Wings Over Scotland

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

It’s one of the most famous lines in the history of cinema. I’ve heard it a hundred times. And lately, to me, it’s a pretty fair summation of everything that’s gone wrong in Scottish Labour’s relationship with both its own members and its voters.

Yesterday, Ed Miliband was here giving his speech in what, in most years, would have been natural Labour leader territory. Tony Blair was never particularly comfortable up here – too many horny-handed, overall-wearing northerners for his taste, and those of his inner circle – but Scotland has been “home soil” for Labour for as long as I’ve been alive, and a long time before, and even he was assured his ovation from conference.

Things have changed. Labour’s claim to being the natural party of government in Scotland has been dashed. Their conduct in the independence campaign thus far has damaged their standing with a large number of their supporters. Yesterday’s speech from Miliband was one of the worst I’ve ever heard a Labour leader give, and that it met with such tumultuous applause in the conference hall is a demonstration as clear as anyone could need that the disconnect between what Labour says and does and what the Scottish people want is now acute.

Those rank and file members who are not wholly disgusted with their leadership for the shabby, dishonourable way they’ve fought this campaign were the ones cheering on the leader on Friday and as someone who might once have been inside that hall I can say with surety and certainty that I cannot understand those people any longer.

Miliband equated the Yes campaign’s “social justice for Scotland” agenda to the campaign of cuts going on south of the border. He compared Salmond to Cameron and talked about how Scotland would be locked in a “race to the bottom”.

We were promised a lovebombing, and instead got a man talking our country down, dismissing the very real social advances made under the Scottish Parliament, talking about the Promised Land which will come under Labour in London – the party which spends its time in England promising its own series of savage cuts to match that of the Tories, to placate the right-wing swing voters of Middle England.

But there are no secrets anymore. If you want to know what Labour really intends to do when it’s next in power in London, you only have to Google it. You want to know how their proposed “new powers” for the Scottish Parliament stack up, or how little they mean next to the reality of being in control of our own country? Check it out for yourself, on any of a dozen websites.

Besides, some of us have longer memories than that. Some us have a longer attention span than it takes to sit in a conference hall and get whipped into a frenzy by a flat, insipid speech like Miliband’s, designed to appeal to the remnants of the party so blinded by a visceral hatred of the SNP that they’re incapable of rational thought. It wasn’t directed at the remainder of Scotland, because the remainder of Scotland is increasingly disconnected from what comes out of Labour these days – or just can’t pick it out of the torrent of bile and venom.

Polls suggest a growing number of people now have their ears closed to the shabby, insulting, gutter-level soundbites coming out of “Better Together” and its constituent parts, most of whom hate each other almost as much as they do the SNP. It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking they’ve switched off completely, but in truth these are people tuned to a whole different frequency, monitoring signals from elsewhere.

Their ears are cocked to the sweeter music of hope, dreaming not of what London tells us has to be, but of what might be if they believe enough in themselves and each other. Because the London narrative has no message of hope within it. It has been shorn of all optimism, and asks that we embrace our limitations, that we accept the political and social primacy of austerity and that we accept cuts and “reforms” that tear the heart and soul out of communities and shred the social contract that bound us.

If there was a “United Kingdom”, this assault on the fabric of our communites and the basis of our shared identity began to erode it a long time ago. But Labour no longer understands this. This failure to communicate began with their failure to understand that the working class had aspirations too.

When the political antennae of Labour was redirected under Blair and Brown to the steady hum of Middle England and its ambitions and aspirations, it forgot that its historic mission was to maintain the upward mobility of those who didn’t have the opportunities afforded to those in the leafy shires and suburbs. The people crowded into the inner cities, those stuck in low-paid jobs, the unemployed and the sick – tthe very people who most needed the protection and assistance of the state.

It wasn’t until Labour failed to win an absolute majority in the Scottish Parliament and required Lib Dem support to run things that real reforms came about, and Scotland started to take the lead in rolling back Thatcherism and Blairism. Yet the policies which did so came largely from the junior partner in the coalition, and not from Labour’s own benches.

The clarion call of much of Scottish Labour’s frontline was that our failure to win a majority wasn’t because we’d gone too far, but that New Labour hadn’t gone far enough. This failure to comprehend a simple fact – that voters in Scotland rejected those “reforms” and wanted a return to a social justice agenda – has haunted the party ever since, because years on the lessons still haven’t been learned.

When senior Labour activists talk about Labour voters “lending their votes to the SNP” they patronise the electorate disastrously. These were never “Labour votes”, they were the public’s votes, and they are not “on loan” to anyone. They won’t automatically come home at some unknown point, they’ll need to be fought for. The party will have to earn them, and to do so it’ll have to change radically, and start to listen again.

