open Democracy News Analysis - Scottish Labour, where's the coffee?, Gerry Hassan - Comments

Cliffy on "Scottish Labour, where's the coffee?"

Cliffy — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:26:03 +0000

It's a peculiarity of the British left, insisting that public services always have to be provided by state employees on top of being paid for through taxation. Yes, private sector contracts can go wrong - spectacularly wrong sometimes - but the challenge lies in Government and its agencies being able to draw up and manage contracts effectively.

Besides, public sector monopolies can have their own problems of inefficiency and lack of responsiveness; it seems to me that opposition to *any* public service reform is simply old school dogmatism.

Labour courted Murdoch, that's not out of love but because he controlled 40% of UK newspaper circulation. There were raw memories of "it was The Sun wot won it" in 1992. You can fairly argue that Labour could have been more courageous and confronted him and his ilk, but I can understand why they felt the need to curry favour!

OK, Brown fiddled with the CGT in 1998, but the most recent revisions - a rate of 18% on asset sales above £1m and 10% on asset sales below £1m - seem reasonable to me, although I'm no tax expert. After all, you've got to provide some incentive for entrepreneurship. Remember that some economists argue that the less tax on capital gains, the greater the incentive to use capital productively. I'm not an economist, so I'll defer on that debate!

Consultants are an old chestnut. Public sector bodies use them for various reasons: to keep down headcounts and running costs; to provide specialist expertise for specific projects; to free up core staff to focus on day-to-day work; to give certain types of decision-making a veneer of objectivity. I'm not a fan of consultants, but they are sometimes a necessary evil.

Gerry Hassan on "Scottish Labour, where's the coffee?"

Gerry Hassan — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:11:58 +0000

I don’t know by what standards you measure the penetration of Labour, politics and our public life by the corporate vested interests, but Labour and politics have changed these last ten years.

How far we have moved is that a recent report commissioned by John Hutton, the Julius report, proposed outsourcing the whole of government activity bar the commissioners. That tells us how far New Labour has taken politics rightward and become a vehicle of corporate welfare.

A short, but not inexhaustible list:

1. Blair and Brown’s endless courting and servitude to the Murdoch court, and constant playing to neo-liberals like Greenspan and Irvin Seltzer;

2. The government’s cutting of Capital Gains Tax; listening to the special pleading of the feather-bedded poor little non-doms to keep their ‘special’ exempt status;

3. The collusion of New Labour in the deregulation of the City of London;

4. Private contracting/purchasing of GP surgeries in England; as we speak major US private health companies are circling the NHS knowing that if they can get their hands on parts of Britain’s NHS they are guaranteed great returns;

5. Academy schools, foundation schools and before them city academies;

6. Promotion of privatisation of basic utilities across the developed world by DfID as a condition of aid; in particular the grotesque support and funding to the right-wing Adam Smith Institute to bring about water privatisation across the African continent. Even by the standards of New Labour this policy led by Clare Short must be one of the most shaming ever introduced;

7. Private sector contracts often go appallingly wrong. Think of the computer disasters: Customs and Excises, CSA, Inland Revenue, National Air Traffic Control, NHS IT (heading by Richard Granger, ex-Deloitte). Think of all the computer discs gone missing by contractors: the 25 million child benefit details. Or the recent delays in education test scores.

8. Despite the abandonment of the Manchester supercasino the implementation of sixteen large casinos across the UK with the resulting loosening and deregulation of our gambling legislation to allow this;

9. The rise of the accountancy and consultancy class and their penetration into the corridors of the civil service to displace considered and neutral advice. Thus we have not exactly neutral firms such as PWC and KPMG offering the government advice on PFI and ‘best practice’.

10. The ridiculous ‘revolving door’ by which ministers and civil servants now effortless move into the private sector working in areas profiting from their skills and contacts. Think of Andrew Turnbull, previously Cabinet Secretary going to work for Arup.

11. The cost of consultants by the public sector has spiralled under New Labour and is said to have cost £70 billion since 1997.

12. PFI/PPP has taken over large swathes of the public sector and public life, building new hospitals, schools and prisons, but mortgaging us to the hilt and landing us with a bill which will be astronomical in 30 years.

Cliffy on "Scottish Labour, where's the coffee?"

Cliffy — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 06:55:26 +0000

Quote:

"Finally, it is surely uncontentious to state that yes New Labour increased public spending but diminished the concept of the public realm by becoming a party of the corporate vested interests: a ‘Labour plc’."

