Kezia Dugdale: no time for a novice?

The admirable John Harris has a piece on Labour in Scotland in the Guardian this morning: "'There's a lot I'm still learning': can Kezia Dugdale resurrect Scottish Labour?" The new Scottish Labour leader has been posted missing since Jeremy Corbyn took over last September, and internecine conflicts on more or less everything broke out in the parliamentary party. The chain reaction of Maoist stunts, bad appointments and feeble speeches has left Kezia gasping for political air, with only five months to go until the next Holyrood election. 

29% of the Scottish public still can't place her. With the head office in turmoil, and the board at war, nobody gives a damn about a branch office pootering on under the leadership of a pleasant but ineffective regional manager. Oldham may have been stoutly defended, but Corbyn's unfocused leadership is doing precisely nothing for his comrades further north. John Harris met Dugdale after First Minister's question time in Holyrood, securing his headline quote from the mildest of mild enquiries about her encounters with Nicola Sturgeon. 

I ask how it went, and she pulls a half-grimace. “It kind of puts to bed any suggestion that how we do politics in the Scottish parliament is vastly different from Westminster,” she says. “It’s still very combative – quite fiery exchanges.” 

Is that to say that when things are like they were today, Dugdale doesn’t like it? 

“Erm… I don’t enjoy it. I endure it. I recognise it’s part of my job, but that’s 10 minutes of my week.” 

Does she think Sturgeon enjoys it? 

“Erm… yeah, I think she probably does. She’s 16 years a politician. It’s taken her a long time to build up the skills and the credibility, and polish the talents that she clearly has. She’s at the top of her game, and this is a chance to show those skills off.” 

And how long does Dugdale give herself before she gets to that point? 

“Look, I’m acutely aware that I’ve just been an MSP for four and a bit years,” she says. “You know? I’m 34 years old. There’s a lot about life, a lot about politics, that I’m still learning. A lot of the things I’m doing as leader, I’m doing for the first time. But there are things I do know a lot about, and there are lots of things I’m incredibly passionate about: education, tackling poverty, female inequality. And on that stuff I’m 100% on my game. But I think it probably does take a wee bit of a while. She’s had 12 years more than I have.”

My first reaction? What a nice, unguarded way Kezia has about her, generous about her opponents with no attempt to gloss or conceal her inexperience or the challenges of her new role. From the outside peering in, it has looked like a steep learning curve. And here we have it confirmed, in Kezia's own words. There's no swagger here, no assertive declarations of unshakeable confidence. No Apprentice style windbaggery. No "I will be First Minister." No "I'm ready, John. I'm ready to lead." 

Compare and contrast with Dugdale's immediate predecessor. "Fighting" Jim Murphy proclaimed from the get-go that he was “applying for the job of First Minister.” He strained every sinew to give the impression of being a scrappy and aggressive alpha. It is a good and sweet thing to wear elderly soccer shorts for your country. By his perished elastic shall ye know him, the chosen one. He fears not the Nats nor the dark of the night. Our knight and deliverer. A runner. A striker. Amen.

Dugdale is - thankfully - above ludicrous escapades of this kind. She is self-aware. She doesn't bullshit. She doesn't radiate that toxic sense of complacency and entitlement which for so long characterised Labour politics in this country. Dugdale's unstudied candour may make you think better of her. But with just months to go until the Holyrood election, with just months left to persuade the Scottish people that Sturgeon should be evicted from Bute House -- isn't this just a little naive? The public are a capricious lot. Honesty, yes. A virtue. A bit of humility too goes far. And self-doubt, in healthy quantities, is essential. But you also need true grit. Steadfastness. Guts. Naïfs and novices need not apply. 

The Little Engine That Couldn't

Choo, choo. At the risk of repeating myself, we really have to nail this one down: the Scottish Government does not have the legal power to take railways into any kind of public ownership. There aren't shades of grey here. There aren't knotty legal complexities. It is clear as day. Clear, apparently, to everybody except the new leader of the Labour Party. 

Interviewed by Gary Robertson on BBC Good Morning Scotland this morning, Jeremy Corbyn decided not to retreat from the inaccurate charges he laid at the door of the Scottish Government last Sunday. Instead, he chose to reiterate and elaborate on his allegations (from 02:40:00 in). And it is sorry, sorry stuff.

Robertson: "You also said on Sunday that they [the SNP] were behind the privatisation of ScotRail. Do you accept that that was wrong?" 

Corbyn: "No I don't think it was wrong at all, because I think - again - they could have taken a different option and could have pushed for public ownership rather than handing it over to the Dutch public." 

Robertson: "But that was about - again - that was about the franchise, wasn't it? Their argument is that in 1993, that was when ScotRail was privatised." 

Corbyn: "The franchise, yes. But I do think they had a choice, and they could have exercised it to ensure that ScotRail remained - or, er turned, rather - into full public ownership. Surely that would be a much better way of doing things. And indeed the Labour policy, overall, is to return the franchises and the rail operating companies into public ownership, so that we all get the benefits of the rail service and the profits that go with it."

This is a mess. Actually, it is worse than a mess: it is a sleekit politician's answer. And worse, I'm afraid, it is a lie. So let's strip it all back to basics. If Holyrood passes legislation which "relates to reserved matters", the law is void. If Scottish ministers act beyond their powers, they behave unlawfully and a costly and damaging trip to the Court of Session beckons. If we rummage through Schedule 5 of the Scotland Act 1998, which sets out these reserved matters, we find the "provision and regulation of railway services". Holyrood can't change the Railways Act of 1993. 

And it is the 1993 Railways Act which sets out the legal process for tendering rail passenger services. This was the instrument of rail privatisation - not the Scottish Government's October 2014 decision to award the new tender to the Dutch company, Abellio. Only Westminster can change the rules. And what do we find in section 25 of the 1993 Act? Oh look. A provision which says - clear as day, black and white - that "public sector operators" can't be rail franchisees. And how are we defining public sector operators? That is any company or subsidiary which is majority owned by ministers, or civic government. That test binds the Scottish Government. That seems to catch the kind of operation Mr Corbyn has in mind. 

The new Scotland Bill finally proposes to tweak the Railways Act to make it clear that, in future, section 25 will not "prevent a public sector operator from being a franchisee in relation to a Scottish franchise agreement." In future, a "people's Scotrail" will be possible, in Scottish Labour's campaigning phrase. This is well and good: a positive development which will allow the merits and demerits of a public sector bid to be explored during the next round of tenders. But on the 8th of October 2014, the Scotland Bill was a dim speck of light on the horizon. 

On the 8th of October 2014, Lord Smith of Kelvin hadn't even held his first meeting with party representatives to negotiate the next stage of devolution. There was no timetable to change the tendering rules, no legislative proposal being scrutinised. Just wooly aspirations, a Tory government and a Labour party dragging its feet on the future powers of the Scottish Parliament. Until the ink was dry on Smith, and the Bill had been introduced, it was anything but clear whether Holyrood would be empowered to consider the kind of public sector bid the new Labour leader understandably favours.