The likes of Tom Harris, Jim Murphy and others should no longer be allowed to speak as if for the great mass of the working class on these islands. What galls is not so much that they told people they weren’t going to get what they wanted from the Labour Party, but that Labour – busy blindly chasing Tory voters – wouldn’t even acknowledge what they were asking for was a valid aim.

The idea that what Labour had done wrong was not to change enough, not move enough to the right, could only have emerged from a self-absorbed political organisation that had completely lost its bearings. It didn’t come from one that was engaged with ordinary voters.

A radical party of the left that offered an alternative with the courage of its convictions, would find an army of foot soldiers and campaigners willing to fight for every vote. Instead, their commitment to Tory cuts, their cowardice in the face of the right and its anti-public-sector agenda, their lack of a backbone, has alienated potential supporters, disenfranchised millions and left ordinary people with nowhere else to turn – and crucially, left the party with a slender and fast-vanishing lead over a Tory Party that’s tearing the country to pieces.

Johann Lamont, perhaps the worst leader a mainstream political party has ever fielded on these shores, yesterday made an embarrassing and fraudulent speech of her own, calling out the SNP for being “dishonest and deceptive and disgraceful” in an address which said not one positive thing about Scotland or the Scottish people but instead was littered with personal attacks on the First Minister and the Scottish Government.

Once again, she decried the Yes campaign as being a purely SNP-driven scheme to “drag [Scotland] over the line”, to win independence by a single vote, purely for its own sake. That insults the integrity and intelligence of the thousands of men and women, of all political parties and none who are campaigning for a Yes because they believe in Scotland, and want this country to stand on its own two feet.

The phony offer of “more powers” has been exposed as a fraud. The leader who a few months ago talked of hard choices, of ending a “something for nothing” culture, now wants to sound like a red-in-tooth-and-claw socialist planning to soak the rich. It fooled the right-wing press into a hysterical panic, but none of it will ever come to pass and Lamont knows it, which is why she can stand in front of her conference audience like a performing seal and make promises she’ll never have to keep.

The entire Labour conference has been an exercise in narrow party-political cynicism, at the expense of Scotland and its future. Thankfully, much of Scotland’s attention is elsewhere. Its people are daring to dream. We are not the idiots Labour thinks, no longer tribally loyal past the point of sanity. Scotland is awake, at last, and eager for something better. We know in our hearts, and we’re starting to know in our heads, that it doesn’t have to be like this, that we can shatter the paradigm once and for all, that we can construct the country we want and deserve.

Our loyalty has been taken for granted for too long. Our trust has been betrayed. This week we have seen the party we thought was on our side try to sell us a bill of counterfeit goods, hoping we wouldn’t check too closely. In the effort, they’ve revealed the contempt in which they hold us – and perhaps always did.

No more. I was a lifelong Labourite, but it’s over now. I have seen the true face of the party over the last few months, and it’s not one with which I want to associate myself. It’s certainly not one in which I’ll find the realisation of my dreams for a better country. Even if I thought they cared about that, not just putting their own snouts in the trough, I don’t believe they have the courage, the ambition or the vision to pull it off.

Tony Blair once said that Labour, for all its accomplishments, was a party rooted in failure, and they’re now living up to his description. The welfare state which a great, reforming and truly socially-responsible Labour Party founded was failed by Blair’s government, abandoned by Brown’s and cannot be saved by Miliband. It will probably cease to function entirely in England, whoever wins in 2015, and Labour will share the blame equally with the Tories and their Lib Dem partners.

Yesterday Johann Lamont tried to get Scots to vote against our last chance to protect and remake the post-war social contract, and to do so she reached for the language of “Old Labour” by invoking the class war. In this last desperate gambit she did no more than reveal her lack of understanding of true Labour values, because that has never been what Labour was about.

The concept of the left waging class war exists only in the fevered minds of the right. The social contract was meant to bind us all together, not split us apart. The welfare state is meant, as a core principle, to be universal – not a begrudged piece of charity for those at the bottom, but for everyone, the ultimate shared pool for all to tap into.

To undermine the principle of universal provision is to do the work of the enemy for them – for how, they will ask, with full justification, is it acceptable for those who contribute least to get the most back, if those who contribute most get nothing at all? This isn’t simply a failure to communicate, it’s a failure to even comprehend.

Scotland is tuned to a difference frequency. A great and growing number of its people are daring to see beyond the here and now, the soul-sapping political and social consensus on offer from the London parties, and to dream of something better as Labour used to do.

We may not know for certain what’s on the other side of the Rubicon, but we know that the world on this side is one we’re better off leaving behind. They keep warning us that crossing the river is permanent, that this change is forever. Once again, they misunderstood the mood. That’s exactly what we’re hoping for and counting on.

*James Forrest is a previous Wings contributor who’s just started his own blog, on which the original version of this article is the debut post. Visit it here.