The twofer strategy: Understanding Scottish Labour's campaign
All you need to know about the party's general election game plan
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Hello! This is the first of three posts in which I examine the general election strategies of the three main Scottish political parties. First up, Scottish Labour.
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In supermarket argot a “twofer” means two for the price of one. An alternative name is a “bogoff”: buy one get one free.
Scottish Labour is conducting a twofer general election campaign in the hope of a bogoff result.
In its sights are both the UK and Scottish governments. Scottish Labour hopes to bring down one and mortally wound the other.
Much thought has gone into making this a dual purpose campaign north of the border, but in truth it is not difficult.
It helps that most of Labour’s most effective messages about the Tories are, with minimal tweaks, also applicable to the SNP.
Both have been in government a long time. Both seem to have outstayed their welcome. Neither has materially improved the health, education, prosperity, security or wellbeing of voters.
Both governments have been chaotic. The UK has had four prime ministers in five years. Scotland has had three first ministers in 14 months.
Both governments have attracted the attention of the police. Boris Johnson broke the law with Downing Street parties during Covid. Police erected a blue forensics tent outside Nicola Sturgeon’s home in the Glasgow suburbs, and her husband Peter Murrell has since been charged with embezzling SNP funds.
This is why the Scottish Labour campaign launch last Friday - with UK leader Sir Keir Starmer and Scottish leader Anas Sarwar - featured candidates holding placards displaying a single word:
Change.
This is a change election at Westminster, with a change of UK government all but certain. Scottish Labour hopes it will be a change election in Scotland too, marking the end of the SNP hegemony of the past 17 years and heralding Scottish Labour’s return to power.
Starmer has his sights on Downing Street. Sarwar has his sights on Bute House. Everything in the Scottish Labour campaign in the six weeks ahead will seek to serve these twin objectives.
But there is a flaw at the heart of Scottish Labour’s campaign. An unwarranted assumption. A demonstration of wishful thinking. A category error.
Labour assumes it can easily hold on to votes won from the SNP. It assumes a shift from SNP to Labour now means defeat for the nationalists in the 2026 Holyrood election.
At best this is premature. At worst it is deluded complacency. Labour is ignoring the clear lessons of Scotland’s recent past.
The short history of devolution shows us Scottish voters are fickle and inconstant. No party can reply on them. No leader can take them for granted.
Personally I find this immensely pleasing. The Scottish voter is an awkward customer, contrary and unbiddable. Long may this continue.
Specifically, there is a large group of Scottish voters who are quite happy backing Labour in Westminster elections and then the SNP in Holyrood elections.
The evidence is clear. To take just one example, look at the general election of 2010. The SNP vote in that contest was a measly 19 per cent. And yet just 12 months later the SNP won a landslide in the Scottish parliament election, with 45 per cent of the constituency vote, delivering a majority SNP government at Holyrood.
Just because SNP voters were willing to back Gordon Brown over David Cameron in the race for Downing Street did not mean they had abandoned the SNP altogether. On the contrary.
The lesson for the current general election should be obvious. Just because SNP voters want to get rid of the Tories at Westminster does not mean they have “come home to Labour” and are now happy in its clammy, comradely embrace.
To me, this seems obvious. And yet I can already see swagger and complacency creeping into Scottish Labour. They are already taking these new voters for granted. They honestly think it’s all over for the Nats.
For too many Labour folk, this campaign feels like Bobby Ewing in the shower. The days of SNP power were just a bad dream. Normal service has been resumed. The natural order has been restored.
This was the lazy complacency that cast Labour into the wilderness in the first place.
If the Labour leadership was serious about its twofer strategy it would recognise it was only borrowing SNP voters, and if it wanted to keep them it would have to offer them something in the manifesto for this general election. Something that acknowledges why these voters have not been Labour since the independence referendum.
Dinnae hud yer breath.
If you suggest to a senior Scottish Labour politician they need a constitutional offer to former SNP voters they look at you like you’re daft. Why would we want to do that, they ask? They really don’t get it.
Support for independence has been pretty much unaffected by the recent slump in SNP voting intention. Has this rung any warning bells in the Labour high command? Nope.
A dispositional reluctance to engage in constitutional politics is clouding Labour’s judgement about its own electoral interest.
Just because independence has reduced in salience - which is undoubtedly true - does not mean it can be safely discounted. This is a category error. It ignores the simple psychological reality of how independence supporters think.
