open Democracy News Analysis - The lessons of Glasgow East, Gerry Hassan - Comments

Anagol on "The lessons of Glasgow East "

Anagol — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:49:49 +0000

As is to be expected, Gerry Hassan has produced the most comprehensively authoritative and perceptive analysis of the political situation resulting from the Glasgow East by-election that you are likely to come across anywhere.

Contrast this with the establishment analysis of BBC Scotland's Brian Taylor, for example. Personable and knowledgeable though Mr Taylor is, he is clearly unable or unwilling to conceive of the Glasgow East by-election result as the dawn of a new political era in Scotland, although objective analysis must indicate that, at the very least, it might well be.

Labour has lost it. In Scotland Labour's loss is the SNP's gain.

Keith McBurney on "The lessons of Glasgow East "

Keith McBurney — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:14:40 +0000

Don’t shoot this messenger welcoming a monumental blow through Glasgow East for and from the fresh winds of democracy which wing peoples powers aloft and presages the toppling of the present UK house of stacked cards held by 2 parties. It was worthy of congratulations all round on many counts. Not least is that it brings forward and to the fore decisions determining the future of democracy and political relationships within and between our peoples and nations of these islands, as well as with our near neighbours on the continental mainland of Europe and those further abroad in the Commonweath.

Gerry asked the Scots a while ago to think about the state we are in and, in the vision of spring, imagine a new, looser arrangement of the ties we are freely bound to in our quest for freedom. Herewith this Scot’s contribution in recognition and reflection on the confederal Independence envisaged by Murray Ritchie and on reviewing the image conjured in my mind’s eye from the crystal ball of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, respectively at: http://www.scottishindependenceconvention.com/Blogs/MurrayRitchie-110108.asp & http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/globalisation/visions_reflections/anthony_barnett. Sovereignty

Sovereignty & Confederacy: the antidote to Unions’ Blues

Gerry,

Thank you for your analysis, both on the night and now here. They ring true to my ear. I stayed up too, through the sparring, comment and aftermath, and on waking rather later than usual found euphoria had worked wonders as a curative as well!

I understand your focus on “Westminster” as it is the stage on which the spotlight will fall for the final acts of the old theatre. But would you agree that it is not the coming battle for possibly the last first past the post as well as the last elections for UK’s Westminster that is the problem, but more precisely the Whitehall which continues to hide behind and abuse it and all we peoples by proxy, much as the deadly duelling duo of Conservative and Labour parties, their paymasters and fellow travellers continue to hide the UK behind our Union so that they might be the ones to save at least the Union later and thus themselves in a win-win outcome beloved by the London City State we all service?

For if they are primarily for the UK polity rather than Union peoples, they represent the State, not us. And if they do not defend us against the State by transforming it for the better at what might be their parties' cost, the danger is that they will set us against each other to save themselves.

I ask because Independence and Union could transform and replace the UK with a Union of the Isles (IU) and so re-unite our nations of families and friends and family of friendly nations in acknowledgement of the final end to Empire in bringing the colonial curtain down on this its last stage here at home.

As you will know, the framework body for such an outcome has been in place since 1998 courtesy of this unforeseen (?) potential and millenial gift to the people in the Belfast Agreement. The intergovernmental Council of the Isles, aka the British-Irish Council, is a welcome comeback to a way of dealing with the mutual interests of our individual and several sovereign selves from a time long before the UK’s mixed blessing of a birth. As its stated aim is to “promote the harmonious and mutually beneficial development of the totality of relationships among the peoples of these islands”, there can be no doubt that in affecting us all, constitutional and political relationships qualify and should be on the agenda.

Others might wish to read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_Isles. Notably, that all the Irish are represented as one would expect among all who are self-governing (1). But - as yet - the only people who are not directly represented are the English, “because England does not have a devolved government“. Until England has its own - devolved or not - perhaps the new Minister for the Department of Regions and Local Government might do? (See the ourKingdom article entitled “A super-quango is born” at http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/ourkingdom-theme/stuart-weir/2008/07/28/a-super-quango-is-born.)

Meanwhile, the UK of England writ large remains a much pasted and papered over historical billboard for drive-by tourists and citizens as political consumers, but a real impediment to dealing with the democratic deficit now so starkly exposed and drawing increasing attention to itself in England. Hence, the way ahead has to lead to their land of oft promised but never delivered peace, progress and prosperity too, if we would as I believe we should and do wish to be harmonious.

The UK of GB & Ireland and now GB & Northern Ireland was a place to know our place, not a country. Britishness is a state of mind the State is minded that you think best of and for it. It purports to have values we all share in fairness, but is not itself just. Chipped to show where they might have been, British citizens bear passports that tell them and others where they do not come from.