But don't believe me. I refer you to the analysis of Kezia Dugdale's predecessor as Scottish Labour leader, Jim Murphy, who blogged that he wanted to:

“... see better, cheaper public transport. The Smith Agreement means we can have a ScotRail that is serving commuters, not shareholders. The current ScotRail franchise sees money going straight from the public purse to shareholders pockets. The incoming one will see Scottish public money support transport infrastructure in Holland. Neither deal is the best deal for Scotland when commuters are waiting on late running services, paying over inflated fares whilst being squeezed against train doors on overcrowded journeys. The best deal for Scotland is a People’s ScotRail, a railway company whose commitment is not to a group of shareholders or a foreign Government, but to the people of Scotland.”

The merits of a public sector bid are one thing. But even the People's Scottish Jim for Scotland - not averse to throwing any old brickbat at the SNP - recognised that what he wanted to do with the railways wasn't yet legal. Even Mr Murphy declined to slag off the Scottish government for failing to do something which the law prevents them from doing. And yet, given a golden opportunity to clarify his remarks - in the interests of straight talking and honest politics - Mr Corbyn doubles down on his wrong-headed claims. 

So taking all of that into account, a few questions. In what sense, Mr Corbyn, could the Scottish Government "have taken a different option" on rail franchising? What "choice" of "full public ownership" did the law give them? Are you seriously suggesting that failing to convince the UK parliament to change the law amounts to an SNP privatisation agenda in all but name? Does that seem fair to you? Do you think most people, listening to your interview, would have understood this was really what you meant? Or do you think the half-attending average punter would be left confused and deceived by your remarks?

You began by suggesting the SNP privatised the railways. Now that has morphed into a claim that they could have considered a public sector bid, but failed to do so, which was bad. But a thorough examination of the law shows us that the parliament in which you sit made it legally impossible for Scottish ministers to entertain the public sector bid you desire. The Scotland Bill, currently going through the parliament in which you sit, underscores the point and fatally undermines your argument. So in what sense did the SNP privatise the railways? Oh dear Jeremy. Straight talking, honest politics my foot. 

I think I can, I think I can, I think I can, said the Little Engine That Could. But thinking doesn't make it so. 

The Scotland to be regained is not a Braveheart nation

Aspiration, lionising "wealth creators", punching coal miners -- the UK Labour leadership election is in full uninspiring swing. And political triangulation is once again the order of the day. I remain leery. Before the General Election, in a piece in the Scotsman, I wrote the following:

When you adopt the discourse of your opponents, when you co-opt their vocabulary and their ideology, you may think you are working a neat political trick, triangulating your way to victory. For a time, it may appear as if you have wrong-footed your enemies, as they struggle to replace the political costumes you have stolen from them. 

Tony Blair was a past master at this. Today, the technocratic and soulless Ed Balls continues to practice these dark arts. But ultimately, triangulation is a way of ensuring that your opponent wins, whether you retain office or they boot you out. It is a recipe for an asphyxiating political consensus, for conceding your opponents’ common sense, and not for victory on something like your own ideological terms.

Power-hungry proponents of triangulation will always be able to give their cynical gambits a realist gloss, casting their opponents as self-defeating dinosaurs insisting that there must be be no compromise with the electorate. The old ghosts of Blairite "pragmatism" - Mandelson, and the great man himself -  have crept from their hiding places to dance the dans macabre on Ed Miliband's political grave. His brother grouses across the water about rediscovering "combination of economic dynamism and social justice." 

Dan Hodges and John Rentoul have been browsing the restricted section, seeking copies of the Secrets of the Darkest Art in the hope of transferring the tarnished former leader's soul into a new political body. And in Liz Kendall, these strange passions seem to have found their perfect vessel. Given her antipathy to much of its historic platform and allegiances, you've got to wonder how the Leicester MP ever found her way into the Labour Party.  And front-runner Andy Burnham seems to be pivoting the same way. 

Starkly, oddly, missing from this discussion is any reflection on how any of these candidates might help the Labour Party to "reconnect with the people" they lost in their Scottish ridings. But ironically, this national triangulation to the right which is prompting another discussion on whether Scottish Labour should borrow another set of consumes from the Scottish National Party - and make a unilateral declaration of independence from their comrades in England and Wales.  The branch office must close. It must be rebranded under new management. It must be liberated to devise its own merchandise and to make its own offers. What cures us in England will kill us in Scotland.  That is the logic, anyway. 

Scottish Labour should be untethered from the UK line and have the opportunity to pursue the distinctive Scottish Labour Scottish line pursued by patriotic Scot Jim for Scotland during his abortive leadership of the party.  The proposal has gained enthusiastic cheerleaders in the press and on the airwaves. Some are speaking up from within the Labour Party. Others are offering gratuitous advice from outside the tent. Iain MacWhirter has been fashioning thunderbolts in his Herald column, arguing that "the tsunami" of the May general election "was the clearest possible message that all political parties in Scotland now have to place Scotland first." Scottish Labour, he argues, must disaffiliate to survive.

Respectfully, this seems like total guff to me. It represents a feeble, doomed attempt at triangulation which mislocates the People's Party's travails and would fatally undermine the principled if quixotic case for the Union which Labour spent months advancing and which probably represents the Union's best last chance for survival in the longer term. As a partisan Nationalist, I suppose I ought to encourage the party to take this primrose path -- but let's consider the facts for a moment. 

The parallels Iain draws with the SDLP in Northern Ireland are inexact. As are those from the German Republic. Practically, you can see how an Independent Scottish Labour Party might manage its relations with and English and Welsh Party. But it it is nigh impossible to see how an ISLP could ever demonstrate its independence in the context of UK wide general elections. The Scottish Liberal Democrats also enjoyed a paper federation with their colleagues in England and Wales. Bugger all good it did them too. 

But more pointedly, as unseated Labour MP for Glasgow South Tom Harris argued this week, Labour "spent three years campaigning, persuading Scots of the value of a UK-wide political union - the benefits of pooling and sharing of resources." Labour UDI would blast this increasingly strained commitment to shared values to bits. In the very fabric of the party, it would cry them hokum. 

Conceding your opponents logic in pursuit of the fleeting hope of victory is almost always a demonic bargain. Labour will not win again when they persuade Scottish voters they have passed some kind of imaginary patriotism test, but only when can translate their tired rhetoric of shared values across these islands into (a) a campaign with a sense of inspiration, mission and vision with (b) a potent and authentic cultural and social basis. 

That may be impossible in the short, medium or long term. But the "Scotland first" diagnosis which preoccupies MacWhirter and his fellow travellers is a sideshow. As Robin McAlpine argued back in December, when Jim Murphy was first elected, the patriotism he espoused felt oddly dated and misplaced: 

"... his pitch to Scotland looks awfully like a Russ Abbot sketch – stand on an Irn Bru crate, wear a Scotland football jersey, eat a Tunnocks’ Teacake. So bad (I think) is his misreading of the mood in Scotland that he has taken to using the word ‘patriot’ like it is the talk of the steamie across the country. He’s even proposing to put it in the Labour Party constitution. The only times I’ve head anyone going on about being a patriot in Scotland it was always a member of the Scottish establishment pretending to be ‘au fait’ with the locals. I really do think he is misreading the mood quite badly. Those Labour have lost don’t want to be ‘more Scotch’, they want out of London-based financial corruption. So far Murphy offers them nothing but platitudes of distinctly the wrong type."