But what does this comment actually *mean*? What *specific* policies or actions are you complaining about? Are you simply annoyed that Labour hasn't nationalised anything or taxed businesses enough?

I wonder whether those nebulous 'corporate vested interests' you mention would really consider Labour to be 'their' party. Last year's CBI conference produced a long list of complaints about employment law, roads, airports and taxes.

Dougthedug on "Scottish Labour, where's the coffee?"

Dougthedug — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:57:49 +0000

Hmmm.

I discovered that there's an edit function in this blog so you can edit your posts after posting. I changed a typo in my post from "The" to "They" but it's changed the order of the postings by changing the time of posting to the edit.

Sorry about that. My previous post should come before Mike's. I'll just leave the typos in next time.

Dougthedug on "Scottish Labour, where's the coffee?"

Dougthedug — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:26:46 +0000

Gerry Hassan wrote:

First, there is a legal entity called ‘the Scottish Labour Party’.

If I'm wrong, I'm wrong Gerry. But can you point me to some hard evidence to substantiate this?

The Electoral Commission has no record of any, "Scottish Labour Party", in their Register of Political Parties and if there is a distinct legal entity known as the, "Scottish Labour Party", operating in Scottish politics then I'm sure they'd love to know about it.

They do however recognise the phrase, "Scottish Labour Party", but only as a registered alternative description for the Labour Party and it can be used on election literature and on voting slips in the same way as the Lib-Dems can use, "Focus Team", or the SNP can use, "Alex Salmond For First Minister", on their election material.

Gerry Hassan wrote:

...an entity called ‘the Scottish Labour Party’ which exists at the realm of ideas, policies and values in this country.

There may be a difference in opinion between various regions in the British Labour Party but that doesn't alter the fact that Iain Gray's one and only position is as Leader of the British Labour MSP's in the Scottish Parliament. It doesn't matter how many ideas or policies he thinks up he has no authority to promote or implement them.

Gerry Hassan wrote:

A majority of Scottish voters in the Scottish Election Studies have differentiated between Scottish Labour and British Labour

Which is not surprising because they've been told for decades and are still being told by the media, newspapers, STV, BBC and radio that there is a Scottish Labour Party and it has a Scottish Labour Leader.

Gerry Hassan wrote:

It is surely time to be a bit more grown up.

I grew up a long time ago Gerry and now I believe nothing till I see some evidence. I was told for years that there was a Scottish Labour Party but when I went looking I couldn't even find evidence of the regional structures the Conservatives and the Lib-Dems have in place in Scotland. It turned out to be nothing more substantial than a label on election material.

Mike Small on "Scottish Labour, where's the coffee?"

Mike Small — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:24:52 +0000

Hi Gerry - of course you can overplay the point - but the simple reality is that Gray lacks autonomy and freedom to be inventive because of the structure he faces. At precisely the time when her needs to be able to go back to basics and write his own script, he cant. It's a major disability when the storyline is being written from the sitting (Holyrood) Govt.

I don't think this is about being 'ultra nat'. I dont know about Doug (I dont know Doug) - but Im not a member of any political party.

I entirely agree that it 'is surely uncontentious to state that yes New Labour increased public spending but diminished the concept of the public realm by becoming a party of the corporate vested interests.' This is the real disgrace - that a party that had a mandate and a majority indulged in an economic strategy that went way beyond anything conceibed of by Thatcher and they are reaping the electoral benefit now in Scotland. This is of course why Cathy Jamiesons attamept to revive the left wing soul of Labour (sic) failed so miserably but also why a directionless and ideologically adrift party now faces the consequences of such shallow opportunism. If you gamble evrything on the cheesy grin of a career politician, you lose everything when he disappears to do whatever Bambi is doingt now (is it saving the Middle East or Climate Change I cant remember?).

Gerry Hassan on "Scottish Labour, where's the coffee?"

Gerry Hassan — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:48:20 +0000

Doug and Mike,
I understand the point you are making saying there is no such thing as the ‘Scottish Labour Party’ but you are just plain wrong. Attempting to see the world in such black and white terms rarely works.

First, there is a legal entity called ‘the Scottish Labour Party’. None of us may think it is Scottish enough, autonomous enough or distinctive enough, but it does exist. It is an organisation with finances and resources which submits its financial returns.