Given this is no wannabe supra state as its Commission might be seen to wish the EU, the multi-national passport of citizens within but not of the IU would tell others that we are either English, Irish, Welsh, Scots, Channel or Manx islander, or from the remaining overseas territories such as Bermuda, the Falklands and Gibraltar if these folk were so self-determined too. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_overseas_territories)

I suggest and welcome that a Union of the Isles is what appears to be unfolding before us as the only recognisable way forward. Not federal under, which we de-facto are but can never de-jure be in Union that was never unitary however over centralised and hollowed out, especially after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and has been exacerbated since by successive Conservative and now Labour, if not Hailsham’s elective dictatorships, certainly authoritarian and autocratic maladministrations which led to the necessity made virtue of ersatz decentralisation in devolution at the expense of the now laid threadbare exposure of tattered democracy costumed by incorporated quango citizenship in England.

No, never again top down power retained. Instead, confederal power shared in mutual interest in rebuilding our democracies from bottom up. This could be achieved through our own open, deliberative Citizens’ Constitutional Conventions and Referendums in each of our nations to self-determine the authority, responsibilities and resources we would prefer to grant to each tier of our governance so that it might rest assured on solid foundations befitting public purpose and purse for these globally interdependent times.

Time too in which to recognise that it is independence as ever which is the prerequisite of interdependence and not some of our cash back and spread around for votes dependence if we would be rid of this London City State nominee client account in the name of the UK.

We do not need to be authorised by the state in its whipped parliaments to hold such Conventions and Referendums do we? After all, it is we the people who are sovereign, individually and severally. Without us there is no state. Or shall we leave it to the new Supreme Court to rule on our law and take it to the UN and Council of Europe again if necessary?

Moreover, such an IU outcome and way forward does answer the English Question of how they might free themselves from England writ large in UK and be party to the process rather than waiting until the rest of us have left the party. It might also serve to better recognise the EU for what it can only be in an interdependent Europe of sovereign independent nation states.

Way to go? If so, do you think it is time and there is time to enlighten all who might care to be informed? Because if we are all so minded, then there is even less further or longer to go now and we who are all inextricably linked could all get aboard for the journey together.

Given the opportunity and choice of being ready and willing to be party to the solution, or remain part and party to the parts and parties that are the problem, what would folk do? If we will, i suggest we too can for all our freedoms.

Goodbye to together yet set apart, divided to rule? Welcome to being apart as we all are individually, yet severally together as families, friends, communities and nations, just and justly as we should be in our personal and social unions of shared liberty, equality and common humanity?

So there it is: Independence in a transformed Union of interdependence, choosing our selves to agree what risks and rewards we might share, agreeing to disagree otherwise. Back to a real future that bridges all our past and present narratives in beginning again without throwing baby out with the bathwater. Independence and Union because like Love and Marriage, we would not wish to have one without the other!

Let us lay this disaffected and disunited Kingdom well past its use by date to rest. Let us bestir and awaken our Union of the Isles. Would you be prince to the kiss? The Union is dead. Long live the Union in all our future kingdoms.

Aye Ours,

Keith, frae Fife and Yorkshire, for Independence & Union, and a member of no party as yet and never any which would remain party to the problem.

Note: The intergovernmental Council of the Isles biannual summit membership comprises the Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland, the Prime Minister of the UK, the First Ministers of Northern Ireland (and Deputy), Scotland and Wales, and the Chief Ministers of Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man. Corresponding Ministers attend regular meetings that address specific matters.

Johnkad on "The lessons of Glasgow East "

Johnkad — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:46:08 +0000

For some of us the demise of what could have been a socialist government is too painful to contemplate. We try to avoid the political news that inevitably refers to yet a "new blow for Labour". Middle England will never sit comfortably with Labour and they only dallied with the party during its venomously right wing phase. My advice is: cut your loses and introduce a series of socialist policies in the dying days. At least we can have a legacy, meagre as it may be. A shocking case in point is the fact that on the issue of civil liberties Labour is now to the right of the Tories! Fave Page: Sony Laptop

Willie Thompson on "The lessons of Glasgow East "

Willie Thompson — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 17:15:40 +0000

We should evidently prepare ourselves for a Tory government with all that implies.

If Gordon Brown wants to win another election and continue as premier what he has to do is simple enough – dismiss the Tories and crypto-Tories with whom he surrounds himself, take on the fat cats in whose interests he's been governing and begin acting like a Labour prime minister – even a mildly social democratic one. Is there any possibility he'll do that? Of course not.

