The Saviour?

So is Gentleman Jim to be the Saviour of Scottish Labour?

The man for the job

Murphy’s main claim to be the man for the job is that he stepped up to the oche.

When the No campaign was trying to avoid the maelstrom of Indyref he took the fight to the enemy. Gordon Brown relied on the tried and trusted TV management techniques of speaking in front of curated made-for-telly audiences but Murphy went out and spoke to voters, come one, come all.

Sidelined by London for being David Milliband’s campaign manager and by Holyrood for being Jim Murphy he made the No campaign his own.

Verdict: he’s the man for the job — who else is there?

When the facts change, I change my opinions, what do you do?

Everyone agrees that IndyRef has changed the facts of Scottish politics utterly, the SNP is now demanding stronger devolution, how can Labour not change?

The creation of a Scottish Parliament created the imperative for the transformation of the Scottish Labour Party.

The pressure to change has been building within the Holyrood wing since the early days of the Parliament. Whatever the wrongs and rights of Murphy’s role in the Holyrood Vs Westminster sniping that has been endemic in Scottish Labour — he clearly has grasped the necessity of change now and is making it happen in a way that Wendy Alexander or Johan Lamont didn’t or couldn’t.

Cathal Goulding of the old ‘Official’ IRA had a famous quip about the Provisional’s Gerry Adams and the Real IRA’s Ruiarí Ó Brádaigh:

“We were right too soon, Gerry Adams was right too late and Ruiarí Ó Brádaigh will never be fuckin right”

Poor Murdo Fraser takes the rôle of Cathal Goulding in Scottish Politics. If his plan to create a separate Scottish Bavarian-style CSU from the ashes of the Conservatives had come about he would have made merry hay during the IndyRef. (I personally would stick Ian Davidson down as the Ó Brádaigh figure but that’s just me). The question remains is Jim Murphy right too late?

Murphy has to appeal to Yes voters to come home to avoid a total wipeout in May— and his new team are hastily repositioning themselves to do that. But had Labour been a bit wiser during the referendum and learnt from Harold Wilson things could be very different.

Wilson allowed the Labour Party to campaign on both sides of the EEC Referendum and avoided a damaging split. If Labour had embraced the IndyRef debates positively and recognised that its voters straddled the question — they would have not only gained more members and renewal from the No side of the debate — but would also be in a position to embrace and bring in Yes activists of a Labourist and anti-SNP bent — thousands of whom are now in RIC and the SSP (even reluctantly in the SNP).

It is easy to dismiss them as crackpot Trotskyists, but that is a mistake. They did turn out 1,000 people to do a mass canvas at a time and have considerably political maturity and skills. Once upon a time the Labour Party was good at taming and maturing the mad but promising Trot, as former RCPer Jim Murphy and ex-IMG Alisdair Darling both well know: youthful moon-howlers the pair.

Some of the criticism of Murphy’s about-face are a not so subtle call for unconditional surrender, which might be emotionally satisfying but bears no relation to politics.

Verdict: it is right that the Leader of Scottish Labour changes his opinion — but it is still not clear which of the Murphy/McTernan team’s opinions have changed

Where Stands Scottish Labour Now?

Murphy’s biggest problem remains time.

The SNP organisational renewal began the weekend after the SNP conference in ‘02 — with fieldwork and interviews running up to the election in May, literature review thereafter and the final report being delivered in the autumn. The practice run began in the autumn of ‘04 in Linlithgow where I was the SNP candidate for the ’05 Westminsters. The main implementation began with the Cathcart and Livingston by-elections that summer, coming to full fruit in ‘07. Even then it took another 4 years to hit the sweet spot properly.

By contrast, Scottish Labour has to fight a 50+ seat election — when it hasn’t fought more than a dozen seats at a time for nearly 20 years or longer — in 4 months time. But luckily for Jim one of those 12 seats was always Eastwood, so he actually knows what a fighting constituency looks like, unlike many of his colleagues.

Labour’s back office and training function remains weak and underpowered. It has traditionally been a prize of faction and an active player in internal selectioneering. Grangemouth springs to mind.

As a party it has a propensity for tin-eared shows of strength that actually project weakness — think Gordon Brown continuing to seek nominations for the Leadership contest after there were no longer enough free MPs to nominate a challenger, or the ludicrous Imperial March in Glasgow where a Procession Of The Payroll was supposed to counter the (admittedly somewhat insane) exuberant mass politics of the IndyRef and duly ended up a YouTube sensation with 468,660 views.

Wee Dougie Alexander’s trumpeting of his Obama-guru is another such. Labour fights elections every year, it should be able to grow its own expertise — depending on buying in talent is pitiful, especially when they are not very good. The point about American politics is that there are a lot of Americans.

So Obama had 300,000 volunteers in his campaign? Rescaled to the UK that’s 50,000, to Scotland its less than 5,000. RIC turned out 1,000 people at a single place at a time. And I’m sure the allocation of gurudom to the now peculiarly Scottish Westminster election is a distinctly low priority — it would appear that Team Murphy is going it alone.

Murphy’s campaign shows all the signs of improvising under pressure — the pledge of 1,000 more nurses than the SNP clearly signals we have reached peak pledge.

The re-rewrite of Clause 4 was brilliantly inspired — basically its a cover-version where everyone already knows the words — but it brings its own problems.

The last Clause 4 debate came after half a decade of slog — with this sudden one the SNP will be banging-on about him U-turning — a charge that will resonate with many of his new target voters — Yesser’s. I’m sure the researchers are collating the collected works of Murphy and McTernan even as we speak. And quite rightly too (if any one in the broadcast media needs a rent-a-quote on the subject you have my contact details. Synthetic outrage a speciality).

And its not just the electorate that Team Murphy/McTernan need to convince. They can produce policy wheezes on the telly every Sunday, but they can’t guarantee what their MSPs or MPs will say when journo’s ask them “Do you trust McTernan?” or “Do you believe Murphy?” after the wheeze is announced.

Especially when the follow up question is “are they going to scrap the current selection process for list seats after May?” (Answer: Yes, of course they bloody are.)

Secretly of course, the wise nationalists know that the ‘Jocking’ of the other Scottish parties is a key ratchet on the road to independence.

Its also clear that the election campaign will be made with what is to hand — telephone canvass returns from the IndyRef cut with Mosaic classifications of social class and a traditional Labour Media grid. Scottish Labour will struggle with money and manpower but a small team can run a good grid if they know what they’re about (and they do).

SNPer’s whinging on Twitter about how “he’s never off the telly” better get used to it. His team already have a full grid to May, with announcements, schemes and plans to get him in the Sunday papers and on the politics shows. The SNP really needs to raise its game and go toe-to-toe on it.

Never forget that the telly and the papers have space to fill under a hard deadline, and if you can reliably give them something of interest they will use it. The answer is a crisp and strategic media team not droning about MSM on your blog.

But his problems won’t end in May. Off the back of that it goes straight into the Holyrood election campaign, and he has to break the stranglehold his duff Holyrood team have on the list seats, but that is another story altogether.