These exaggerated protestations of patriotism had an early 1990s feel to them. But worse, they reified the dubious "surge of nationalism" story which dominated much of the UK media in the aftermath of the referendum. The crass sketches of "Glasgow Man". The picture of swithering Yes voters as dull-minded, policy-illiterate, beer swigging, sport loving sentimentalists who had been taken in by national feeling-- and who could be won back by a few tired performances in a manky old football shirt and an incontinent sprinkling of Scottishness in Labour's campaign literature. 

Murphy even sought to exploit the idea that we want our politicians, like Dick Whittington, to head to London with nothing but a bindle, and to return heavy with gold pauchled from English mansions. It was a picture of crassness and misunderstanding.

I don't know about you, but I just don't recognise the electorate Murphy was trying to address. Not in the tenements of Glasgow. And not in the small town and rural communities in which I grew up. The only place I have seen such a constituency consistently conjured up is in the columns of frustrated, confused, pro-union, right-wing writers -- who feel like their sense of political gravity has deserted them in the aftermath of the 18th of September 2014. 

For Scottish Labour to premise its general election campaign on these tangled, embittered -- and I would argue -- essentially misplaced diagnoses was remarkable. Murphy hoped to ride a wave of national sentiment which does not exist. At least not with anything like the force and intensity he seemed to imagine.  The average elector is not the cybernat of hated preoccupation. Scottish Labour's problems are not due to the perceived dearth of their patriotism, but to arrogance, ideological drift, triangulation, laziness and organisational hollowness. The Scotland to be regained is not a Braveheart nation. 

Forming an independent Scottish Labour party would be a historical blunder of even bigger proportions. Let's hope they make it. 

The long Scottish Parliament, and the short

Speaking of seemingly technical but politically pregnant choices, we need to talk about the Fixed Term Parliament Act. The 2011 legislation has fallen out of the headlines after the election of the Cameron majority, but its echo will continue to be felt in Scottish politics for years to come. Why? It all comes down to an ... er ... timetable. Bear with me. The Act fixed Westminster's parliamentary terms at five years, in contrast with the four afforded to Holyrood under the Scotland Act, with UK general elections scheduled for 2015, 2020, 2025 -- and so on. 

All things being equal, all unforeseen catastrophes being avoided, Holyrood's electoral cycle ought to spin through 2011, 2015, 2019, 2024. But in order to avoid an unseemly clash this May, the Fixed Term Parliament Act extended Nicola Sturgeon's spell in office for an extra year, re-scheduling the next Holyrood election for 2016. But as the observant amongst you will have noticed, this is a clash deferred, not a clash resolved in the longer term. If we toddle on on the current electoral timetable, 2020 will bring with it yet another collision between the Holyrood and UK general elections. Not to mention European and local government polls. It is all a bit of a mess.

In the longer run, MSPs may decide to use the powers of the new Scotland Bill to extend the ordinary spell of a Scottish Parliament to five years, matching London and pulling us permanently out of sync. But in the short term, with another Holyrood election pending, what to do? There are only two real options here. The next Scottish Parliament, to be elected in 2016, could serve for either a three or another five year term. Under the three year plan, this would schedule future Holyrood elections for 2016, 2019, 2023 and 2027. Under the five year plan, 2016, 2021, 2025 and 2029.  Remember, UK general elections are now on a five year cycle: 2015, 2020, 2025, 2030.

The implications of the choice between these alternatives are not immediately obvious, but they are politically important and the option chosen will tell us a good deal about Nicola Sturgeon's approach to leadership.  As this decision will have to be taken before the Scottish Parliament is dissolved neat year, the SNP majority's view will be decisive. But nor are the balance of interest and calculations obvious for Scotland's main opposition leaders.

So which alternative to go for? Decimated in the general election, hollowed out in human and financial resources, with internal rows brewing, lurching on under Jim Murphy's zombie leadership, and anticipating a leadership battle, Scottish Labour is not looking fighting fit -- to put it mildly.  There is little time for introspection, but introspection appears unavoidable and necessary. And another half decade of "renewal and reform" may come to seem more attractive than the gruesome prospect of taking the fight to the SNP in 2016, with only three more years to get seriously back in contention for 2019. 

Of course, Kezia Dugdale or Ken Macintosh may well lead their troops down in defeat in 2021 too. But I imagine that either of these candidates would feel more confident of their chances after five years rather than three. Sorting out their internal difficulties, making good candidate picks, hoping to run the long-serving SNP administration to rags on its record.  

In the Times recently, Kenny Farquharson suggested that Dugdale needs five years' grace if she takes up the party reins. With respect to Kenny, he may have got his timings wrong. If 2016 produces a three year parliament, Dugdale may require at least seven years grace before she fronts a winnable election campaign. If, that is, Strugeon throws caution to the wind, endorses the three year plan and puts her main opponents in an awkward spot.

Moreover, the choice will give Scottish Parliament campaigns distinctive political backdrops for at least a decade. With the three year plan, Holyrood elections for the foreseeable future would take place against the tail - or fag - end of Westminster governments. Embattled, uncertain, out of ideas, exhausted. There are political opportunities there. By contrast, the five year plan would always set Scottish Parliament against the backdrop of developments in London. And that too is a gamble and projection with chances and risks for Labour and the SNP.  Another Tory government returned? A resurgent Labour Prime Minister elected? 

For a more cautious SNP leader, there are more obvious advantages in the five year plan. An extra year in office more or less guaranteed, barring disaster and disgrace, it would line up the next Holyrood battle for 2021, in the wake of another general election which -- at least at the moment -- Labour look unlikely to win. And that before the Tory majority rejigs the constituency boundaries in their favour. As we have seen, Tory wins can be leveraged north of the border.

And then there is the inevitable referendum dynamic. Whether we consider the three or the five year plan, barring an unforseeable "material change in circumstances", an independence referendum should not be in the party's manifesto for the next Holyrood election.  A three year suspension in these ambitions may be more palatable to those parts of the party who believe we should go full steam ahead for a second referendum as soon as possible. Those five years may feel long.

But realistically, I'm not convinced that we should even consider a second poll before the second half of the parliament which will be re-elected in 2019 or 2021. And that very much depending on the state of public opinion. If Sturgeon did decide to restore an indyref policy to the SNP manifesto in these circumstances, a decent period of time would have passed.  If you felt confident about Scottish opinion on the constitutional question turning speedily in a more positive direction, the three year plan has its charms. It burns through the years quickly. Two elections are likely to make it feel and seem as if significant time has passed since 2014.

On the other hand, going for five years means the calculating Nat retains flexibility to factor UK election results into account more actively. After 2020, Scots may have just seen a second Labour leader in as many years going down in defeat to an increasingly cynical, unionist-lite UK Tory party. Going for a three year Holyrood parliament, and another 2019 election, means that the SNP would be making big manifesto choices blind about the overall balance in UK politics. Wary Nationalist data gannets may blanch at that prospect.

