Scotland, Wendy Alexander and a bad year for the roses
This guest blog is by Illiam Costain McCade who is based in Edinburgh and works as a freelance political consultant and as senior consultant (Scotland) for Cogitamus Limited. He can be contacted at coscade@blueyonder.co.uk
When, after the Scottish Parliament election on 3rd May 2007, Labour emerged as Scotland’s second largest party, beaten for the first time by the SNP, and with their support at the lowest level for over half a century, there was, surprisingly, a slight sigh of relief within the Labour ranks that things weren’t quite as bad as they could have been. Indeed, in retrospect, these are now more likely remembered as halcyon days for Scottish Labour.
We were entering a new era of politics in Scotland, with our first ever SNP administration ruling as our first ever minority government. With hacks and anoraks wondering whether the SNP could actually govern, and whether or not a minority government could survive very long, it would take a Herculean effort to make anything else dominate the political headlines – but Labour succeeded in stealing the show.
Following the historic election defeat, leader Jack McConnell was naturally required to fall on his sword, making way for a Brownite leader. Cue a leadership election with only one candidate, and a new start for the party, from September 2007, under Wendy Alexander.
In her resignation speech just ten months later, Wendy was keen to blame the SNP for her troubles, indicating that it was “unrelenting”, “vexatious” and “successive SNP-inspired complaints and investigations” around donations to her leadership campaign which did for her.
However, in truth, nothing seemed to go right for Wendy from day one, and her leadership will be remembered for bad performances, bad judgement, and bad management. Her legacy will bear witness to the fact that her problems, and Labour’s problems, go far beyond issues arising from donations to a leadership campaign that never was. Whoever emerges as the new leader later this summer will need to take stock, understand what went wrong, and try to undo the damage.
The first point they will need to recognise is that, with regard to the donations issues, the real long-term problems for Wendy were less to do with the details of the donations themselves and much more to do with the way the first story was handled and the lasting impressions this generated.
When the first story broke in the Sunday Herald on 25th November, regarding the acceptance of an illegal donation from a Jersey resident, Labour responded with a series of denials and obfuscations until there was no option other than to admit that the law had been broken – though, of course, not deliberately.
It was the nature of the response, rather than the transgression itself, which made the biggest impression on the media and public. It ensured that whenever the issue of donations was raised – and there were three separate issues within the space of eight months – any Labour statement on the matter was met with suspicion. It also generated a public perception of Scottish Labour which saw the party as lacking in honesty, integrity, probity and effective management.
An additional problem for Wendy was that the original story, and subsequent information, could only have been leaked to the press by a party insider. She was barely two months into the job, and already enemies within the Labour party were briefing against her.
However, the damage done to Wendy by the various donations issues serves to distract from the broader range of problems her leadership suffered.
Although she came in to the job with a deserved reputation for intelligence and strong debating skills, at no point during her ten months of leadership did Wendy succeed in besting Alex Salmond during First Minister’s Questions or in outmanoeuvring the SNP on policy or strategy.
Indeed, with regard to strategy, she may be best remembered for undermining her own initiatives.
In December 2007, Wendy put to the Scottish Parliament a proposal to establish an independent commission with a remit to review devolution and recommend any changes to the present constitutional arrangements within a devolved framework (i.e all options short of independence). The proposal was conceived as a counterweight to the SNPs ‘national conversation’ on independence, to take ownership of the constitutional debate out of the SNPs hands, and to broaden the debate beyond the single issue of independence.
With the backing of the Lib Dems, Labour’s former coalition partners, and the Conservatives, the Commission on Scottish Devolution was established. The UK Government announced its support in January 2008, Sir Kenneth Calman was appointed Chair in March, and the Commission held its first meeting on 28th April. Just one week later, Wendy announced that Scottish Labour now supported a referendum on independence.
The apparent lack of co-ordination with colleagues at Westminster, with her own party, and with her own policy adviser on the decision to support a referendum meant that media focus never shifted to the SNP, as it was intended to – the policy change itself, and the mismanagement of it, was the main story from start to finish.
In terms of internal party support for Wendy, it was this policy shift, poor management and poor performances at FMQs, and not the various donations issues, which made her continued leadership untenable.
We will never know whether or not, given the right amount of breathing space and support, Wendy may have been able to grow into the role, but on the evidence of the last ten months it seems that she did not possess the qualities or skills necessary to lead Scottish Labour at this time and, perhaps most fatally, she could not rely on their loyalty.
At the same time as the slow disintegration of Scottish Labour has been playing out, the SNP celebrated its first full year as a minority government and without suffering a major defeat in the Scottish Parliament. (The first bill to be rejected, on 18 June 2008, was a proposal to replace Scotland’s two main arts bodies with a new quango. Though MSPs backed the general principles of the legislation, they rejected the accompanying financial memorandum.)
According to a recent YouGov Poll in the Daily Telegraph, the approval rating for the SNP administration is 52% (with only 27% expressing dissatisfaction), and almost every poll indicates that support for the SNP, in terms of voting intentions, has increased since the 2007 election.
In short, whilst everyone has been watching the Wendy Alexander show, the SNP have had time to settle in relatively unhindered, and are continuing to enjoy an extended honeymoon period.
Whoever prevails in the forthcoming Labour leadership election will obviously need to identify new strategies for dealing with the SNP, but given the extent of their own party’s problems, this will have to be a longer-term objective.
The focus will need to be on recovery, on reassessing the position on a referendum and repairing the damage done to the Calman Commission and to their relationship with the other unionist parties. Perhaps most fundamentally, they will also need to find a way of addressing the issue of devolution for the party itself, seeking greater decision-making autonomy, and disengaging its own fortunes from those of Labour at Westminster.
It is against this background that Labour are now preparing for the by-election in Glasgow East. On paper, this should be an easy win – it is their third safest Westminster seat in Scotland, with a majority of more than 13,500 over the SNP, who would require a 22% swing to win.
But with the SNP riding high in the polls, the Scottish Labour Party leaderless and morale at an all-time low, the timing of the by-election could hardly be worse Gordon Brown.
Labour’s fortunes in the by-election, and the fortunes of the new Scottish Labour leader, will both depend heavily on their ability to honestly assess where the party has been going wrong in the last ten months.