Mandy Rhodes interviews Wendy Alexander as she prepares for her first Scottish Labour Party conference as leader under the banner of Reform, Renew and Reconnect
You know you’re in trouble when a politician tells you they’ve been speaking to ‘normal people’ about ‘real issues’ on the bus. It’s akin to Baroness Jay of Paddington saying she understood the needs of rural communities because she owned a weekend cottage in Buckinghamshire. Let’s face it, only weird people and country folk talk to you on public transport. But then maybe Wendy Alexander finds it easier to engage in these brief encounters with strangers than she does with the rest of us.
It’s been a tough old six months for Alexander; elected leader when no one else wanted to stand, embroiled in a row about donations, which led to her being twice referred to the procurator fiscal, a media mauling over her weekly and frankly, derisory performances during FMQs, the loss of two spin doctors - one because he could stand it no more after six weeks and the other dismissed for calling the First Minister a cunt - and the continual drip, drip, drip of internal party strife that sees her painted as steering a rudderless ship. Even the big-brain theory has been called into question.
So maybe that’s why during this pre-conference interview she continually refers to her insightful discussions with the public on trains and buses as if these day-to-day debates shape her strategic thinking for the party’s future more than her internal party deliberations. Well, maybe they do and certainly one of her MSP colleagues told me that ‘Mrs Woman on the number 44’ might have more chance of speaking to his illustrious leader than he ever would…ouch!
In these circumstances, it would be easy to add to the barrage of criticism that has been flung Alexander’s way and, frankly she does little to ingratiate herself with the press; there’s her odd use of the third person – talking about Wendy this and Wendy that, there are the stories of her standing up the Daily Record’s editor for lunch, not once but twice, the clumsy briefing of individual members of the parliamentary press corp by her allies, who read from a pre-prepared script, the attempt at a media charm offensive over dinner, when she mentioned Donald Dewar’s name countless times but failed to talk in the present or the future and the endless briefings with newspaper editors and political hacks that have failed to raise a smile, let alone a headline. And on a personal level, she gives me a pre-conference interview in which I am given ‘exclusive’ details about what she will say in her speech in Aviemore this weekend and then briefs all the daily newspapers on the same detail before I even publish! Yep, there are ways to make friends and influence people and this isn’t one of them.
Much is made of the fact that Wendy is a woman to either explain why the male-dominated media gives her such a hard time or to excuse her sometimes erratic behaviour. Neither reason is particularly complimentary or positive but neither is it true. Wendy gets the press she gets, not because she is a woman, but because she is Wendy.
And as a woman, it would be hard not to feel some empathy with her. None of the last six months can have been easy; not as a woman, not as a politician, not as a mum but the truth is, she doesn’t appear to have learnt that much from it. I would like to say that she now comes across as a more warm and engaging human being, having learnt some humility and grace from the donor affair but that would not be true. Even when she accepts that she did something wrong, she corrects herself and says one of her team did it; she does not recognise her performance at FMQs as shoddy but instead, says she raises the important issues and accuses the First Minister of being derelict in his duty by refusing to answer questions; and when asked about her own internal party travails, she dismisses such accusations as trivial.
True, she has in the last few months, along with a new spin merchant, adopted a more tactile style with interviewers, there’s a lot of knee touching and a disturbing amount of close eye contact. She has also, reportedly, had voice coaching and some lessons in presentation and, when she takes her time, does make coherent and rounded points but there are still lots of issues to overcome and one of them is to present a good, strong case for the opposition.
Despite the prevailing view, the media is not deliberately out to get her but in the absence of a good policy story to sell, she becomes the architect of her own bad press. A positive media offensive could be one of her most crucial battles as leader. But Wendy, it seems, is incapable of playing the media right and while many, probably herself included, would argue that substance is more important than style, there hasn’t been much of that on show either.
The kindest thing you can say is, to her credit, she has weathered the storm. Despite continual predictions in the press that her days as leader are numbered, she has endured the brickbats, the legal investigations and the internal mudslinging to emerge as a leader that, she says, is ready to lead.
So, honestly, how does she think her leadership has gone so far?
“Well, what keeps you going through all of that is that you keep trying to do what’s important to you and put issues on the table
what keeps you going through all of that is that you keep trying to do what’s important to you and put issues on the table 
,” she says…
My heart sinks; you know you are not about to hear a heartfelt response to what must have been one of the most turbulent and emotional times of her life, but instead a whole litany of good causes…
“I recall one Friday when we were in Edinburgh and we went to visit a homelessness project called The Rock, and we met inspiring youngsters who had taken time off from working in Tesco to work with Project Scotland to set up a project at Meadowbank stadium for young homeless women to get them into sport - that was such a brilliant idea…
“The following Friday I was in my own constituency, working hard to try to save a project to put computers into peoples’ homes, help support broadband, let grandparents bringing up kids make sure that their kids have access to a computer when they were at school, and just week in week out, I keep doing these sorts of things.