Second, and more importantly there is an entity called ‘the Scottish Labour Party’ which exists at the realm of ideas, policies and values in this country. A majority of Scottish voters in the Scottish Election Studies have differentiated between Scottish Labour and British Labour, and have seen the former as less in hock to New Labour.

Third, none of this denies that Scottish Labour does have problems vis-a-via autonomy, distinctiveness, issues of who has voice and power, and its relations as part of British Labour, but it is a bit more complex and nuanced than just saying ‘Scottish Labour’ does not exist.

I would argue that the ‘Scottish Labour does not exist’ ultra-nat view is the mirror image of the uber-Labour view of portraying the Nats as a dark, evil force. Both of these are distortions and unhelpful and centred on trying to deny the legitimacy of your opponents. It is surely time to be a bit more grown up.

Finally, it is surely uncontentious to state that yes New Labour increased public spending but diminished the concept of the public realm by becoming a party of the corporate vested interests: a ‘Labour plc’. New Labour fundamentally changed the nature of Labour and thus British politics and we are all witnessing the disastrous effects of where this has taken us.

nezavisimost on "Scottish Labour, where's the coffee?"

nezavisimost — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 09:25:39 +0000

DtD spot on.

PS Gerry, it's Scottish NATIONAL Party

Cliffy on "Scottish Labour, where's the coffee?"

Cliffy — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 08:15:13 +0000

"[Labour] sided with the interests of corporate power against people". There's a debate to be had about the merits or otherwise of PFI, the role of the private sector in public services and all the rest, but Gerry is just resorting to lazy leftist caricature here.

The fact remains that under Labour spending on public services increased markedly, health and education improved on most indicators, employment has been high, average household income increased, and absolute and relative poverty fell for most groups. Just look at the stats cited in the No.10 Strategy Unit's UK audit or the Scotland Futures Project's own strategic audit.

I'm not cheerleading for Labour, but let's have a balanced and reasoned debate, grounded in facts.

Mike Small on "Scottish Labour, where's the coffee?"

Mike Small — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:43:59 +0000

I have to agree with everything that Doug has written.

What was slightly comical about Iains launch was the idea of telling his 'life story' as an attempt to juxtapose against Salmonds 'elitist' biography. Oh dear I think Scottish Labour aides have been watching the Palin-Obama Show a little too much on their summer holidays.

"Look we dont have a coherent answer (of any sort) to the constitutional questions swarming the political shores, in fact we dont have coherent policies other than a sort of denuded degraded Thatherism 2.0, but does it do us any favours that this guy used to work for Oxfam?"

And, only a few weeks ago even, hitching your bandwagon to the trusty Brownite wing of London Labour must have seemed like a really good idea.

The reality is that as Cameronian Britain looms large, the prospect of a Gray led Labour Party in Scotland, devoid of autonomy or policy imagination beating the SNP in the next election is minuscule.

Dougthedug on "Scottish Labour, where's the coffee?"

Dougthedug — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:46:34 +0000

There is no, “strictly speaking” about it, there is no such thing as “Scottish Labour” and it cannot get more autonomy because there is no Scottish organisation or structure within British Labour to give it to.

Gerry Hassan wrote:

“...and the leader needs to become the leader of all ‘Scottish Labour’. “

What? How can he be a leader now if he needs to become a leader later. A very mixed up statement which dances round the fact which I will state again and again. There is no “Scottish Labour”, there is no “Scottish Labour Leader”, Iain Gray is the Leader of the British Labour MSP's in the Scottish Parliament.

It even says that on the British Labour in Scotland, web site,

British Labour wrote:

“Iain Gray has been announced as the new leader of Labour in the Scottish Parliament”.

So what power has he got in British Labour? He leads the British Labour MSP's in the Scottish Parliament and he may be given a seat on the Scottish Executive Committee. I say may because his name's not up on the SEC membership page on the site yet. Maybe Wendy's not going to give her place up so easily.

And why the inverted commas round, “Gordon Brown is still ‘officially’ the leader of Scottish Labour”? I assume you put the inverted commas round “officially” because “Scottish Labour” is something that doesn't exist. It is the British Labour party in Scotland, England, Wales and grudgingly Northern Ireland and Gordon Brown leads it all.

Gerry Hassan wrote:

“It should accept and embrace the SNP as a normal, conventional political party.“

That would would work if the SNP was some kind of regional Lib-Dem-alikes but the SNP is directly opposed to the British Unionism and Nationalism of the British Labour Party. The British Labour Party is desperate to defend the establishment, Lords, Ladies, Whitehall, Westminster and all in both Scotland and the UK and if the SNP wins then there is no British Labour party and no British Establishment.

