that their demise did not start or end at the Scottish independence referendum. Their failure to stand up to Thatcherism in the 80s; the creation of New Labour in the 90s and the advent of Blairism militarism which gave us the Iraq war – all of these events had a fundamental effect of the party’s membership but it did not manifest at the ballot box.
In 2007, 39.5% of the votes in Scotland went to Labour- that’s 922k votes. This actually increased in 2010 when Labour won 42% of the vote. It was only in 2015 that Labour’s vote dwindled from 42% of the vote in Scotland to 24%. Yes, there were other aspects at play here, specifically the rise in popularity the SNP, but it was during the period 2010-2015 that the seller destruction of Scottish Labour took place.
I can remember the day that I turned my back on Labour. Or should I say, I can remember the day that Labour’s turned their back on me. I was a founding member of the No2BedroomTax campaign and we were ultimately successful in convincing the Scottish govt to fully mitigate against the bedroom tax in Scotland.
It was during this campaign that I was asked to speak at a rally protesting outside the Scottish Tory conference in Stirling. After the speeches and rally, there was a march through the streets of Stirling. It was during this march that we heard shocking news.
While ordinary Scots were fighting against the Tories. While we were protesting against harmful Tory cuts, one of Labour’s big breasts, former chancellor Alistair Darling, was not standing shoulder to shoulder with us. No, he was giving a speech and subsequently received a standing ovation at the exact same Tory conference that we were protesting against.
Never in my life did I believe I would see the day that a Labour MP speaking at a Tory conference, lee alone receiving a standing ovation. Yet there if was, right before my eyes.
Alistair Darling decision to speak at the Scottish Tory conference was, to me, an unbearable betrayal. He symbolised everything that was wrong with Labour. Instead of standing up for their beliefs. They discarded their principles to go hobnobbing with the Tories.
Bringing this forward to the indyref. For me, Labour standing shoulder to shoulder with the Tories during the indyref may have been a little bit more bearable if they hadn’t stood shoulder to shoulder with the Tories on the bedroom tax; if they hadn’t stood shoulder to shoulder with the Tories on austerity; if they hadn’t stood shoulder to shoulder with the Tories public sector cuts. All the Better Together campaign did to me is rub salt into my wounds and reminding me that, when I needed Labour the most, they betrayed me and took the side of the Tories.
I suspect that every former Labour voter in Scotland has their own personal story about their journey away from Labour and in most cases, Labour’s damage, is self-inflicted.
Voters in Scotland had a positive emotional attachment to Labour. This attachment resulted in Scotland voting en-mass for Labour for 60 years. That emotional attachment is still there but it is now a negative emotional attachment and this spells trouble for labour in Scotland.
And this is the problem for Labour-it doesn’t matter what policies they offer, it doesn’t matter who their leader is and it certainly doesn’t matter how ‘autonomous’ they say they are. Nothing can overcome the visceral and deep dislike that former Labour voters feel about the party. And this means that we could very well be witnessing the terminal decline of Labour in Scotland and there is nothing Scottish labour can do about it.
