EITHER a coarsening or a liberation of language occurred this week at Holyrood, depending on your point of view. The internal divisions of Scottish Labour were laid bare in an exchange which will now forever be referred to as "Pishgate".
Perhaps it was unkind of Labour leadership hopeful Richard Leonard’s team to deploy a mildly profane but gloriously evocative adjective in rebuking Jackie Baillie. Yet, it led to an exchange between First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and the Presiding Officer Ken Macintosh which might easily have belonged to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and was just as entertaining as Mr Leonard’s scrofulous press release. Referring to the vibrant colloquialism contained therein Ms Sturgeon sought to twist the knife into Labour’s wounds, only to be seized by a bout of good old-fashioned Presbyterian rectitude. “I cannot actually say it, presiding officer,” she said.
There are some who believe that the Scottish Labour leadership contest has been farcical from the outset and that Thursday’s outbreak of verbal beastliness merely epitomised it. I disagree. It must have cheered some of the Labour faithful to know that there are still signs of life and passion in a party that recently has begun to make you think of Monty Python’s dead Parrot routine: “this party is deceased; it is an ex-party”.
The First Minister thus heads for the SNP’s autumn conference in Glasgow next week with a smile on her face if nothing else. Her advisers and spinners will advance the line that the party is in fine fettle following an uncomfortable summer and they will derive some satisfaction from the Keystone Cops production currently being played out by Labour. Yet Ms Sturgeon doesn’t need me to tell her that this conference is the most important of her 10-year career in government. The faithful who will set another attendance record have rarely been more fretful at any other time since 2011 when it first seemed that the time for independence was upon them. The little matter of 21 lost seats in June’s General Election will cast a shadow as will Ms Sturgeon’s reluctance in an interview with The New Statesman to set any kind of time-frame for a second referendum on independence.
The chaos of the UK Tories’ Brexit negotiations makes the First Minister’s caution understandable yet Scotland’s election cycle is tolling a bell for the prospect of independence. Put simply, the Scottish Government’s ability to call for a second referendum runs out at the end of the current term. Thereafter she must hope for an unlikely third successive pro-independence majority at Holyrood to keep the dream alive. She must then hope that the Brexit shambles and its consequences will have become apparent even to those who voted for it within the next three years. If before then Boris Johnson successfully completes his defenestration of Theresa May, the First Minister can regard it as a wee Brucie Bonus.
The First Minister ought also to be concerned with the long-awaited re-appearance of the old familiar battle lines between Right and Left in UK politics. Not since the early days of Tony Blair’s government in 1997 has a Labour leader looked as assured and in total control of the party as Jeremy Corbyn has done this week at Brighton. Nicola Sturgeon’s programme for government announced last month received a generally favourable rating; it was inclusive rather than radical though and sought to convey a sense of Scotland being bright, progressive and open. There was little in it though that resembled a detailed strategy of reform to address the burning issue of educational attainment and dismantling the curse of managerialism that afflicts the NHS in Scotland. The inequality of land ownership remains largely unaddressed and the patterns of privilege that continue to hold sway at the top of Scottish public life are unaltered.
Mr Corbyn, though, has wasted little time in delivering on his eye-catching slogan “For the Many Not the Few”. His pledge to bring back essential services into public ownership will be welcomed by the many who have watched helplessly as those services, under the Tories, have been viewed as a dripping roast for private companies specifically set up for the purpose. Not for a long time has a Labour leader set the political agenda so dramatically. His main conference speech sought to build on the themes of his inspiring election campaign. He pledged to breenge into markets which were gerrymandered to fit the narrow interests of the Tories and their big-ticket donors. He wants a “new model of economic management to replace the failed dogmas of neoliberalism”.
It elicited an immediate response from Theresa May who sought to position herself as the champion of those vested interests that Mr Corbyn had pledged to disrupt. Mr Corbyn had said capitalism was facing “a crisis of legitimacy” following the 2008 banking collapse. Ms May, on the other hand, insisted that “a free market economy, operating under the right rules and regulations, is the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created. It was the new combination which led societies out of darkness and stagnation and into the light of the modern age. It is unquestionably the best, and indeed the only sustainable, means of increasing the living standards of everyone in a country – and we should never forget that raising the living standards, and protecting the jobs, of ordinary working people is the central aim of all economic policy.”
Ms May’s speech came less than 12 months after she told last year’s Tory party conference that she wanted to work towards a Britain “where everyone plays by the same rules and where every single person, regardless of their background or that of their parents, is given the chance to be all they want to be”. Within weeks though, there were tax breaks and tweaking of inheritance duties for the UK’s richest citizens especially those found to be residing in important Tory constituencies. Austerity measures continued to gnaw at the life chances of the UK’s most vulnerable accompanied by a slew of threats aimed at the status of EU nationals living in the UK.
Between them Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May have restored the old way of things; this is now a struggle between a philosophy that seeks to improve the lives of the many and one that is desperate to hang on to the ancient privileges of the few. The Labour supporters in Scotland who deserted the party en masse have been waiting for a leader to speak with such conviction for many years. Nicola Sturgeon must hope that their thirst for self-determination comes first.
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