From The Herald
IT TOOK the Labour Party a long time to deliver the Scottish Home Rule promised in its 1918 manifesto. How perceptions change in a few years. Holyrood is part of the party's recent folklore. The late Donald Dewar is revered as father of the nation. His children in the Labour family look first to Edinburgh to achieve any political ambitions, whereas the highest office many could previously hope to win was a bailliedom in the local council.
All this wrap-my-red-rose-in-a-saltire stuff has clearly affected Jack McConnell, our otherwise ultra-cautious First Minister. Anonymous voices in his own party complain that he is just, well, too Scottish. These mutineers suggest Mr McConnell has reverted to the true colours of his Scottish Labour Action student days, when he campaigned for autonomy from London.
The evidence? Not only did he commit the heinous crime of supporting the likeable underdogs Trinidad and Tobago in the football World Cup (along with the bulk of his countrymen); Mr McConnell has threatened take his 90-minute nationalism into the real world. We are told he plans a Zizou-style assault on the constitutional settlement. Reports suggest he wishes to enter next year's Scottish election campaign promising more powers for Holyrood and keeping his English colleagues at claymore's length – ie safely south of the Border.
It's not hard to see the logic in this strategy, a point many of his nationalist opponents would privately concede. Scots may grumble about their parliament in much the same way as they moan about everything else – the rain, the proliferation of wheelie bins, holes in the road, cricket on the telly – but deep down they love Holyrood, tumbling roof beams and all. They certainly wouldn't close it down, despite the indefatigable carping of right-wing commentators. Opinion polls have shown the electorate, in fact, want a parliament with more fiscal teeth and extra powers.
Add to this soft patriotism the spectacle of Tony Blair embarrassing himself on the national news every other night and it's not hard to see why Mr McConnell may wish to distance the executive from London. The Iraq war, the cowardice over Lebanon, the grovelling to Bush in that overheard dinnertime conversation: all have done their damage. So has the very metropolitan smell of sleaze emanating from the office of the Prime Minister. His free holidays, the cash for peerages row, the debacle of his culture minister Tessa Jowell and her conveniently estranged husband's complicated finances: all of these have diminished Mr Blair's reputation and his government.
In England, the slide has resulted in the Conservative Party, miraculously, looking like a credible electoral force. But nice Mr Cameron could not make headway in Scotland if he donned the clan colours and promised to avenge his Jacobite ancestors on Culloden moor. Instead of a charming Old Etonian, Mr McConnell has a two-headed Scots terrier snapping at his heels, in the shape of a resurgent SNP led by Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon.
With buoyant oil prices making an independent Scotland look like a pretty attractive proposition, it's little wonder Mr McConnell is trying to out-nat the nats. Perhaps the First Minister feels he has earned the right to choose this path. Since he took the helm of the Labour ship back in 2001, he has steered a steady, if unadventurous course. His supporters would argue that a period of stability was needed after Henry McLeish nearly threw the ship on the rocks. Promising to do less but do it better, Mr McConnell played the technocrat. He assembled a small but loyal management team and asked them to focus on a few policy priorities.
Success is varied. Headway has been made on public health through the improvement of school dinners, the smoking ban and a greater emphasis on physical activity. However, the executive's nervous attempts to curb alcohol consumption, which continues to rise, might undermine progress. The failure to restrict the availability of booze will also affect Mr McConnell's attempts to curb the anti-social behaviour that blights many urban communities. Banning the sale of swords will not deter the drunk with the broken bottle. However, the First Minister has been commended – rightly – for his bravery in squaring up to sectarian violence.
Mr McConnell has served his London masters well by defusing rows that threatened to embarrass them. He deftly closed down the revolt provoked by hospital closures a few years ago. He saved some threatened hospitals and kicked the row into the long grass by demoting his health minister and ordering a review. In doing so he preserved the jobs of a few Westminster Labour MPs. You'd think they might be grateful. Nor did Mr McConnell ever really square up to London over the jailing of asylum seekers' children and the subsequent dawn raids on families whose applications for refugee status had failed. His administration just had to cope with changes to the funding of English higher education that inevitably affected Scottish universities. Crucially for Mr Blair, loyal Jack made sure Scottish Labour did not break ranks on the Iraq war.
If there was going to be some internal rebellion against Mr McConnell, you might have thought it would be provoked by this rather submissive approach. Susan Deacon, the former minister who this week announced her intention to leave politics, certainly believes there is a lack of ambition in the current administration. In an interview yesterday, she expressed deep disappointment at the executive's capitulation on Iraq.
But Ms Deacon's ambitions for the parliament are sadly not shared by the apparatchiks now gunning for the First Minister. They represent the strain of thinking in Scottish Labour that for decades fought against the home rule commitment of its founding fathers. These staunch unionists fell grudgingly behind devolution in the 1990s, only because they were afraid of voters turning to the SNP. Many of them had campaigned against the proposed Scottish Assembly in the 1970s.
This faction sees the survival of the British Labour Party as paramount – far more important than Scotland's needs as a nation. It believes in the supreme sacrifice: delivering a phalanx of Scottish MPs to shore up future Labour governments that cannot defeat the Tories in England. Any increase in the powers of the Scottish parliament will weaken the position of Scottish MPs at Westminster, and so affect Labour's chances of governing England.
So should we feel sorry for Mr McConnell, stabbed in the back by less imaginative colleagues just as he threatens to take Scotland on to a new level? For all the talk of the First Minister reverting to his quasi-nationalist roots, he remains cautious. He once campaigned against Trident. Why can't he condemn the Blair/Brown determination to replace it at enormous cost?
But even the most pragmatic politicians continue to carry a torch for their youthful ideals. So I am willing to believe it was Mr McConnell's intention to play the long game: stabilise the fledging parliament, build up trust in London, then inch, ever so gradually, towards a little more autonomy. But if that was his plan, it has been overtaken by events. Mr McConnell is showing the patriot card just as his election prospects are threatened by a resurgent SNP and the unpopularity of the UK government. It looks like opportunism.
From The Herald 21 September 2006
http://www.theherald.co.uk
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