“Visiting a pensioner in Edinburgh who is losing her home-help support as a result of the cuts the city council is making here…
“…and of course, it’s sometimes frustrating that the media weren’t interested in these issues, but the important thing is to stay the course and as they say, what doesn’t break you, makes you.”
And then there are all the other ordinary people Alexander says she meets on trains and buses who discuss with her the ‘real issues’ of the day. And that’s the trouble, when politicians start talking all holier than thou or about the role of public transport in their own privileged lives, it all starts to sound, well, a little disingenuous.
Right, let’s get the donor affair out of the way. How did she feel during that time?
“Well, I’ve spent my time trying to make sure it didn’t get in the way. A mistake was made and as soon as that mistake was made, the £950 was handed back, Charlie held up his hands and apologised to me and everyone else involved and then we simply had to await the outcome, and the Electoral Commission said that Wendy took significant steps but not all reasonable ones…and so we move on.
“I mean, every political party has had a technical breach at some stage or other of the rules. As I say, the moment I knew a mistake was made, the money went back, and if every politician whose party had made a technical breach of the rules at some point left politics, we’d have a much smaller parliament.”
Did she feel that the media were just out to get her scalp?
“I think that’s a judgment for others to make,” Why? “I think it’s a daft politician who gets into second guessing those issues. The important thing is for all of us to account for our own actions and my determination throughout all this was to remain focused on the causes that the people care about.
“I mean, I travel on the train, travel on the bus,” Here we go. “And without exception, the people who I meet want their politicians to care about the things they care about. Things like, is my child getting a nursery place, is attention in school right, what happens when my mother goes into an old person’s home, how do I make sure they care for her the right way? These are the issues that people on the bus or on the train [and again] are talking about.”
Does she regard herself above the law?
“No, I do not think politicians are above the law and yes, I think I was treated correctly… you know, we live in a democracy, all parties created an independent body to look at these things, it reached its judgment, it’s for others to dispute if they think that decision is wrong but I’d like to know why they won’t accept a decision made by an independent body that is put in charge of these matters.”
What is her view now about how parties are funded?
“Well, it is a very live debate. Myself, I think there probably is a case for some state funding of politicians. If you ask volunteers to enforce complex laws then mistakes are made. We see them being made by all parties, all the time, and I think in Westminster there is a consensus that these issues need to be looked at on an all-party basis. There is room for change.”
And on the subject of change, she said in her leadership acceptance speech that the Labour Party in Scotland needed to make changes. How far has that ‘reform, renew and reconnect’ process gone?
“I think a lot further than is publicly apparent and some of that is deliberate.” Eh? “I think it’s well known that we feel that perhaps in May, we were out organised. In 1997 Labour out organised the opposition and I think there was a sense that in 2007, there were parts of the country where we were out organised and I think it’s time to fix that and actually, as I was coming on the train,” And again. “I kind of thought about what we are doing and I thought, what I can tell you is that on the reform, we have a new general secretary in place who takes over as of conference, he has an outstanding organisational track record but also on the reform side of things, we are at conference launching a new ethnic minorities task force, we’ve never had an ethnic minorities task force in Scotland, we’re looking to have a full-time worker for that. I came this morning from the inaugural meeting of the Scottish Association of Labour Councillors, they’ve got a dedicated organiser looking after them, that’s never happened before, and I was very keen to see that happen. We have put in place a joint liaison committee, which is a fancy way of saying the MPs, the MSPs and the councillors meet together regularly so that team Labour is strong there. Ideas Scotland, which is the think tank, is holding fringe meetings at Scottish conference. I suppose the other area is that in 2007, we only had a disc-based voter contact system and the SNP had an online version. So one of the things that is going on behind the scenes is the rolling out of Contact Creator, which is the first online voter database and a whole suite of web-enabled tools, including things like Print Creator, and we credit Print Creator with the success we’ve had in two by-elections - not much notice but we won the by-election in Kilsyth and we won the by-election in Cambuslang - and we’re about half-way through a whole winter programme of what we’ve called lay organisers’ training academies, so on a weekly basis, they’re being trained on this web-enabled environment and it’s really transforming the Labour Party from a mentality, which even ten years ago, people kind of thought, ‘oh, well, once every four or five years, you have a general election’, into one that says, we’re now in a continuous campaigning environment where we look forward to European elections next year, the general election the year after that, the Scottish Parliament election the year after that and the council elections the year after that, and really transforming our organisation for that environment.
“So I am giving you the heads up, Mandy, that there will be a document called ‘Reform, Renew and Reconnect’ presented to conference that outlines all the parts of this which are not confidential to our opponents.”
Said document arrives in all media conference accrediation packs the next day and she holds briefings with the daily newpapers two days later!
“So there’s a whole set of constitutional amendments which are going through at this conference, which focus primarily on policy-making structures and the role of local government in the party, but there will be a further set next year. If you’re asking me if we’re at the end of the process, the answer is no.”
