Glasgow East: an analysis

Aileen Colleran

“It’s the end of the world as we know it?” (REM) or is it just a blip?

The biggest mistake the party could make is to assume Glasgow East was a one-off bolt from the blue (or yellow and black, if we’re talking party colours), and that the natural order of things will inevitably be restored at the next Westminster election. That mode of thinking and lack of honest reflection will cost us many seats at the next general election and lose us Holyrood again. We are no longer the natural party of government in Scotland and the sooner we all wake up and work out what that means the better.

Decades of conventional wisdom have been overturned. A reasonable turn out, a sunny day and a short campaign failed to help Labour. Nor did simplistic Nat-bashing. We can’t (and shouldn’t) attempt to scare the electorate into voting Labour, and imply that the voters are criminally stupid to even contemplate any other alternative. One of the biggest mistakes made in the campaign was to refuse to engage in the debate about why people might be disillusioned with Labour and to acknowledge that many voters no longer know what we stand for.

At the start of the campaign I had hoped we would have a different approach to the blunt instrument approach that cost us the Holyrood elections last year. I had hoped we would try being positive and use the Labour – led achievements and vision to build a case for why people should vote for Labour, instead of being hysterical about why not to vote for the SNP. The politics of fear versus the politics of hope – um, which do you think is going to resonate? Look at the US elections, and ask yourself, what is our emotional message? We were 10 years behind in organisation and campaigning tactics and still running the narrative of a 1999 campaign in both 2007 and in the by-election. Divorce is messy work then, but today more and more Scottish people are increasingly feeling like the wife who knows she will have a tough time if she leaves him, but is seriously thinking of packing her bags. There is no such thing as a tribal Labour vote anywhere, and this was the final proof of that realpolitick.

The organisational issues are worth examining as they are indicative of underlying issues and politics and help us understand what is happening in the party. I accept that there was the inevitable factor of by-election volatility and there was a no risk opportunity for voters to send a message to Labour without having to change the government. The slick salesman that is Scotland’s First minister, Alex Salmond, managed pull off a face both ways campaign, urging voters to send a message to Gordon Brown but emphasising that it wouldn’t cause the fall of a government. He invested a lot of his own personal political credit by being very visible on the doorsteps throughout the duration of the campaign. It was a mistake for Gordon Brown to body swerve the by-election as voters took it as ducking their concerns and not being willing to face them.

A local weakness was that there was little or no voter ID data, and a low level of year round campaigning activism, so the party was out-organised, but even if we’d run the perfect campaign and won by 200 or 300, it would have been a sticking plaster on an open wound. It takes something significant in people’s hearts and minds to turn around a majority like that. We have to ask ourselves what it was the SNP were tapping into? You can’t mobilise a vote that isn’t there.

The cost of living and the feeling that Labour is no longer in touch with people’s fears about paying the bills and looking after their families (and most of all the 10p tax rate issue), were real issues on the doorsteps. A killer postcard that the SNP delivered in the final days of the campaign showed a photograph of Gordon Brown shaking hands with Margaret Thatcher on the steps of Number 10 - making it rather difficult to campaign on the message that Westminster seats are about us versus the Tories. It could, however, also be said, that we gave far too much attention to the SNP in the course of the campaign, even to the extent of delivering a leaflet that had a photo and the name of the SNP candidate on it as an attempt to attack him – I leave it to more experienced analysts to judge whether that was wise.

After Dunfermline, London, Crewe and the English and Welsh local elections, we shouldn’t have been surprised that it was touch and go. But the media were getting hysterical about Glasgow East because of its perceived invincibility as a Labour fortress. This was part of the mythology that Glasgow East was one massive sink estate dominated by Labour – not so. The broad brush picture of this as a solid Labour seat wasn’t strictly true. Baillieston SNP ran two council candidates last year (the only area in the city to do so), and returned two. One of them had the biggest vote of any councillor in Glasgow in 2007, so they had a substantial vote and activist base to build on.

It is also worth noting that our local activists felt sidelined and their local knowledge was either ignored or unasked for. However, whilst not demeaning the small band of dedicated activists and councillors in the constituency, there was no real record of year round campaigning, voter contact and recruitment to the party.

Trying to get a by-election off the ground from zero to 60 in seconds isn’t easy and reinforces the need to be out engaging with the public day in day out. No wonder the electorate are cynical when the only time they see politicians and parties at their door is when they want something. We are no longer at the heart of many of our communities, most of the people who were out canvassing, leafleting and being active were either elected members or those “paid to care” (working for the party or MPs or MSPs , or want a job or position in the party). This reflects what has been lost from the central core of the Labour Party.

The Glasgow East result was delivered by a ‘perfect storm’ of circumstances from the national picture to local factors including that a significant high voting part of the constituency had been abandoned to the SNP since John Mason won a council by-election in 1998 (this man had previous form...)

It should provide a wake-up call. Unless we can positively prove what Labour stands for, not by rhetoric, but by actions, we end up being out-flanked. We are in severe danger of becoming the party of the 20th Century. Labour emerged as a major political party in the early years of the last century and achieved its greatest electoral result towards the end of that century in 1997.

Unless we all take a good long look at who we are, what we stand for and whom we seek to represent and campaign for we could become irrelevant in the 21st Century. I am reminded of the line in one of my favourite films, the Two Towers, when King Theoden facing the ultimate battle declaims “how did it come to this”? Really, this is not over-emphasising the situation.

You know the worst thing about the reaction from voters on the doorsteps in Glasgow East – it wasn’t hostility (I am used to that in my own ward where Iraq had a major impact). No, it was a polite indifference. Almost as if the voters didn’t even want to engage in a debate with us. It was as if they’d already made up their minds that they no longer wanted to buy the Labour brand and weren’t going to waste their time discussing it with us.

Now, that is serious.

These are hard times for the party both North and South of the border, but the issues we face are the same. Our opponents may be presenting from slightly different directions, but the next 18 months are critical for the future of the country and the party.