What should Labour do to win back Scotland?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

More heat than light indeed.

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Well there isn't a lot that Labour as a Britain-wide entity can do because Scottish elections are entirely Scottish affairs. Establishing Scottish Labour as an independent entity couldn't do any harm though.

I think what needs to be understood is that the Scottish Labour Party is (and has been for a long time) both an organisational and ideological disaster. Organisationally because, well, everything you have heard is actually true; in particular I would note that most Scottish CLPs are indeed practically paper organisations.* The fact that this has remained true despite mounting evidence (going back decades) that the Scottish electorate is infinitely more volatile than that of the rest of the United Kingdom is an act of egregious collective incompetence. Scottish Labour has been a bit of a potemkin party for decades; the tendency has been to get round this via strong personalities. Currently there are none left. Not only that, but the senior figures of today seem to be political idiots; Scottish Labour has proven to be an unbelievably incompetent opposition party since 2007, with an unparalleled ability to turn open goals into own goals. Ideologically because although there is a good socialist case for maintaining the union, the party has proven almost entirely unable to articulate it (Gordon Brown can, oddly enough, but he's retired) and has often been more concerned with petty factional disputes than engaging with the electorate (the recent leadership election - a factional bunfight and nothing more - was a depressing case in point). The electoral consequences of this have been devastating.

So, basically, Scottish Labour needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt. Some had been arguing for this anyway, but I think it is quite clear there is really no alternative now.

_{*This is not, despite claims to the contrary, actually true of CLPs in other parts of Britain.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The LibDems are well to the right of us. Have people here not been paying attention lately?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Perhaps (and if nothing changes certainly), but 2017 is a long time away.