Your first four tests are simply asking the British Labour party to apologise for being the British Labour Party. Number five is interesting either as an indicator of how you think about Scotland's status as true nation state or how you want Iain Gray to think about Scotland.

Gerry Hassan wrote:

“start thinking about what living in a small northern country with the capacity to be one of the world’s leading social democratic societies should be like.”

Is this a call for Iain Gray to be a nationalist? Because Iain Gray wants to live in a Scotland which is a small poor, perpetually Labour voting northern region of the UK.

It doesn't really matter anyway. Iain Gray has no power in the British Labour Party.

It wasn't a genuine party leadership election as in the SNP, or a Scottish regional leadership election as in the Lib-Dems or the Conservatives, it was just to be leader of the Labour Group of MSP's in the Scottish Parliament.

Iain Gray can't change the party because he hasn't got the authority in Labour to do anything like that. Wendy Alexander was the first Labour Parliamentary Group leader to discover that without the authority of the First Minister's post the Labour Parliamentary Group leader is a non-post. Iain Gray will be the second to discover this.

The electoral college system of members, unions and MSP's, MP's and MEP's which was used to elect him is much too complex and overblown for the post of Labour Group Leader in Holyrood as it was put in place to elect within Labour what Labour expected to be a permanent Labour First Minister in Scotland. As a result of this, Iain Gray got delusions of grandeur and said on the basis of his electorate in Labour he should run the British Labour Party in Scotland. The smack down from the British Labour hierarchy in the form of Des Browne was immediate.

Des Browne wrote:

"Iain has gone and engaged with every part of the party in Scotland. The support he has gleaned in doing that shows he is supported by the broadest possible base in Scotland and he is entitled to say that. Iain, I know, respects the structure of this party."

The structure of the party being that there is no Scottish structure. The British Labour party is monolithic and makes no concessions to any regional leaderships. Slap down time.

George Foulkes said today,

George Foulkes wrote:

"I think today's election of Iain Gray as leader of the Labour Party in Scotland...",

which shows that either he hasn't a clue how the Labour party is structured in Britain or that he is deliberately pushing the line of a Scottish Leader and a Scottish Labour party. A line which is slavishly followed by the BBC.
In terms of the British Labour Party Iain Gray is a non-entity and the post of Leader of the Labour MSP's in the Scottish Parliament is a minor post. There was a Labour company wide election in Scotland to elect the Scottish Janitor. Now, he may be a popular Scottish Janitor but he's still nothing more than a Janitor in the company and doesn't get near any boardroom decisions or company policy.

Scottish Labour, where's the coffee?, Gerry Hassan

Gerry Hassan — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 09:27:44 +0000

Iain Gray faces a daunting set of challenges as the new leader of the Labour Party in the Scottish Parliament. In an OurKingdom essay, Gerry Hassan asks whether the party could yet find a way forward, in Scotland and beyond, in challenging an unravelling global order.

As one Scottish born leader’s hold on power diminishes, his prospects now hanging on an ever-weakening thread, another, a young pretender, enters the gladiatorial ring. We are talking about the fate of Gordon Brown and the new leader of ‘Scottish Labour’ (more on that term and position later), Iain Gray.

The fate of these two, greying, middle-aged, male Scottish Labour leaders are inextricably linked; if Brown goes down irreparably damaged by a rebellion at his party’s conference next week, Gray’s days will be if not short, even more difficult and nerve-racking. Yet, if Brown gets through the next few weeks both may then be impaled on the difficulties of the forthcoming Glenrothes and Motherwell and Wishaw by-election campaigns which the fortunes of Scottish Labour will greatly influence. Scottish Labour is in trouble, its dominance of Scottish politics over the last fifty years is over, and its current condition and decline are a harbinger of what may come to pass as the future for the wider party.

Scottish Labour as a Football Team in Trouble

The election of Iain Gray as leader of ‘Scottish Labour’ is – and this is no mean achievement - the party’s fifth leader in nine years. However, it is their first ever-democratic election. The party is being extremely cagey about releasing the full results of how many people voted. It claims a not too poor 58 per cent turnout amongst its ‘official’ membership of 18,000. This would mean that just over 5,500 party members actually voted for Gray for him to get his majority (along with uncertain numbers of trade unionists, MPs, MSPs and MEPs). Of course, it tells you something about Scottish Labour’s secretive like traditions that there is no public transparency as to how it conducts itself in elections.