It is a finely balanced judgement, and not merely a technical question of parliamentary timetabling. But one thing is clear. MSPs' choice between the long Scottish Parliament and the short will paint the political scenery against which Scottish elections and referendums are triggered, understood, analysed and fought -- perhaps for the next decade or more.

Jim Murphy: Labour's rubber chicken fix

Poor Jim. A victim of circumstances. Talented. Did his best. A plucky, energetic campaign. Formidable politician. Couldn't hold back the tide. A long crisis in Scottish Labour. Not his fault.

As the UK Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, and even sorry old UKIP are sitting around telling sad stories of the death of kings, Jim Murphy hopes to hold on, unsalaried, seatless, representing nowhere, as leader of the Scottish Labour Party. Murphy's friends and sympathisers in the party and in the media are busily attempting to erect a firewall around the unseated leader, insulating him from any responsibility for Thursday's calamity. 

Jim wasn't erratic, implausible, unfocussed -- he was vigorous, impressive, but stymied by Labour's structural deficiencies. Give him time, the logic runs, a second shot at it, and his undoubted talents will reshape the people's party into a fighting force once again. That's the story, anyway.

But wouldn't this all be rather more plausible if Mr Murphy -- and his crack squad of Better Together spinners -- hadn't run such a dreadful, purely tactical, unstrategic, incoherent gattling gun campaign? Jim Murphy may be forgiven for failing to work miracles -- but will his party colleagues really forgive him his many missteps and misjudgments in what was -- let's remember -- a thoroughly devolved Scottish Labour campaign. 

 

Let's consider the evidence against him. Late in April, he told the Sunday Times that his party had "fallen asleep" after the referendum. It is worth remembering that Murphy won the internal leadership contest in the middle of December last year. His appointment was met with a splendid and sympathetic press ("a formidable campaigner: he has turned his once Tory seat into a seat for life") 

But little in Murphy's subsequent choices suggested that he thought that Scottish Labour had anything more than a crisis of leadership. From the get go, the relentless focus of the Scottish Labour campaign was on his own character. He was the key spokesman for the party throughout the campaign, despite consistently ambivalent personal ratings. Like his chief of staff, complacent Murphy seemed think that all Scottish Labour needed was "a striker", and he was only too happy to pull on the boots.

Ponder this question. In the critical early days of his leadership, when the party needed to nourish its roots, jury rig its organisation, and forge ahead with a judicious focus on the critical issues -- what were Murphy's priorities? How did he forge on to reclaim the territory Labour had lost? Ah, yes. The football. Football kits. Football matches. Liquor at football. Running along the Clyde in a football shirt. To what end? Headline grabbing sideshows, the fundamentals, sidelined.

But if Murphy knew full well that the Labour Party were under the cosh in the wake of the referendum, and expecting a little local difficulties across the country, why the devil did he tell the media in December that his party wouldn't lose a single seat? If Jim fully apprehended the weakness of his organisation, why was he boasting to Buzzfeed as recently as January that his main opponents were flat footed, off pace easily outwitted? 

A measure of bullshit peddling is to be forgiven -- morale must be sustained, after all -- but these are unforced errors that reeked of hubris rather than the plucky confidence of the underdog. To risk a Bourbon strategy, evoking the very worst of a party who seems to have learned nothing and forgiven nothing since 2007, was bananas.

And then there was the referendum. Unseated Labour MP, Ian Davidson, put the central incoherence clearly on election night. Murphy chose to begin this campaign by emphasising a gentle, wooing appeal to those who voted Yes in September.  Having appointed a slate of SNP hating ultras to his private office, he disavowed a unionist approach, pledging to focus on issues of social justice and what a Labour government in London might achieve.

But cheek by jowl with polling day, democratic socialist, un-unionist Jim was launching scary poster campaigns, which were only likely to appeal to frit Tory unionists, who wanted to keep the Nats out.  This desperate last gambit only helped to entrench the referendum fight as a dividing line in this election, to Labour's obvious disadvantage. A Scottish Labour Party cannot survive on the votes of Alex Massie and Chris Deerin alone. This much should have been self evident. But Jim decided otherwise, in yet another change of tack.

He thought he had secured a wicked debating point over Nicola Sturgeon on the costs of fiscal autonomy. This is a complex issue. The merits and demerits and depth of the SNP thinking on this are for another day. But as a matter of political strategy? It looked good on paper. It appealed to the most embedded of Labour prejudices against the Nats -- "The SNP are committed to more austerity than Labour. Telt ye. Tartan Tories, etc" -- but it was wonky, technical, and relied on convincing folk that something which we know appeals to Scots at a low information level -- more powers -- would really have their shirt. Yet Murphy kept plugging away at this unpromising line for weeks. Another good call.

This was an erratic, negative campaign by trial and error, which obscured elements of Labour's more compelling policy platform by focussing on a succession of hopeless canards. You can see Jim, sitting down with Blair McDougall in front of a plain piece of paper, brainstorming, listing ideas, trying each strategy in turn, and scoring them off when they don't work, without any eye to their internal or systematic coherence or anxiety that the public may have been paying attention, and have noticed the contradictions.

Murphy is clearly a formidable political operator within the now stricken Scottish Labour party. But if the 2011 campaign is anything to go by, he is old guard, deeply implicated in the party's current malaise, and a rubber chicken when it comes to broader strategy. He reposed faith in the judgement of the wrong people and, left to his own devices, pursued the wrong priorities, pushing his comrades and allies to ruin. This is not the legacy of a man who just got unlucky, whatever Jim's remaining adherents might insist.

Like his political mentor Tony Blair, Jim Murphy was "the future once", in David Cameron's barbed phrase. And now, the lost leader, the man of straw, is trying to bounce his colleagues into permitting him to stay, saved only by the logic that there is no viable alternative in Ian Murray or in his Holyrood colleagues. They must be fuming.

Murphy may have had only five months to screw up the Scottish Labour Party, but he's made a grand fist of it. It always looked like a tough campaign, but I can't believe that the party's near wipe-out yesterday was inevitable. No busy SNP activist I met during the campaign ever thought it was inevitable. And make no mistake, accept no spin: Murphy's hands are dipped in the blood.

23:59

That Scottish Labour slogan in short: "Vote for us to avoid an illegal referendum which nobody is proposing which we would shoot down immediately." #WinningHere.

Work for you?

On Andrew Neil's Sunday Politics sofa, senior Labour MP and shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Chris Leslie, just told the BBC that his party would block any further independence referendum in the next parliament. Neil suggested to him that #indyrefs remain "reserved matters" under the Scotland Act. "Absolutely," Leslie responded, "there is not a way that we would want to see a repetitious repeating of something that has been decided for a generation." 

A couple of days ago, I asked Scottish Labour leader a fairly simple question: does he or does he not believe that Holyrood has the legal authority to hold another independence referendum? Answer came there none. But Leslie's comments this morning confirm what Mr Murphy would not: the UK Labour Party clearly still believe and maintain that the Scottish Parliament currently does not have the power to hold a second referendum, that Westminster consent is necessary, and that Westminster consent would not be forthcoming in the next five years. No minority Labour government, no majority Labour government, no Tory and no coalition government would currently be prepared to put its name to another section 30 order, along the lines of the text adopted after the Edinburgh Agreement, paving the way for a second poll.