Willie Thompson

Anthony Barnett on "The lessons of Glasgow East "

Anthony Barnett — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 14:39:58 +0000

Tks Alex - very helpful link

alex_buchan on "The lessons of Glasgow East "

alex_buchan — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 09:57:25 +0000

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/scotland/Labour-heads-for-meltdown-over.4329009.jp

This article in Scotland on Sunday is the most useful analysis I’ve found on what went wrong for Labour in the campaign itself. I found it particularly revealing that English cabinet ministers who travelled up for the campaign told colleagues that they were 'amazed' at the level of goodwill they found in the constituency towards the SNP.

It’s interesting to speculate if this is evidence of the difficulty UK based politicians have in relating to the situation in Scotland. You would have thought, after the experience of Crewe and Nantwich, where large numbers of Labour voters switched to the Tories, that widespread support for an alternative would not have been so 'amazing’, so it suggests other blinkers were at play.

It could be that they take Labour loyalty in seats such as this for granted, but it could also be that Labour politicians, steeped in a Londoncentric view of the SNP as a narrow reactionary party, are genuinely shocked that labour supporters have ceased to buy that line. Having seen the SNP in government enacting the kind of polices, such as moves towards the abolishing of prescription charges, that they would have once looked to the Labour Party to enact, they are deaf to Labour’s rhetoric.

They also seem to be increasingly deaf to Labour’s scare mongering over independence. The article says that the SNP had polling evidence of growing support for independence in the area and that Labour therefore misjudged their tactics when they concentrated their efforts on painting the SNP candidate as a hardline nationalist.

Anthony Barnett on "The lessons of Glasgow East "

Anthony Barnett — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 08:51:00 +0000

Just to remind readers what Martin Kettle wrote on 4 July when the by-election was called:
"Every generation or so, the city of Glasgow seems fated to hold a parliamentary byelection that shapes the politics of the era.... The possibility that Gordon Brown might not be able to withstand a humbling Labour defeat there makes Glasgow East the most important parliamentary byelection since at least 1983... Arguably it's even the most important byelection ever, depending on the outcome.... everything about Glasgow East suddenly matters more than anything else in British politics for the next three weeks.
The fateful spotlight on Glasgow East is an irony that Brown himself is peculiarly well-placed to appreciate. For most of the 20th century, the seat was known as Glasgow Shettleston. For eight of those years, from 1922 until 1930, it was held by the legendary Red Clydeside MP John Wheatley, Britain's first Labour minister of health and a pioneer of council housing. When Wheatley and his fellow Clydesiders left for Westminster from St Enoch station in 1922 they were seen off, according to one Labour historian, by a crowd of up to 120,000 singing the Red Flag and the Internationale. Wheatley was the man who "more than anyone else, had helped shift Glasgow's Catholics towards Labour", adds the historian. That historian is Gordon Brown.
Glasgow East is still the predominantly catholic and predominantly Labour place that Wheatley knew. It is Labour's 25th-safest seat. It is also one of the poorest and most unhealthy constituencies in Britain. No seat is home to more voters on incapacity benefit or disability allowance. None has fewer voters with higher education qualifications. None has a higher proportion of single-parent households. Only one has more social rented housing - and none has a public housing development on the scale of the Easterhouse estate.... To lose such a seat for the first time since 1922 would not just be a spectacular Labour disaster but also an unmissable sign of wider Labour disintegration in Scotland..... These fears explain the early timing of the byelection. East is already one of the lowest turnout constituencies in the UK - just 48% voted there in 2005 and 40% in 2001. But Labour is banking on turnout falling lower still. Polling day has been deliberately placed during the summer holidays - Scottish schools have already broken up. It is also midway through the Glasgow fair holiday, when the city traditionally empties and the more politically volatile C2 demographic - backbone of many a byelection swing - are safely away on vacation..... Brown has told his local coordinator, the canny and experienced Motherwell MP Frank Roy, to run a minimalist strategy focused wholly on the core Labour vote... The sole aim is to hold off the SNP in a very low poll held as quickly as possible after Marshall's resignation..... It is all a far cry from the calls for a "new kind of politics" and the concern over falling turnouts that marked some of Brown's speeches in the months after he succeeded Tony Blair. Today, humiliatingly, Labour's view is that the fewer people who vote, the better. Glasgow East - like Brown's premiership - is now entirely about survival."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/04/scotland.scotland

sunniva on "The lessons of Glasgow East "

sunniva — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 23:34:18 +0000

Excellent analysis. You are right about Labour denial. Scottish devolution was founded on a notion that the SNP were not a serious party; that Scottish desire for nationhood was not a serious goal; that devolution was just the latest attempt to halt 'the SNP bandwagon'. Remember that telling phrase? Says it all really.

