Scottish referendum predictions thread.

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66. The grim reaper is knocking for Scottish Labour

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/27/grim-reaper-knocking-scottish-labour

The old political order is a dying patient: each week brings new convulsions, more symptoms of approaching morbidity. All three main party leaders have ample reason to spend the next six months howling in the foetal position in some lonely corner of Westminster.

Nick Clegg: the man who went from Churchillian popularity levels to the walking, talking personification of political opportunism in a matter of weeks in 2010, prompting the mass defection of anti-Tory voters from Lib Dem ranks. David Cameron: the leader of a party in long-term decline who failed to win an election against a disintegrating Labour government in the midst of economic calamity, losing voters and MPs alike to ex-City broker Nigel Farage’s “people’s army”. Ed Miliband: the leader who disastrously fails to inspire with a coherent alternative, even as living standards plummet, who now faces the implosion of the Labour party in the nation to which it owes so much of its existence, Scotland. It’s springtime for Ukip, and the Greens show occasional tentative signs of a mini-surge. First-past-the-post seemed to freeze the old system in aspic. Another indecisive election result could do for it.

The three Westminster parties are in crisis, but the resignation of Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont brings us back to Labour woe. Scottish Labour is not simply in one of those ruts parties occasionally get themselves into, before dusting themselves off, having a few policy reviews and then rebounding back into office. As things stand, the political grim reaper is hammering away at the party’s doors. The party believed Scotland was theirs for keeps, that voters could go nowhere else (whoops); and, in turn, Westminster Labour saw Scottish Labour as its vassal, too. Long before the referendum, the Scottish Labour party had been emptied of its activists. From the diminished ranks of a once mighty movement, the most talented opted for Westminster; no wonder the Scottish party in Holyrood – with a few striking exceptions – is so barren of ideas, of ability, of inspiration, of anything. With much of the party reduced to an exhausted rump, a catastrophic strategic decision was made to link arms with the Scottish Tories and run a joint campaign of fear, rather than an optimistic independent Labour campaign pledging a federal Britain and a Scotland of social justice. The result? “Labour” is a word spat out in contempt by all too many Scots, including a sizeable chunk of its own former voters. Speak to prominent Scottish Labour figures, and they know the abyss beckons. They just don’t have the vaguest idea what to do about it.

If Scottish Labour does indeed die, historians will ponder just how the party of Keir Hardie allowed itself to be outflanked on the left by a Scottish National party committed to George Osborne-style cuts to corporation tax. But that is indeed the party’s quite remarkable achievement. And that brings us to the next act in the possible demise of Scottish Labour. Labour’s crisis owes so much to an embrace of Blairism that left a progressive vacuum the SNP was able to fill. It is seen – as Lamont put it herself – as “like a branch office of London”. The yes campaign repeatedly conjured up the Iraq war as a bitter memory of Westminster injustice. So who is being lined up as Lamont’s successor? The arch-Blairite, staunchly pro-war Westminster machine politician, Jim Murphy. It is not so much a loss of senses; it raises questions as to whether there are senses to lose in the first place.