For Labour, the Scottish Leadership Election is Make-or-Break
Ballots open today for the Scottish leadership election. Anas Sarwar represents the failures of the Labour establishment — while Monica Lennon offers a roadmap to a democratic socialist future.
Scottish Labour members and affiliated supporters get their ballots today. Hyperbole is used in these elections as a matter of course, but it really is no exaggeration to say that whichever choice emerges as leader will determine the future of the Scottish Labour Party, and with it, the potential outcome of the 2024 General Election.
The voice of hope for a better future and a changed Scottish Labour Party is Monica Lennon. She has run a refreshing campaign that fundamentally recognises the need for Labour to change. Importantly, she is aligned with those doing the serious thinking on what type of Scotland we want to create, the powers and constitutional arrangement required to accomplish it, and the need to reach out to lost Labour voters.
A fresh new face, authentic, working-class, and with a track record of turning a hugely successful campaign into legislation, she has the type of broad appeal inside and outside the Party that would see Labour speak to those lost voters. Crucially, she is someone whose words are backed with deeds. When she extolls the need for equality and collectivism and argues that unity is strength, people will believe it.
Her opponent, Anas Sarwar, is the establishment candidate: the candidate who sowed seeds of division inside the Party via what many believe was the constant undermining of Richard Leonard, and the candidate whose well-resourced campaign seems like it was primed and ready to go.
To be fair, Sarwar has made a decent campaign film. That’s what happens when you have the idea that a campaign might be coming, and generous resources backing you. Starmer made a decent campaign film too. The lesson – be wary of slick campaign films.
It was against the backdrop of the Scottish battle last week that the UK party’s leadership gave a masterclass in how not to talk to the Scottish electorate. In a new party-political broadcast, Keir Starmer spoke to Scotland without mentioning Scotland once. In the background was the now obligatory Union Jack, betraying an apparent obliviousness to the sentiments of an already sceptical Scottish electorate.
The film was Blue Labour in its origins, patronising in its tone, and one-dimensional in its analysis of working-class voters. Why Scottish Labour’s interim leadership, including Sarwar allies Baillie and Murray, felt it wise and/or helpful to air this broadcast in Scotland has left many members here astounded.
Monica Lennon understands that such ham-fisted attempts at patriotism are not the way to win again in Scotland. She is in tune with two very important pieces of work published last week: one is ‘Remaking the British State: For the Many, Not the Few’, a report I know well, commissioned by Jeremy Corbyn when leader and authored by Sean Griffin; the other is the latest Red Paper Collective report, titled ‘Scotland United’. Both are serious pieces of work – careful and methodical, and offering genuine grown-up analyses of the future direction of Scotland and of the Scottish Labour Party.
Planning for Meaningful Change
‘Remaking the British State’ is the most detailed contribution to the debate emerging from the Labour Party since the Scottish Constitutional Convention. According to Professor James Mitchell, the report ‘is the single most important contribution [he has] read in debates on the UK constitution in a very long time.’ Its origins lie in the then-leaderships of Corbyn and Leonard understanding that Labour needs to develop a thought-out constitutional position—something that is neither the broken status quo nor independence—if it is ever to properly recover in Scotland.
The report considers the kind of society we need to build. It asks where power should lie in a democratic, socialistic vision of the state, what social and economic conditions are needed to build it, and the principles which should underpin it. This is a refreshing inversion of the sterile debate between Scottish nationalism and status-quo unionism: where current conversations are transfixed by potential constitutional futures, legal forms, and vacuous notions of sovereignty, nationhood, and identity. Rarely do they ask questions of purpose. The areas covered in the report demonstrate the necessary breadth: social and economic rights, workers’ rights, public ownership, the environment, a national investment bank, and more.
In terms of the redistribution of power, the report considers a senate of the nations and regions to replace the Lords, which will give voice to those areas at Westminster. To strengthen and revitalise local democracy, the report promotes the principle of subsidiarity, and from that, proposes new powers for the devolved nations and English regions over tax, borrowing, social security, drugs policy, and employment law, with the new senate given responsibility over regulation of the UK single market. It also proposes abolishing the royal prerogative.
The Red Paper pamphlet, meanwhile, examines the case for change in Edinburgh and the UK. Touching on the capture of the Scottish Government by economic interests, it asserts that political change must come with economic change. It says the purpose of any new powers devolved to the Edinburgh or the UK regions must be to create a fairer and better country and an interventionist industrial and economic policy.
The Red Paper in no way advocate a referendum but make clear that it is for Scotland to decide whether there will be a referendum, and if and when one does come, whether there will be a third option on the ballot paper. James Mitchell outlines the feasibility of a multi-option referendum within the paper, which is a vital new contribution to the current debate.
Standing alongside Monica Lennon’s approach, these papers demonstrate the serious thinking going on around the constitutional question in progressive Scottish Labour circles. They are in stark contrast to the banality of the current binary debate, which in no specific or direct way offers any roadmap to a change in the economic model. The thinking in both these reports serve democracy and the Scottish people in a way that is not happening elsewhere, including within the present Labour leadership – instead, the current approach moves some way off into the opposite direction. The election of Monica Lennon would offer hope that Labour could and would change course.
Turning Theory into Action
Starmer did speak directly to Scotland in December, in a speech lacking in detail. Although he acknowledged the need for change and maintained that he would be setting up a constitutional commission, he added that he would wait until its completion before setting out a clear direction. The Griffin report’s release leads us to wonder why its findings were not factored into his thinking. Why reinvent the wheel?
The Red Paper document and the Griffin paper offer a roadmap. But the roadmap needs a political vehicle. At this stage, there is widespread scepticism about whether Starmer is that vehicle, and here in Scotland, if Anas Sarwar can be.
If elected leader, Monica Lennon would be. She will address the Scottish electorate as they are, not as we want them to be – and she will stop going back to the future with the same failed strategy.
Lennon represents a break, not continuity, with the political approaches that led to decline in the first place, and she recognises the need to treat people in Scotland like adults if Scottish Labour is ever to come to power again. This feels a long way off, but it can be done if we begin with Lennon as leader and we start having the conversations—the sensible conversations—immediately.
As Starmer said in October, Labour has ‘a mountain to climb’. Like politics, the climbing of mountains takes patience, courage, and the meticulous planning of an extremely detailed route – one that makes sure all members of your team are with you on the ascent; one that sees proper patriotism as building the type of country that people really can be proud of. The flags, someone should tell Mr Starmer, don’t come until the end.
Monica Lennon knows that. She will do the hard graft, offer the vision, and engage the electorate before flying any flag. Vote Monica Lennon.