Just as troubled football managers are jettisoned by a nervous chair the first sign of bad results, the same is true of Scottish Labour these last few years. Kevin Keegan, Sam Allardyce, Henry McLeish, Jack McConnell, they are just so interchangeable!

It was another sign that democracy is still an early learning experience for Scottish Labour that during the contest no major differences were revealed between the three candidates for the leadership. In their fifteen party hustings and numerous media debates they were all broadly prepared to consider the merits of a windfall tax and were for more autonomy for Scottish Labour, but were silent, evasive or unwilling to address a swathe of major issues: nuclear power, Trident, the disastrous consequences of British foreign policy and the nature of the British state.

The Potential Cathartic Nature of Leadership Elections

Leadership elections can be a significant turning point for a party. They can provide the moment when a coalescing of factors make a party wake up, smell the coffee and say no more are we going to carry on as we have done.

The Scottish Labour contest was not one of these moments, though it should have been. This is a bad omen for the larger British wide leadership contest Labour also needs. In Scotland the party’s leaders showed no real sense of anger, hunger and dismay about the situation the party is in, even though here they have already been thrown out of office. There is little sense that the party needs to change the way it acts, sees the world, Scotland and its opponents, and start mapping out a new philosophy and direction.

In recent times there are a number of examples where political parties have used leadership contests to positively take charge of their own fate. The Labour leadership contests of 1983 and 1994 were two examples. Both of these were historic national events involving hundreds of thousands of party members and trade unionists. The 1983 contest began the party’s road back from the abyss with the marginalisation of the then still powerful ‘hard left’ and election of Neil Kinnock. The 1994 election saw Labour embrace the politics of modernisation advocated by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, leading to New Labour and three election victories, which eventually took the party to the existential crisis it now finds itself in.

Another UK example has been recently provided by David Cameron’s election as Conservative leader in 2005, which despite the denial of many in Labour, was the point where the party decided to put doctrinaire obsession with Thatcherism and Eurosceptism behind it, embrace the legacy of New Labour and develop a modern Conservatism in Blairite colours.

The re-election of Alex Salmond as leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party for the second time in 2004 has in retrospect turned out to be a major turning point for the SNP: the moment it decided to get serious politically about challenging Labour - which coincided with the moment of New Labour’s post-Iraq unravelling and the perhaps even more profound decline of Labour’s one-party domination of Scotland.

Scottish Labour is far from reaching its much needed turning point. This month’s election shows it is more at the place the Tories were in after losing in 1997 or Labour in 1979. It is still stunned by its defeat in the May 2007 elections to the Scottish parliament in Holyrood. Stunned and not yet thinking; still assuming that it can change the world to suit its assumptions, rather than the other way round. Reality has not yet sunk in.

Fade to Gray: Living in a Black and White World

Iain Gray’s progress to the leadership is surprising, given he was a fairly undistinguished minister (Enterprise 2002-3), then lost his seat in the 2003 Scottish Parliament elections, and spent four years as a Special Adviser to Alasdair Darling, the Scottish Chancellor of the Exchequor whose recent long profile in the Guardian revealed not only his ideological vacuity but also his lack of street intelligence claiming that he had “no idea” there would be a financial crisis.

Gray’s leadership acceptance speech showed spark, along with a bit of fight and contained some good lines and was well delivered. As has to be the case these days he founded his claim on leadership on his life story. But its value was undermined by his attempt to use it to get at Alex Salmond. Even his biography was sacrificed in an effort to make Salmond a pariah.

Scottish Labour detests the SNP and their judgement is disabled and distorted by the hold these views have over them. Even more, they hate Alex Salmond with every bone in their body and find him a detestable, morally objectionable figure – someone who they think should be universally held in contempt by the court of public opinion. The best thing Scottish Labour has done in recent years has been hate and vitriol.

There is something wrong here in the heart of Scottish Labour; something which reveals the ambiguity, doubt and emptiness which lies at its core, and transmutes this into hatred of others.

You do not need to be a psychoanalyst to work out the source of the pathological effort to turn Salmond and the SNP into an untouchable taboo. As I have explained in a previous essay in OK, the SNP is a not very left-wing social democratic party that is relatively competent and popular even thought it still has to win over large swathes of Scottish public and institutional opinion to its cause. In short, Labour has created a mythical, omnipotent, ‘dark’ SNP which only exists in its mind and psyche and nowhere else.