But here's big Jim, still galloping around the country, giving it his "24 hours to save the Union" routine.  “You only have 24 hours to stop a second referendum. The clock is ticking,” a leaked leaflet yelped. "Only Labour can STOP ANOTHER REFERENDUM." Caps lock is,  clearly, cruise control for TERROR.

As his helpful colleague just made clear to Andrew Neil, however, Murphy's threats are all empty. And he knows they are empty. His colleagues south of the border know they are empty. The wisp, the spectre, he hopes to frighten the electorate with has no substance. None of this ought to be news. It echoes Miliband's earlier statements that he would not accept another referendum any time soon.  But if there is zero prospect of a second referendum in this Westminster parliament, how the devil can you make that the central plank of your campaign against the SNP in the last two weeks of the campaign? If you maintain that the Scotland Act - here since 1998 - blocks an independence poll, why on earth do we need Scottish Labour MPs to "stop" it?

Several consequences logically flow from Leslie's comments, none of which seem particularly helpful for the Labour Party.  If you dp want a second referendum at some point in the future, I doubt you'll much appreciate this high-handed talk of "blocking" and permission refused. But then again, January's big plan to "reach out to" those who disagreed with the Labour leadership on the referendum seems to have gone the way of all things already. Instead, democratic socialists are despatching epistles to Tories in their constituencies, while Jim "I have never been a unionist" Murphy hopes to survive in East Renfrewhshire by attracting unionist votes. 

Alternatively, if you are swithering about voting for the Nats because of concerns that a second referendum might result - despite Nicola's repeated denials - you can heed these comments and rest easy. Whether or not you vote for the Labour Party, the Tories, the Liberals or for the SNP, no second referendum will result in this parliament. An SNP vote is risk-free on that score. Even if you disbelieve the First Minister, and sense that plots for a second plebiscite are brewing - Leslie reassures you - the unionist majority in Westminster can and doubtless will ensure that the question cannot be put.  The Union doesn't need the People's Party to save it once again. Constitutional law as already done the trick. Spectre, exorcised. 

If you didn't know better, you'd think that the left hand of the Labour party doesn't know what the right hand us up to. (Or, as one reader just suggested, that left and right hands are busy, fighting each other...)

Murphy's unanswered question...

"Mr Murphy, you have raised the prospect of a second independence referendum on several occasions now during this campaign. This week, you have launched a desperate end of days poster campaign, based on this claim. But can you tell us now, do you believe that Holyrood currently has the legislative competence - the legal right - to call a second independence referendum?" 

It is a question which none of the press pack seem to have put to the Scottish Labour leader, but as I blogged about here last week -- it is becoming a central question in the party's ailing general election campaign which Murphy will not and cannot afford to give an honest answer to. 

Why not? Because on Jim's own analysis of the Scotland Act, supported by his former Westminster colleagues, and his Better Together allies, even if the SNP sweep to power in the Scottish Parliament in 2016 or 2020 or 2024 with a political mandate for a further referendum, unless the Scotland Act is amended, Holyrood doesn't have the legal power to hold the poll. This analysis remains debatable as a matter of constitutional law -- but during 2011 and 2012, Murphy, David Cameron and his Liberal Democratic allies maintained a united front and spoke with one voice: no consent from Westminster, no referendum.  (The same analysis can be applied to the spectre of full fiscal autonomy, which could only happen, if a Westminster majority voted to endorse it. The SNP cannot - even if they wished to - realise and deliver this policy alone).

On Jim's own legal analysis, Westminster had - and still retains - a veto.  Which, to put it another way, is to say that Jim believes that an SNP majority, of whatever scale in Westminster or in Holyrood, cannot force another referendum through. Which, to put it another way, is to say that Jim is being economical with the actualité in his frantic and dishonest efforts to suggest that another referendum is pending - whatever Nicola or any other senior member of the SNP maintains about their political intentions. Which, to put it another way, is to say that the central plank of Scottish Labour's election campaign in its dying days is predicated on a falsehood, a fiction, a fib.

It might be nice if one of the tribunes of the press took him to task on it. 

A legal query for you @JimForScotland, do you believe that Holyrood has the legislative competence to call a second independence referendum?

— PeatWorrier (@PeatWorrier) May 1, 2015

Harnessing the 55%

While toddling through Shawlands this week, I chanced across the Labour's Glasgow South candidate, Tom Harris, campaigning outside the local Co-op. Having politely explained that I wasn't with him in this election, I took the opportunity to ask him about a letter which has been circulating in the constituency, inviting folk who voted No on the 18th of September 2014 to save his bacon on the 7th of May. 

"I thought Jim had said that Scottish Labour isn't a unionist party?" I enquired. "But I'm a unionist," he said. In his affably bluff way, Tom explained that he needed every vote going, and if that involved putting the fear of god up the Tories of Newlands, he'd make no apology for doing so.  "And I suppose you're pretty right-wing too, so - " I quipped, for villainy - "I suppose I am," he responded, with unexpected candour. I sidled on. Good luck to him. He'll need it.  

But the encounter made me think a wee bit about the assumptions lying behind Tom's letter, and being pushed nationally by Liberal Democrats in tight spots, that the Better Together alliance can be cobbled back together to save their skins."55% of people voted no, back me to stop the Nationalist juggernaut." John Curtice has been pouring buckets of icy water over the idea that tactical voting represents an effective anti-Nationalist strategy over most of the country, arguing that the sums just don't add up. As Professor Curtice points out, there aren't enough Labour, Tories or Liberal Democrat voters in the overwhelming majority of seats to make a decisive difference, even if folk were inclined to lend their vote to a Better Together ally. 

But the thinking behind this isn't just numerically problematic - it also flies in the face of what the referendum taught us about the reasons and attitudes lying behind the No vote. Tom and the Liberal Democrats seem to have forgotten who the 55% are, and why they voted against independence last September. The recent findings of the Scottish Election Study suggest that the No lead did not come down to British identities, or optimism about the Union, nor widespread pessimism about independence, but fear, risk and uncertainty. 

The study concludes that identities - Scottish and British - provided core support for both Yes and No campaigns, the outcome was decided by perceptions of economic risk. The most recent tranche of survey data from the study suggested that feelings of Britishness or attachment to the Union account for just 29.5% of the No vote. To put a more concrete number on that, just 590,568 of the 2,001,926 votes attracted by the No campaign seem to have hinged to any significant extent on British identities. 

This chimes with my own experiences. If this referendum has revealed one thing, it is that Scots allegiance to the British state is - perhaps disturbingly - provisional. A popular, winning, organic unionism has not emerged. If anything, the Conservative and Unionist Party seems hell-bent on salting the earth across the border, to ensure no sprouts grow. 