In brief, Alexander says that she needs to get the party to face up to why the SNP beat them in May and to be prepared for the next election. She says that the electorate were looking for a change rather than abandoning wholesale support for the Labour Party and says that she is in no doubt about how the public feel about independence, which is why she is involved in a cross-party body looking at the constitutional arrangements that excludes independence as an option.
“I think the phrase I used last time with you was that the Scottish people want to walk tall without walking out and obviously, the Constitutional Commission is taking the Parliament with us and one of the distinctions I would draw with you is that for all the SNP’s rhetoric of consensus, we now know it’s characterised by two things; they have a National Conversation, which they have not brought to the floor of Parliament, and all that talk of consensus rings pretty hollow from someone that spends his whole time not answering the question and being personally abusive while he’s at it.”
That’s all good and well but she is involved in an examination of the constitution that specifically excludes the option of independence. That isn’t very consensual or for that matter, very Buddhist-like, is it? Why not have it there to be debated?
“Because independence is not what I believe in and it’s not what the vast majority of Scots believe in and it’s not what the majority in the Parliament believes in.”
Oh, right, if you don’t like it, don’t debate it school of politics. Can the same be said of her view of the Government’s consultation on the council tax?
“At every level we see a bit of disrespect for Parliament from the SNP. Yesterday, I challenged the First Minister on the figures he has produced on local income tax and he didn’t answer me and then five minutes later, you’ve got some spin doctor providing them to the media in the black and white corridor. It’s so disrespectful of Parliament.
“There is absolutely no doubt that the big issue for the third term of the Scottish Parliament is whether we end the right of local government to have any control whatsoever over its financing.
“Over 150 years ago, Scotland got run by civic leaders who said we want clean water, we want to provide primary education, we want to care about public health and at that point, they had virtually all the services, they ran all the services and they raised all the money. Progressively over a hundred years, we are now down to local government, at its own hand, raising about 15 per cent of the money and running a lot fewer services than they did then. It seems to me, the big choice is whether we end forever that right of local government to have local accountability in terms of making choices in their own area, and I think that as the Nat tax comes to be seen as Alex’s poll tax, it will be hauled below the waterline, not because of an artificially low rate that was dishonest but because to deny local communities the right to make choices about what’s right for them forever, because there will be no way back, is the wrong thing to do. Even Mrs Thatcher didn’t say local councils will never make any decisions ever again over how much they have to spend in their own area.
“I think there is a case for a property tax, that’s the view that Peter Burt reached, it’s the view that every advanced country in the world has. That’s not to say the system is perfect. There are ways in which it could be made fairer but to say that in a basket of taxes there is no room for domestic property, puts us out with the mainstream consensus of every other advanced country.
“This was a cheap fix, as was the promise to abolish student debt, this was a government that bribed its way to office and in three years time, people will look back and say has all student debt been abolished? No. Are class sizes twenty? No. Have we continued to build schools? No. You don’t make a promise that you can’t keep and you don’t stand up in Parliament and repeat a promise when your officials have already told you it’s going to take you ten years. Not to apologise to Parliament for that sort of action shows the cavalier-ness that we’re beginning to associate with the First Minister. The promise that they were going to match Labour’s school-building programme, brick by brick, won’t happen and the promise to abolish the council tax, I predict, will not happen.
“When people make a judgement in four years time about who is serving Scotland and who is using Scotland, they will see that here is Labour who is serving Scotland and here is the SNP who is using Scotland.
“My analysis in May was not that people doubted Labour’s fundamental beliefs but that people doubted whether we understood where they were in their lives at the moment and that is where we need to reconnect.
“The judgement on Labour by the people next time round will be whether they think we listened, that we learned, that we are in tune with their priorities, that we know what they wanted. We are not complacent about Scottish schools, not complacent about their work/life challenges, not complacent about their anxieties about how they care for elderly relatives…these are the issues that will dominate and the question for us is, have we, in six months, put in the organisational building blocks, the policy building blocks and worked out the constitutional relationship?
“There are great causes left in Scottish politics and it is not the case that just because we are not dealing with foreign policy, or international development or Darfur or relations with the US that there are no great causes in Scottish politics, there are great causes contained in the everyday issues of how people - that I meet everyday as I travel between Glasgow and Edinburgh,” – those buses and trains again – “live their lives.”
“I want to be remembered as a politician that deals with those issues and makes them great causes and changes peoples lives for the better
I want to be remembered as a politician that deals with those issues and makes them great causes and changes peoples lives for the better
. That is our challenge.”
At last a grandstanding sentiment that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck but what remains extraordinary is that for a politician of her generation, Alexander seems to be stuck in the mindset of 70s Labour as far as communication goes. She can connect with a busload of people every day if she
likes but a negative performance in print, on TV or online filters out to tens of thousands of people at a time. Jim Callaghan famously froze out the media and Michael Foot believed that trudging round the country addressing town hall meetings would be more effective than trying to harness the power of the press, leaving one Margaret Thatcher to capture the headlines and stay in power for almost 20 years …
Playing the media game may seem a frivolous and irritating exercise to Alexander but it’s an essential one to win.
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