Yessers do not just believe in indy, they have a mindset in which Scotland has political and cultural primacy in all things. Last week figures were released from the Scottish census showing two-thirds of Scots consider themselves only Scottish and not at all British. Those who think of themselves as both Scottish and British make up only 8 per cent of the population, a fall of ten points in a decade.
The SNP folk currently lending their votes to Labour are not secretly searching Amazon Prime for Union Jack underpants. Their world view is intact. In the broadest terms, they are instinctively in favour of greater Scottish autonomy. This makes them very different from the culturally unionist politicians in positions of authority within the Labour party.
I wrote about this recently in my column in The Times. Forgive the long quote but it saves me repeating myself unnecessarily.
Labour in Scotland has to persuade its new influx of independence supporters to stick around.
The Tories offer a salutary lesson. In the 2019 general election, Boris Johnson audaciously stole the working-class Labour vote from the Red Wall. It gave him a landslide victory. But the Tories failed to give those new voters all of what they wanted, such as vast increases in public spending in the north of England.
When change failed to materialise, these voters shuffled back to Labour.
In exactly the same way, Labour’s new influx of indy-supporting voters will drift back to the SNP if Labour does nothing to cherish them.
What form should this cherishing take? Should Sarwar suddenly declare he is in favour of secession? Perhaps not. But there are changes he can make that are compatible with Labour’s historical position on devolution. I can think of three, for starters.
First, he could back new powers for Holyrood that make it easier for devolution to work the way it should. This means a tidier package of welfare powers; some flexibility on immigration to counter Scotland’s demographic timebomb; some leeway on employment law; and greater ability to borrow so as to iron out fiscal fluctuations over time.
Second, Scotland’s place in the Union needs to be cemented into the British constitution. This requires a replacement for the House of Lords that operates as a senate of the nations and regions, with guaranteed rights for Holyrood, just as [Gordon] Brown envisaged.
Third, the absence of a legislative route to another referendum on independence is unsustainable. Northern Ireland has one, why not Scotland? It might seem counterintuitive to focus on independence when a breakaway is losing salience. On the contrary, this is precisely the right time to set out new ground rules and remove the issue as a source of nationalist grievance in the future.
Within Scottish Labour there is a deep weariness about the constitution. Most Labour politicians yearn not to have to think about it ever again. This is understandable. But you cannot dismiss the instincts of half your voter base. Not with impunity.
Labour needs to learn from its recent experience of dealing with a constitutional change with which it disagreed. When much of the British working class supported Brexit, Labour had to adapt to survive. On independence Labour has to apply the same nimbleness, the same long-sightedness, the same ruthlessness.
I admit in my heart of hearts I am not hopeful on this front. I blame the 2014 independence referendum. Just as it made the SNP more fundamentalist, it made the Labour party more unionist. Twenty years ago nobody ever joined the Labour party to save the Union. Now it is part of the psychological make-up of many Labour activists and parliamentarians.
Other factors are at play too. Since becoming Labour leader, Starmer has been courted by both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Each former prime minister has tried to steer Starmer towards their own priorities. Blair’s focus is, interestingly, the use of artificial intelligence to transform public services. Brown’s focus is rewiring the British constitution in a historic shift of power away from Whitehall to the UK’s nations and regions, coupled with a return to old-school industrial policy.
Blair has been winning this tussle. At the centre of Labour’s general election war room in London sits Glasgow-born Pat McFadden, MP for Wolverhampton South East and the party’s national campaign co-ordinator. He was Blair’s political secretary in Downing Street during New Labour’s second term in power. I like Pat and I admire him. But it’s fair to say Pat was never on the nationalist wing of the Scottish Labour party.
If the very idea of Labour having a nationalist wing puzzles you, then a small history lesson is perhaps necessary. Here is an extract from another of my Times columns, this one about the civil war that has raged for generations within Scottish Labour.
The story of the Labour Party in Scotland can be seen as a long and at times bitter tussle between small-n nationalists and hardline unionists. Within Scottish Labour there have always been those who pushed for home rule and those who asserted the power of the centralised British state. These two sides have vied for the upper hand for a century and a quarter.
At times the nationalist wing overplayed its hand, such as when the breakaway Scottish Labour Party was founded in 1976, led by Jim Sillars, who at the time was a Labour MP. If you enjoy political intrigue, I can heartily recommend HM Drucker’s ‘Breakaway’, a vivid account of the rebel party’s brief but tempestuous life and its eventual destruction by Trostskyist entryists.