For some folk, a sense of Britishness is essential, a part of their identity, the object of passionate attachment. Some of the best pieces from pro-union writers during the dying days of the campaign spoke of these themes in a way that the cynical, anxiety-generating apparatus of the official campaign never even attempted. But like the identity ultras on the Yes side, these are minority enthusiasms. The Better Together parties looked deep into the eyes of the Scottish people, and found dealer's eyes peering back at them, unsentimental, commercial, counting the pennies, weighing the odds -- and won the game on that basis.  

A gulf of feeling separates this dicing of the economic odds from the anti-Nat ardency which this new Better Together alliance hopes to ignite. And if you voted against independence on the basis of these cool calculations, what the devil are you to make of the plaintive efforts of candidates like Christine Jardine and Tom Harris, addressing you like a union fundamentalist, a loyalist, re-running September's poll? 

This stands at odds, not just with the numbers, but what we know about the key motive forces of the No vote. It may peel off ultra montane No voters, for whom the national question has acquired new and critical salience, but seems likely to strike a dud note for those opposed to independence who do not share these intense attachments. It is a case of pro-union political leaderships, projecting their own antipathies onto a more ambivalent, less ferociously negative, public. Scotland is not a land of Effie Deans. 

It is a phenomenon which surprised SNP canvassers are experiencing on the doorstep. Over the weekend, I was having a blether with one of the SNP candidates in the city about what, if you read the media, you probably regard as an improbable phenomenon - the No voting SNP supporter. Why? For some, it is buyer's remorse. But for many more, they voted no on a more conditional basis: "not yet", "not ready", "not convinced by the arguments" - but none of this is proving decisive in determining which party they believe will best represent them in this parliament in Westminster.

For electors of this kind - the overwhelming majority of the 55% - the #indyref cannot be comprehensively "weaponised" in the way Liberal Democratic, Tory and Labour campaigners in East Dumbartonshire, Glasgow South and Gordon - increasingly desperately - hope, believe and pray. 

The return of the monster

So, let me get this straight. From 2011 until the Edinburgh Agreement of 2012, senior figures in the coalition government and in the Labour opposition were as one: Holyrood did not enjoy the legal power to order an independence referendum on its own authority.

The SNP may have claimed a thumping majority in Holyrood, the party may run the Scottish Government, and they might claim a political mandate from their 2011 election victory - but in law, at least, any referendum required Westminster's consent. The referendum "related to a reserved matter" - the Union - and as such, was beyond the powers given to the Edinburgh parliament in the Scotland Act of 1998.

Advocate General and Liberal Democrat peer, Jim Wallace, gave a speech at the University of Glasgow, setting out this legal analysis:  "The UK government’s legal view is that the Scottish Parliament has no power to deliver a referendum on independence." The cross-party Scottish Affairs Committee, under the unabashedly partisan headship of Glasgow South West MP Ian Davidson, endorsed Wallace's analysis, claiming that it was crystal clear that the proposed referendum fell outwith Holyrood's legal competence and would almost certainly be struck down in the courts. David Cameron echoed the threats and menaces of his Liberal Scottish legal advisor.  

Neither the Labour Party, nor the Liberal Democrats and Tories wanted to block the poll - they accepted that there ought to be a "legal fair and decisive" vote - but the Better Together chorus was at one on the illegality of any unilateral attempt by Holyrood to order a poll without reference to the Mother of Parliaments on the banks of the Thames.

The Edinburgh Agreement and the subsequent order under s.30 of the Scotland Act cleared up this legal uncertainty, explicitly authorising a referendum on independence, subject to the conditions that the Electoral Commission was involved, that no "devo max" question appeared on the ballot -- and that the poll was held by Hogmanay 2014.  

The constitutional hour glass having run out on the 2014 referendum, you might imagine that Labour, Tory and Liberal Democratic parliamentarians would believe that we had returned to the ante referendum status quo. At least legally. If they had any faith in their legal analysis in 2011 and 2012, they would draw comfort from the thought that no future #indyref is currently possible, without negotiated consent from Westminster. You might have thought that they would feel pretty damn pleased with themselves. The only risk of another independence referendum, in their legal analysis, is if the overwhelmingly pro-Union majority in the House of Commons voted to allow one.  So why the exaggerated air of snark and panic?

But truth, reason and fidelity to their past arguments seem to have gone out the window in these heady general election days. In a last desperate gambit, Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat candidates and ministers are blundering around the country, and blethering to their fellow travellers in the media, screeching that the perfidious Nats are plotting to inflict another separation poll upon the Scottish and British people. This, you know, despite categorical statements from senior SNP sources that none of this is on the cards. 

But on their own legal analysis, the only route, the only viable legal path to another independence referendum is if the overwhelmingly pro-union majority in the House of Commons and Lords voted to authorise one. The only danger of Jim Murphy experiencing another referendum is if he slurps too much Irn Bru, and in the grip of a sugar high, gallops through the wrong lobby in the palace of Westminster. According to his government's legal analysis, Nicola can no more force David Cameron to endure another referendum, than she can introduce a Scottish minimum wage, or unilaterally seize control over Scotland's social security net.

If there is, as senior Labour folk all argued, a crystal clear UK lock on granting or refusing an #indyref, why the manufactured panic? It couldn't be a desperate ploy, could it? A last ditch, knowing and winking nonsense designed to put the fear up credulous people who know no better? Heaven forfend.  

What's that coming over the hill? Is it a monster? Is it a monster?

Blair's last Horcrux...

Building on yesterday's thoughts on the sticky predicament which Chuka Umunna and the Eds generously dumped Jim Murphy in on Monday, I have a wee piece in this morning's National on Scottish Labour's new shapeshifter leader, several months into his agitated stewardship of his troubled party. An excerpt:

"For his critics and detractors, it is all too easy to see Mr Murphy as the undead, malevolent soul fragment of Labour’s late, unlamented wizard of spin. Having assassinated the decent but lost figure of Johann Lamont, and snatched the “branch office” from her, Jim has evolved into a divisive figure who kicks up remarkable levels of antipathy. 

Many see him as a sort of Lovecraftian monstrosity, conscienceless, centreless: all surfaces and no depth, his shifting harlequin face twisting and bending into whatever expression he imagines his audience want him to wear. 

Today, he is anti-austerity Jim, crusader against cuts and defender of the rights of the common man. Scant months ago, he was Trident Jim, a fully paid-up cheerleader for the military industrial complex, calling on his leader to accept Tory spending cuts and shun “shallow and temporary” populism to prove the party’s credentials as a “credible” opposition to Cameron’s Conservatives."

You can read the whole thing here.

If the yolk sticks

If the yolk sticks. You would be hard pushed to invent a worse story for Jim Murphy and his Scottish and UK Labour colleagues, every which way you look at it. The Eds are anxious to establish their fiscal probity. They will never satisfy the baying hounds of the Tory press, but doughty little fiends that they are, they are desperate to show that they can "responsibly" hack away at the British state with the best of them. 