And yet...

There's evereything to play for. I was impressed by Margaret Curran. Her fundamental decency; her discipline and work ethic; her clean campaign; her courage and honour; her willingness to stand at the last minute when others had unaccountably failed to show up... now there's a story!

Wheatley's daughter!

And there we see the two faces of Scottish Labour; the slugs who have occupied Labour seats for years like personal fiefdoms; and the Mother Courage prepared to hold the red flag aloft.

The lessons of Glasgow East, Gerry Hassan

Gerry Hassan — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:28:54 +0000

A leading analyst of Scottish affairs, Gerry Hassan, shows how the Scottish National Party's by-election victory in a previously unassailable Labour fiefdom is a signal of shifting tectonic plates in United Kingdom politics as a whole.

Scottish and British politics are clearly moving into a new political era. The sensational Glasgow East by-election victory for the Scottish National Party (SNP) and humiliation for Labour in one of its safest seats is evidence enough, but even it only hints at the scale of the changes underway and the degree to which a momentous contest for the future is sharpening.

The Glasgow East result confirmed in the early hours of 25 July 2008 - in which the SNP overturned a Labour majority of 13,507 to win by 365 votes, a swing of 22.54% - is a product of a number of different political trends, all of which are now pushing one way north of the border: towards the SNP and away from longstanding Labour dominance.

Three of these trends are immediately apparent in the by-election outcome:

* the backlash from fifty years of Labour hegemony of Scottish politics: the "machine" politics, the clientist state, the reality that for years it has been the incumbent party

* the fact this is the third term of a Labour government in the United Kingdom becoming more and more unpopular, which despite three election victories and a decade of economic growth has failed to remake the political weather

* the popularity of the SNP and the political honeymoon of Alex Salmond's minority administration in the Scottish parliament - an administration which has been at once popular, populist and competent.

These three trends are feeding into a long-term changing of gears in Scottish politics, which can only be bad news for Labour. This involves both Labour's hollowing-out as a party, as the authoritarian clientist politics which it developed to perfection in its Scottish heartland is no longer working; and the SNP administration's knowing how to stand up for Scotland - and thus stand up to Westminster - and developing a progressive agenda distinctive enough to be different from the neo-liberal consensus.

Gerry Hassan is a writer, commentator and policy analyst and author and editor of twelve books on Scottish and UK politics including The Scottish Labour Party: History, Institutions and Ideas, After Blair: Politics after the New Labur Decade and The Political Guide to Modern Scotland. He can be contacted on: gerry.hassan@virgin.net

The Scottish Labour Party has always been a strange, even unfathomable, creature to observers inside and outside Scotland alike. The establishment of the Scottish parliament in 1999 - passed by a Labour government after it came to power in London 1997, after eighteen years of Conservative rule - has thrown new scrutiny, attention and pressures on to its north-of-the-border fiefdom. The party has not responded well, or with any sense of grace, to this unfamiliar situation.

In nine years of devolution, the party has had four leaders in the Scottish parliament: Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish, Jack McConnell and Wendy Alexander. None was elected in a proper contest involving party members, and two - McLeish and Alexander - resigned amid financial scandals involving constituency or campaign expenses.

This sequence points to two of Scottish Labour's characteristics: its denial of democracy, and the way it has blurred the lines between party and state. True, there never was a golden era of democracy in Scottish Labour, but as the party has become more and more the country's political establishment so any kind of internal democratic practice and debate has disappeared. Instead, a self-important cabal of the party - made up of its Westminster (London) MPs, its Holyrood (Edinburgh) MSPs, councillors, researchers and advisers - have taken control of the direction of the party. This process that has been to the ultimate detriment of the party itself.

A vanished legacy

The unattractive face of British Labour, by now a bizarre mixture of battered managerialism and neo-liberalism, compounds the problems of its Scottish counterpart. The Gordon Brown administration inherited office on Tony Blair's departure in June 2007 at an already low and vulnerable point in the political cycle; though his near-exhausted legacy still cannot excuse how inept and poor Brown has been.

Nor, however, should all the blame for Labour's overall predicament - or for the Glasgow East result - be dumped upon Gordon Brown's shoulders. For eleven years of "New" Labour rule and a decade of dominance have reduced any sense of moral mission and compass - outside of Brown's own psyche - to a ruin. The standard New Labour defence of its record on the economy and social justice - the much proclaimed sixty-three successive quarters of economic growth (which includes Labour laying claim to the last four years of Conservative rule) - carries a grating echo of the triumphialism of the Margaret Thatcher and (in a far lower key) John Major era that preceded it.

