One man can save Scottish Labour and the UK: Gordon Brown
Wanted: A political miracle worker to bring Labour back to life in Scotland. The decision of the English leader of Scottish Labour, Richard Leonard, to stand down has thrown the spotlight on the forlorn hope Labour might have of winning a majority to govern in Britain.
From Keir Hardie via Ramsay MacDonald to John Smith, the big beasts of tartan Labour have also been dominant Westminster figures.
Not any more. Labour has one MP in Scotland, the amiable Blairite Edinburgh MP, Iain Murray. Labour has just 23 out of 129 MSPs in the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood.
Richard Leonard is a privately-educated Yorkshireman, who stayed on after doing a degree at Stirling University to work full-time for Labour and trade unions in Scotland. A loyal Corbynite, he won the leadership in 2017 at the height of Corbymania.
Sir Keir Starmer has no time for him. Compared to Ruth Davidson, the feisty, media-friendly former Tory leader in Scotland, Leonard has had zero impact.
His likely successor is Anas Sarwar, who in 2010, at the tender age of 27, inherited the Glasgow seat of his millionaire Labour MP father, Mohammed Sarwar. Sarwar the Elder went back to Pakistan to be Governor of Punjab. He repudiated his British nationality.
Though Anas Sarwar lost his Westminster seat in 2015, he is likeable, centrist and will do Sir Keir’s bidding. But few believe he can restore Labour’s lost fortunes in Scotland.
The evaporation of Scottish Labour has been one of the most extraordinary phenomena in contemporary European politics. For 30 years Scotland produced the most talented generations of politicians ever seen in Britain — perhaps anywhere in the democratic world.
John Smith, Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Donald Dewar, John Reid, Brian Wilson and Helen Liddell were joined by younger talent such as Douglas Alexander or Pat McFadden to win control of Labour in Scotland. They then brutally swept to one side Labour’s English public schoolboy politicians — the likes of Tony Benn and Michael Meacher — or aides such as Jon Lansman, and took control of Labour nationally.
After John Smith’s premature death in 1994, they installed the Edinburgh-educated Tony Blair as Labour leader, with the bagpipe-playing Alistair Campbell as his media maven using dark tabloid arts to destroy the hapless John Major government.
Having conquered the Labour party, this focused, take-no-prisoners elite regiment of Scots went on to conquer state power and hold it for the longest consecutive era of Labour government in history. Latterly they installed one of their own, Gordon Brown, as Prime Minister.
The problem was that as all this top Scottish talent flowed south, they left no-one behind to mind the political shop. Moreover, they made the fatal error of many in 21st century politics of ignoring the rise of nationalist identity politics.
Instead, the London Labour Scots assumed that the 20th-century centre-right vs centre-left duopoly would continue. Labour had pledged more devolution and went about creating mini-parliaments in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast.
The electoral system was a complex proportional one which, as in European Parliament elections, soon opened the door to nationalist politics. The SNP in Scotland and Ukip in England presented themselves as the authentic voice of the nation, standing up against oppressive remote rule – Brussels for Ukip and London for the SNP.
Unlike Ukip, which had to focus all its energy on converting the Tory party to its Brexit position, the SNP could champion a more left-wing, socially rooted politics, in contrast to national Labour, which under Blair had become champions of economic liberalism.
Above all, the SNP defended the 2-1 vote against Brexit in Scotland, while Corbyn’s (and now Starmer’s) Labour Party twisted (and still twists) in the chill wind of English identity politics. Labour pleases neither its younger, pro-European graduate supporters, nor the immigrant-hostile Red Wall working-class voters.
So Anas Sarwar is on mission impossible to make Labour electable again. But there is one Scottish Labour personality who might – just might – stave off the inevitable SNP victory and the move then to an anti-British plebiscite, dedicated to doing to the Union of England and Scotland what was done to the union of Britain with European partner nations after 2016.
Gordon Brown stayed in Scotland after losing power in 2010. He contributed powerfully to the defeat of the nationalist plebiscite in 2014, far more than David Cameron or any Tory politician.
Brown has not gone off on the glitzy money-chasing trail of a John Major, a Tony Blair or a Theresa May. He works for the UN pro bono as an Ambassador for education in Africa. He is seen around his native Fife backing every good cause. He is a passionate unionist and can out-debate any tartan nationalist on television or in any public forum.
As a former Chancellor who made the British economy work for the whole UK, until the 2008 crash arrived from America, he can demolish SNP pretensions that their brand of nationalist economics will work for Scotland. The SNP have spent all their years in government promoting the destruction of the Union with the rest of Britain. Scottish education, once the pride of Scotland, has been reduced to a shadow of its former glory. Scottish health outputs are a disgrace, with Scotland having the highest deaths from drug abuse of any nation in Europe.
Brown, whose father was a Church of Scotland minister, has the moral authority to take apart the SNP deceits and cheap nationalism. At 69, is he not too old? There is a precedent. William Gladstone came out of semi-retirement at the age of 70, a year older than Brown is today, to take first Scotland and then the entire country by storm with his Midlothian campaign speeches of 1878. They re-established the Liberal Party and left the flashy showmanship of Benjamin Disraeli stuttering for air and space.
It is far from clear that Brown wants or would accept one last giant political campaign to save the United Kingdom of the four nations, which is teetering on the edge of history’s dustbin. Boris Johnson, in the eyes of most Scots at any rate, is an elitist southern poseur who has sold his soul to the demons of anti-European English nationalism.
But Gordon Brown is the only man in Labour who could make a difference. Only he can save the Union — and give Labour a fighting chance of returning to office — before it’s too late.
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