The usual suspects are itching for any opportunity or pretext to question Miliband's commitment to the deficit-frame of "fiscal probity". But the Labour leader held the line, with a cauld kale offering of cuts, interspersed with a few simple, positive, constructive ideas. A mean repast it may be, but compared to the ragged, personalised, unstrategic mess that is the Tory base campaign, you can rattle off a few clear and cogent Labour proposals on one hand. For voters of the left, much of this is robbed of its substance and vitality by the overarching commitment to the deficit fetish economics which Ed Balls has imbibed -- but there it is. Choices made. Lines drawn.

Mr Murphy's task is even trickier. He has deemed it expedient to tack to the left to restore Scottish Labour's ailing fortunes, keen to pin the SNP as careless cutters in contrast with his gloss on Labour economic plans as an "end to austerity". Simultaneously, Scottish Jim for Scotland has taken Scottish Henry McLeish's Scottish advice that Scottish Labour should embrace Scottish patriotism. He has also been struggling to cast off the acrylic uniform of the party's "branch manager", run up by tricoteuse and Murphy oustee, Johann Lamont, and to establish himself as the Heid Neep of Scottish Labour's warring vegetable rack of parliamentarians, divided by their jealousies, ambitions and contempts. 

Labour is onto two losing games here. If you want a chill hearted bastard to "balance the books", why vote Labour? Why go for the bloodless alternative? Why not back blue and get the real thing? Similarly, if you are the kind of voter animated by the idea of your representatives "standing up for Scotland", why back Labour over the SNP? Cram as many references to Scotland into your Twitter profile as you like, apply a patriotic gatling gun to your election literature - you are always going to be facing a Scottish National Party whose sole fealty is to the voters north of the border, without inconvenient colleagues with different and legitimate and incompatible political agendas in the rest of the country.

On austerity and the narrow Scottish interest -- it is a battle you can't win.  If Labour aspire to remain a - or the - national UK party, I'd have thought they'd be best to push back against this limited "patriotic" agenda, rather than embracing it. Which is a long-winded way of saying: both of these -- it seems to me -- are losing games for Scottish Labour to play. But poor Jim finds himself locked into, or has chosen to play, both hands. Cue broken eggs.

Today's "slapdown" by Labour's shadow business spokesman, Chuka Umunna, and Ed Balls, undermines just about everything that Jim Murphy has been agitating so antically to promote: Labour as an anti austerity alternative, his own office as robust, independent, "patriotic", in charge of the Scottish contingent in Westminster, paying the piper and calling the tune. But Chuka was having none of that, offering up this suspiciously quotable demolition of Mr Murphy's position to Andrew Neill this lunchtime. Gey generous it was of him too:

"The leader of the Scottish Labour Party will not be in charge of the UK budget. The leader of our country, our next prime minister, Ed Miliband, will be in charge of the UK budget and he has just answered the question, when that was put to him - will there be any cuts over the course of this parliament not just in the first financial year, but in the following financial years?  And he was absolutely clear - there will be the need for further consolidation and cuts throughout the rest of the parliament."

This doesn't even leave Mr Murphy the wriggle room to be a critical friend of the UK leadership, pursuing different priorities from within the UK Labour Party. If you want to give the Labour party the heart and stomach to pursue different priorities -- there is clearly no point backing Jim. Even his own senior colleagues apparently see him as an irrelevance, and do not have the good grace to conceal their indifference to his opinion from the public. 

Today's clash also helps to marginalise impressions of Mr Murphy's control over his own Westminster parliamentarians.  In principle, at least, Jim heads up the whole contingent of Scottish representatives -- but the Eds apparently regard his colleagues as their worker bees, to troop biddably through the lobbies in Westminster without reference to the manic pterodactyl (Alex Massie™). It is the old, unedited hubris. But it diminishes Jim to a cypher, to do as telt, again. Either the Scottish Labour leader a) misunderstood the nature of his UK colleagues' plans, or b) dissembled about it none too subtly, but whether a) or b) is the case, his point of view is dismissed as irrelevant. 

If Murphy cuts up rough, he gives the Tory press an enviable opportunity to chuck muck at Ed Miliband. If he doesn't, and keeps his tongue in his head, he looks craven, disingenuous, calculating, and ineffective. A fine day at the office, all around. Tonight, the frittatas are on Jim. 

The Vow+?

This morning, the Labour Party launches its 2015 manifesto in Manchester. It pledges to hold a UK wide "people-led" constitutional convention and commits any new Labour government to additional Scottish devolution. The key paragraph reads as follows:

"In September 2014, people across Scotland voted overwhelmingly for change. Labour will keep its vow and implement the Smith Agreement in full. And we will go further, with a Home Rule Bill to give extra powers to Scotland over tax, welfare and jobs. Rates of income tax will be set in Scotland. Billions of pounds of social security spending will be devolved, including benefits that support disabled people. The Work Programme will also be devolved along with a greater ability to invest in capital projects.

The new devolution settlement will recognise the strength and security offered by being part of the United Kingdom. We will maintain the Barnett formula, and Scotland will continue to benefit from pooling and sharing resources across the UK."

For all of its superficial conclusiveness, this paragraph leaves urgent questions about the contents of the "vow plus", advanced by Gordon Brown and Jim Murphy, unanswered.  Labour pledge to "go further" than Smith, but go on to list only policies which the Smith Commission agreed to devolve, and which we already find in the draft clauses of the Scotland Bill published by the Scotland Office.

There is nothing here which the Tory and Liberal Democratic coalition have not proposed. So what more are Labour proposing? What precise elaboration on the Smith heads of terms are they planning? Smith came to the conclusion that housing benefit could not be disentangled from the universal credit. No mention of housing benefit here. So what is the scheme, Jim? Ed?

Nothing in today's manifesto affords even a speck of illumination. We are left where we started with Labour: no minimum wage, no pensions, no employment law, no Equality Act, no national insurance, no housing benefit, no universal credit, no broadcasting, no corporation tax, no inheritance tax, no capital gains, no renewable energies, no oil.

The draft clauses of the Scotland Bill were clearly Treasury work: grudging, minimalist and controlling. There are a number of different ways in which the broad, airy proposals of the Smith Commission might be realised, some bolder, others more cautious and limited. The devil is, proverbially, in the legal detail. And in drafting that detail for Alastair Carmichael, UK civil servants adopted the most restrictive alternative at every turn. In the light of today's manifesto, I increasingly wonder if the Murphy/Brown "vow plus" rhetoric really amounts only to this -- a commitment to give effect to the Smith Commission in a very slightly more ambitious way than the outgoing coalition has proposed. Haud me back...

Wherefore art thou, Honest Abe?

Not many folk read Thomas Carlyle these days.  Although we hear quiet echoes of the Scottish historian and critic in our folk histories of the French Revolution, with his pungent prose, Carlyle's high Victorian style can seem hopelessly windy and overwrought today. But it would be wrong to see Carlyle's collapse into obscurity as a question of style only. The basic assumptions informing his approach to understanding history, society and social change have been hotly contested, not least his argument that "history is nothing but the biography of great men."

In his time, Carlyle was not alone in conceptualising history as a succession of charismatic individual leaders and kings, warriors and tyrants, whose choices shaped the lives of the tongueless legions of the silent dead, who went about their lives in the shadow of these collossuses, shaped but not shaping their fates. Hegel famously described Napoleon as "the world spirit on horseback." As critics from Herbert Spencer onward have pointed out, the great man theory of history is simplistic nonsense. Leaders have their impacts and their influences, for sure, but life is much more complicated, more collective, and agency more socially distributed, than a mighty roll call of caesars and conquerors admits.

