Scottish Labour acknowledges it was out-organised by the SNP during the May elections and suffered gravely from voters’ belief that the campaign was led from London, according to confidential party briefing documents seen by Holyrood.
The admission, which is contained in a document outlining the party’s planning for the mooted early general election, goes on to acknowledge that Scottish Labour needs to establish itself as a distinctly Scottish party in the public eye.
It says: “In May, we were out-organised by the SNP and the voters believed ours was a London-led operation. The Scottish Labour Party must now present a Scottish Labour machine to the electorate, targeting the seats that are vulnerable in the post-SNP Holyrood world and not simply those vulnerable against a traditional Labour/Tory analysis.”
The briefing also reveals that if Prime Minister Gordon Brown had called a general election for this year – a move that close ally and former Secretary of State for Scotland Douglas Alexander is widely considered to have favoured – a desperately under-resourced Scottish Labour Party would not have been in a position to fight it.
“By the end of November, Scottish Labour will be left with only six staff. Of these, the team will have no policy, press, or communications capacity, and only one organiser with more than one year’s experience on the staff. This serious situation will leave a party staff too under strength and short-handed to effectively tackle the range of tasks required to produce an effective general election campaign in Scotland.”
Scottish Labour’s perilous financial position is also addressed, revealing that all campaign spending is reliant on locally raised funding, with the briefing concluding:
“So, in addition to a staffing deficit, Scottish Labour also lacks the capital resources to effectively prepare for UK elections following the high levels of expenditure on May’s campaigns. If we do not address this problem, the party will not be able to offer a coherent election campaigning service to MPs at a general election.”
In Scotland, the document suggests that Labour is – belatedly – recognising that the Scottish electorate expects the Scottish Parliament, and Scottish Government, to represent Scotland first, rather than act as the northern arm of a UK-wide political movement.
“While there are great innovations being developed in Victoria Street (UK Labour headquarters), they on their own cannot win in Scotland.”
A key recommendation made in the strategy says that the party needs to “establish firmly that Labour has learned from May 07 and has re-engaged, with elected representatives in every tier of government listening to Scottish voters.”
Support for this view is found in a recent snapshot of support for independence in Strathclyde University’s Scottish Social Attitudes Survey. Political commentator and co-director of the survey, Professor John Curtice says that while support for independence has fallen, public expectations of the role a Scottish Government should play have changed.
“The SNP’s victory in May was a success for the party rather than the cause of independence it espouses. It had a popular leader and tapped a feeling that Holyrood should put Scotland, rather than partnership with London, first.”
However this push to distance Scottish Labour from Westminster will face opposition, notably from senior Labour figures from Scotland but working at Westminster.
One such figure, closely aligned with former Prime Minister Tony Blair disputed that Westminster issues, and the appointment of London-based figures like Alexander to run the campaign, contributed to the election defeat.
“It had nothing to do with Iraq, or Blair, or any other Westminster issue, this was all about Scotland and it was a Scottish election,” the source said.
The documents obtained by Holyrood demonstrate how Labour intends to rebrand itself as a Scottish party by undertaking a “multiple-strand consultation programme” called ‘Labour Listening’ due to report around Christmas.
This would result in February’s Scottish Labour Conference seeing a motion to “Renew the Party Aims and Objectives (Clause 2 of the Scottish Standing Orders)”.
Other key elements of the Wendy Alexander-led campaign to rebuild the Scottish party include the development of a Scottish Communications Centre employing sophisticated electronic tools to drive and record voter contacts. In addition, Labour intends to make more use of the internet – an area where the SNP had an advantage in the previous campaign – by launching an online “viral publicity campaign”.
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