Five Challenges for Iain Gray: ‘Labour’s Coming Home’

The Scottish commentariat say that the future for the party north of the border is clear: Scottish Labour needs to become more Scottish, get more autonomy, and the leader needs to become the leader of all ‘Scottish Labour’.

Most people in the country have little idea that there is strictly speaking no such entity as ‘Scottish Labour’. The party is not an autonomous body, there is only one British Labour Party. Thus Scottish MPs in London and MEPs in Brussels and the Scottish branches of trade unions, vote for the leader of the Scottish Labour Group in the Scottish Parliament. Gordon Brown is still ‘officially’ the leader of Scottish Labour as Tony Blair was before him.

If we put this not unimportant point to one side, we can ask what does Scottish Labour stands for. Here are five tests the party needs to pass:

Labour was born as a party whose aim was to protect people from and humanise the worst aspects of capitalism. The party through its history never did this perfectly, but was informed by this moral compass. Since New Labour this has no longer been the case, as the party sided with the interests of corporate power against people. Scottish Labour has aided this by advancing PFI, marketisation and private prisons. Memo to Gray leadership: can Scottish Labour see the corporate takeover of Labour as part of the diminishing of our democracy, and acknowledge its part in this sad episode?

It should accept and embrace the SNP as a normal, conventional political party. Memo to Gray: the SNP are here to stay. Scottish Labour needs to accept them as a permanent fixture so it can then engage with them on an issue by issue basis while also competing at a more macro and strategic level.

Recognise that the old ways of Labour running Scotland were patronising and paternalist. Memo to Gray: admit this openly stating that while Labour began with the best intentions it slowly morphed over the years into a ‘self-perpetuation society’ and nomenclature which looked after itself and ran Scotland for its own benefit. Find a couple of examples of how a Labour council mistook the party for the people, and say that we will never practice this again.

Openly admit the limited and unattractive mix of polices by which Scottish Labour attempted to ‘govern’ Scotland under devolution. These were a strange, unattractive mix of old-style labourism and marketisation. Memo to Gray: drop symbolic policies in each: the authoritarian anti-social behaviour agenda of awarding kids prizes for ‘grassing’ on their neighbours, and the whole PFI/PPP agenda, would make an ideal two.

Start to think openly about the economy, social justice, public services and issues of culture and identity (the last of which should not the sole preserve of the SNP). It may be hard for some Labour people to understand, but when party representatives go on about ‘Labour values’ very few members of the public have any idea what this means. Think about it. A decade plus of New Labour trashing everything social democrats hold dear. Memo to Gray: start thinking about what living in a small northern country with the capacity to be one of the world’s leading social democratic societies should be like. Why doesn’t Scottish Labour dare to begin to imagine what a successful Scots social democracy would look like? And then address what the party would have to do to get there?

Scottish Labour has to undertake the difficult task of no longer behaving as if, thanks perhaps to SNP over-reach or a mistake, things will default back to where they were. The starting point needs to be a project of taking the Labour Party back into the hands of its members and supporters and reclaiming it from the corporates and big business - a bold course which would have ramifications beyond Scotland.

British Labour has colluded with the vested interests of the global order in the last two decades. This is an agenda which has slowly fallen apart, and delivered less and less, as the international, Wall Street way has began to fray and fall, and reveal its lack of capacity to deliver prosperity, security and hope to most of the people in the developed world, let alone wider issues of global justice.

The SNP has not distinguished itself by opposing this approach, rather its project is to demonstrate that it is fit to govern within the neo-liberal order. Redefining Scottish Labour in opposition to this, reclaiming it from the dominant order of recent times would be a step for Scottish politics of some significance. It would open up a genuine area of disagreement with the SNP rather than debating the merits of whose ‘Scotland plc’ works better, and would have consequences for the future of British Labour and challenging the debasement of our political life.

The question, however, is whether there is anything left to reclaim, especially given the modest numbers involved in the party’s first democratic leadership contest. Can the 18,000 foot soldiers have the energy, will and insight to begin such a process? Forget about trying to ‘save the Union’. What Scotland needs is a Labour Party whose slogan is, ‘Labour’s coming home’.

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 Labour Decade and The Political Guide to Modern Scotland. He can be contacted on: gerry.hassan@virgin.net

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