In academic history, the approach may be a dead letter, but it remains alive and well in UK political commentary, which tends to personalise successes and failures, focussing relentlessly on personalities and perceptions, conceptualising and understanding politics from the top down, rather than the bottom up. But it remains something of a surprise to discover Martin Kettle, giving us a vintage draught of great man theory in the Guardian, arguing that "To save the union, Britain will have to find its own Abraham Lincoln."

What Britain needs, he contends, is a charismatic uniter, able to articulate a new unionism in a compelling, soulful way. 

"What is clear, though, is that someone somewhere in British public life has to make a Lincoln-like effort to inspire the better angels of our own nature and to try, again and again, to halt the current fissiparous abandonment to our worse ones." 

Kettle concludes:

"Unless this happens, our house may not stand for long. The chances of that producing a “more advantageous or more satisfactory” outcome are tenuous at best. Who can give believable voice to what needs to be said? It is hard to think of the statesman or woman with the standing to speak for our union. Perhaps an archbishop can attempt it. Perhaps a poet. Where, and who, is our Lincoln?"

The idea that the American civil war was won with words, rather than bodies, blood and Springfield model rifles, is sufficiently daft not to detain us -- but for Kettle to see the challenges for our union in these terms is hopelessly analytically thin and naive. If anything, this emphasis on missing, charismatic leadership can only distract Kettle's unionist fellow travellers from an honest, clear eyed analysis of the complex, deeper problems of British political affect and loyalty which the referendum campaign revealed.

Like the New Labour prophets who told us that Jim Murphy would fix the party's Scottish problems single-handed, the idea that the challenges for the Union can all be answered by a lyrical but homespun Great Emancipator of our own is beyond comic. This is the politics of the West Wing, where the tough, often slow work of social and political change can be done by delivering a splendid speech, as if compelling statements of principle make the world turn. Remind me to ask Barack Obama: how did that work out for you, Mr President?

Keeping the doing of British government in hand

I recently met a die-hard English unionist who was worried about the dearth of Scottish students attending the great British public schools and to be found in the ornate halls and cloisters of Oxford and Cambridge. At first blush, these anxieties seemed highfalutin and even comical, but what my interlocutor was really worried about was what he saw as the emerging lack of Scottish corporate solidarity with British elite experiences and values. It was essential, he thought, for an admittedly tiny, but he judged, potent minority of young Scots to be enrolled in the stoutly British public sphere not just educationally, but in ineffable common experience, sentiment, and friendship.  

"Give me the child and I'll give you the man" is an old Jesuit boast, and hardly an original insight, but something about his idiosyncratic disquiet and his equally idiosyncratic solution struck me forcibly. Here was a fellow with a sense of the deep crisis of British unionism revealed by the referendum campaign, trying to think longer term, trying to think strategically about how political ideas can be produced, how they are popularised and how they (perhaps even inadvertently) are enfeebled and dissipate. The idea that the Union can be preserved in the longer run by Vows, Commissions and Scotland Acts alone is fanciful. His choice of solution and objects may be peculiar, but he understood this clearly.

After the heart-stopping anxieties of early September, only a remarkably complacent unionist would now think their work complete, and their initiatives, concluded. To see the ongoing political struggle for a popular, winning, organic unionism only in terms of tactical voting against the perfidious separatists in May is colossally to miss the point. The Better Together parties looked deep into the eyes of the Scottish people, and found dealer's eyes peering back at them, unsentimental, commercial, counting the pennies, weighing the odds. 

For pro-union writers such as Alex Massie and Hugo Rifkind, to conduct constitutional debates as double entry accounting was to neglect the urgent, emotional register of continuing union, but the official No campaign essentially conceded the mercurial loyalties of the electorate, accepting the disturbing provisionality of Scots' attitudes to the Union, and piling in with numbers and arguments likely to pique the interest of a canny, and cautious investor. 

That was an effective strategy for the 18th of September 2014, but securing loyalty through anxiety is not a sustainable device for securing continued Union in the longer term. Machiavelli may have judged that it was better to be feared than loved, but folk often forget, he recommended that the prince should aspire to be loved also, and thought "merciful, faithful, humane." The Union may have been temporarily saved by resort to fearful measures, but unless Scots can once again be persuaded to identify emotionally with the British state, none of the policy autonomies granted to Holyrood will be worth a clipped farthing. 

Only a vanishingly small segment of pro-union opinion seems alive to this wider context, and the fundamental challenges it discloses. The Prime Minister has declared the Scottish question, answered. Jim Murphy has shed his unionist skin altogether.  But behind today's news that big infrastructure projects are to bear plaques with Union flags and "Funded by the UK government" labels, we can perhaps detect the beginning of an attempt, as Alistair Carmichael put it, for a "greater presence" of the Westminster government in Scotland after the No vote.  The move has obvious echoes with the now muted, and taken for granted, but significant and symbolically powerful rebranding affected by Alex Salmond's first administration in 2007.  

But it is still about the cold hard cash. And it still does not answer the deeper, more ineffable concerns of my old unionist about how to build the British solidarity found wanting in the run up to last September - and how to retrench Scotland's position in the union using softer, more sentimental means that the hard nuts and bolts of primary legislation and institutional reform. It also reminds me of something I wrote when the Smith Commission's proposals were revealed. Plastering the Union flag across these big projects is a material expression of the idea that the Union must keep large parts of the doing of British government in hand:  

"For all of the panicked focus in the rest of the United Kingdom of the end of the Union as we know it, the Smith proposals are, essentially, a conservative restatement of the idea that the Union must do things and be seen to do things. Big things. It cannot be an empty vessel within which an autonomous Scotland is contained, and set at liberty to pursue its own priorities. A disinterested lender of last resort, or an organiser of armies and navies with no real interest or say in the domestic affairs of Scots. It must be a state with a purpose, with a mission. To characterise this as an unprincipled "fudge" is fundamentally to misunderstand the political thinking undergirding it.  

For Smith, the Union cannot be conceived a loose confederation of mutually uninterested parties, pursuing their own distinct political priorities. There must be Union dividends. It must pay you back in cold, hard cash. It is a single market in which the worker must be at liberty to float freely, and in which the worker can expect the same minimum wage whether she labours in Cumbria or in Aberdeen. Where her pension is paid from the same pot as her cousin in Kent. A union which builds homes, sustains communities, builds ships, heats pensioners. A Union which secures your fealty, not out of fellow feeling, or a dim sense of identity, but by keeping hold of the purse strings. By keeping significant parts of the doing of British government in hand.  

You may no longer work for state-owned corporations. Ravenscraig may have closed. But the Union justifies its existence by being a force in the life of every person in this country, more and less happily, more and less forcibly. Bugger the abstract calculations: Unionism must remain a matter of self-interest. The UK parliament and government must be felt to be a force in the land."

All of that, in a wee flag.