It is revealing in this respect to see in the aftermath of Glasgow East politicians like Douglas Alexander - up-and-coming stars of New Labour's decade of dominance and in his case, as a close ally of Gordon and sister of Wendy, an emblem of what the party has become - repeat this technocratic mantra. The willed evasion of a catastrophic political defeat by reference to economic achievements, the acknowledgment of hard times for consumers, and the need for leadership - all in a disembodied language gutted of genuine thinking and engagement - is both irresistibly reminiscent of late-Thatcher arrogance and loss-of-touch, and a resounding symbol of how Labour's operating mode brings politics itself into discredit.

A missed project

The reduction of Labour's progressive credentials to an all-time low in Scotland and the UK meant that the SNP administration at Holyrood which entered office after the Scottish election of May 2007 had in a sense a luckier inheritance than Gordon Brown south of the border eight weeks later - notwithstanding that it had only a one-seat majority in parliament.

But the SNP had also made its luck and changed the political weather, a fact confirmed again by its stunning success in Glasgow East. Even now, fourteen months and two leaders later, Labour remains in denial about the SNP. Many in Labour - including most of its MSPs and MPs - see the "Nats" as some kind of pestilential and illegitimate guerrilla army operating in Labour's own (and they do mean "own") heartlands. Wendy Alexander accused the SNP of being obsessed with Scotland's constitutional future, but was herself consumed by the same obsession. She thus spent her short-lived and ill-fated leadership fighting a phantom tiger of her own creation, wondering all the while why she never laid any punches.

The SNP - contrary to Labour's fevered imaginings - is like many centre-left parties around the world, an uneasy compromise between social democracy and neo-liberalism, with no real understanding of political economy or the grotesque ways modern capitalism works (thus, closer to New Labour itself than either would like). Yet it has in government so far managed to address this balance better than Scottish Labour ever has done, displaying more of a capacity for statecraft and stagecraft, all the while conveying its project with a sense of mission, story and voice (something Labour had years ago but has long since lost.

A lost kingdom

The Glasgow East by-election highlighted all this and more. The seat, one of Glasgow's most deprived areas is, if not the "broken Britain" of Conservative leader David Cameron's rhetoric, part of a "forgotten Britain" - despite the investments and programmes that under Labour have levered money into the constituency.

The reasons Glasgow East is as it is are many and complex, but Labour's custodianship of it and areas like it has become part of the problem. Labour's candidate Margaret Curran proclaims that the party's cause is "inequality" and "injustice", but the party hasn't unambiguously embodied or furthered these causes for decades. One underlying issue in the by-election, for example, was the scandalously poor quality of public representatives who have for long worn the Labour rosette in Scotland; something personified by the outgoing Labour MP David Marshall, who seemed to represent the seat in the "absentee-landlord"-style of a 19th-century "rotten borough".

Thus the singular story of Glasgow East also contains within it more profound and long-term changes in the nature of Scottish and United Kingdom politics. The most important is that the old unitary UK, once held together by a populist unionism which managed to contain both a Tory reactionary story of Britain and the old Labour story of the people and progress, has died.

For a brief period after 1997, it looked as if it might be possible that a New Labour story of Britain - one that highlighted diversity, pluralism and multiculturalism - might be able to take the centre ground and shape the future of the UK in a way previous progressives had only dreamed of. That New Labour story is now in tatters, destroyed by centralism, cronyism and corruption, and the Blair-Brown fixation on Atlanticism. What is interesting is that no new compelling story of Britain has emerged from the Conservatives or anyone else.

This failure to develop any plausible British story - of which Gordon Brown's many missives on Britishness are a symptom, not the solution - offers many new challenges, opportunities and openings to progressives across these isles. The SNP, buoyed by its Glasgow East victory, has powerful political momentum - as long as it does not overreach itself or fall victim to its own form of arrogance. More broadly, the contours of Scottish and UK politics now point to a prospective referendum on Scottish independence (most probably in 2010): this promises to be a historic, even seismic event in the history of Scotland and the UK.

Beyond Labour and unionist scaremongering, beyond nationalist sentimentality too, the current moment offers a challenge to progressives and public opinion north and south (and west and southwest) of the Scotland-England border: namely, to address the question of what kind of society they want to advance, and how as a result they should contest the embedded vested interests in Westminster and across entrenched political elites.

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