More recently, and more effectively, a ginger group called Scottish Labour Action (SLA) pushed the home rule agenda within the party for a decade beginning in 1988. Its members included Jack McConnell, who would later become a Labour first minister, and his friend Tommy Sheppard, who would later become an SNP MP.
The SLA was loathed by powerful figures in the Scottish Labour leadership but the home rulers ultimately prevailed. Without the patience, resilience and savvy of key SLA figures such as Dr Bob McLean, devolution might never have happened.
There are lessons here. SNP folk tend to regard Scottish Labour as a uniformly unionist monolith. This is a mistake. More than a mistake, it is lazy. It reveals an unforgivable ignorance about Scottish political history. A strategic aim of the SNP should always be to aid — or at least not to impede — the nationalist-leaning side in this Labour civil war.
Scotland’s parliament was reconvened in 1999 because of a happy alignment in the political heavens. Labour’s home rulers were on top and the SNP was in the ascendancy. These were the ideal conditions for Scotland winning autonomy within the UK. Unionist fundamentalists within the Labour Party could be persuaded devolution was a tactic to quell the independence movement. A temporary truce in Labour’s civil war made progress possible.
The question now niggling me is whether a wounded SNP makes another such alignment impossible. And in those circumstances, is a further advance for Scottish autonomy less likely?
I can understand why Labour unionists might be icky about accommodating nationalism. But surely they can see the electoral imperative? In the 1990s, Labour activists may not have liked the way Blair came to an accommodation with Thatcherism but they could appreciate the strategic need.
In the coming days Scottish Labour will unveil its own version of UK Labour’s pledge card, with the manifesto crunched into six priorities for government. The UK card has promises on English NHS waiting lists, anti-social behaviour in English streets and recruiting more teachers for English schools. These will need to be replaced north of the border.
One thing about Scottish elections that sometimes puzzles people is the confusion about which policies are devolved and which are reserved to Westminster. Why are we discussing Scottish schools in a UK general election? Isn’t that a Holyrood responsibility?
In truth it makes no rational sense. This election will not install a Labour government at Holyrood. But the reality of politics in the devolution age is that all elections are about everything.
The ordinary voter has primacy. If he or she wants to use a Holyrood election to protest about Gaza or a Westminster election to protest about the closing of a Dundee swimming pool, then it does no good to try to lecture them on the niceties of Schedule 5 of the Scotland Act 1998.
Elsewhere, Labour will be attacked from the left by the SNP on wooly Starmer-Reeves evasions on the two-child benefit cap and the rape clause. Labour attempts to look strong on immigration will be a big opportunity for the SNP, as will Starmer’s refusal to countenance membership of the European Union’s single market or freedom of movement.
Will such policy arguments make a difference? Unlikely. The simple arithmetical message has got through to Scottish voters: more Labour MPs than Tory MPs means kicking the Tories out of power. Labour looks set for a good day in Scotland on July 4. Current polls suggest the SNP could be left with only one seat in Edinburgh and none in Glasgow.
A famous victory, then. But for how long and on what terms? Will these new voters stick around? Or will they be back in the SNP fold by this time next year?
My guess is that with the benefit of hindsight this campaign will come to be seen as a missed opportunity for Scottish Labour, a landmark error of strategic thinking.
For one short window in time, Labour is being lent the votes of Scots who have spent years supporting the SNP.
This is an opportunity to show those voters Labour understands them. Labour gets who they are. Labour gets what they believe. Labour gets what they value.
Labour can do that with language, with empathy and - most importantly - with policies.
Will this happen in the coming six weeks?
I’ll believe it when I see it.
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“A chield’s amang you takin notes, And faith he’ll prent it.” Robert Burns
Well reasoned arguement Kenny. I do feel a little disenfranchised. I think English/ UK Labour is wooing the Scottish vote, but I would be interested to see the new government's attitude to Brexit ( a movement that Scotland voted against)
Whichever way Scotland votes ( even if Labour makes little gains, I suspect that Labour will form the next UK government
I’d forgotten Lord McConnell was once a radical (of sorts). I’ve not forgotten that particular arrogance which Scottish Labour imbued in the old days. They had reason with Dewar, Brown, and Cook at the helm. I’d bet Dewar had read more Scottish literature and had a deeper knowledge of Scottish art than the massed ranks of the SNP in both parliaments. Now we are lead by a dullard who chooses to launch his Scottish GE campaign defending a pal caught with his fingers in the till. I thought you said things can only get better Kenny :)