Mike Phipps reviews Hope and Despair: Lifting the Lid on the Murky World of Scottish Politics, by Neil Findlay, published by Luath

“A time of perpetual crisis and scandal is the only way I can describe the last few years of my time in the Scottish Parliament,” writes former Labour MSP Neil Findlay in the Introduction to this detailed diary. “The aftermath of the 2014 referendum on independence left Scottish politics mired in a constitutional dogfight.” Every political issue was viewed through the prism of the independence debate. Meanwhile, Scotland continued to experience appallingly long NHS waiting lists and the worst rate of drug deaths in the developed world.

Neil Findlay began his working life as a bricklayer. After eight years on his local council, he was elected to the Scottish Parliament in 2011. As he saw the political establishment riding roughshod over those least able to defend themselves, he became the champion of those without a voice. He also served long enough to witness the scandals and feuds that would tear apart the party that has run Scotland for the last sixteen years.

As a socialist MSP, Neil Findlay battled not just the SNP-led Scottish government, but also the unionist right in his own Party. For him, the four years covered in this diary “started with so much hope and ended with despair.”

The narrative begins in August 2017 with Corbyn-supporting Richard Leonard beginning his successful bid for the vacant Scottish Labour leadership. His opponent, Anas Sarwar, who would ultimately get the leadership four years later after spending much of the intervening time briefing against Leonard, spent a staggering £125,000 on his unsuccessful campaign, which worked out at about £16 a vote.

Findlay was uplifted by Leonard’s win, hailing it as “an opportunity to move away from the failed strategy of recent years… we can now provide a radical alternative to the SNP and shake off the disastrous Better Together legacy.”

But concerns soon set in: “I got a call from Richard Leonard… he hasn’t uttered a word to me for three weeks. I gave him a long list of things he must do quickly, including appointing the right team around him, not giving his opponents in the party a position, appointing a new team at party headquarters and taking control of staffing appointments in the parliamentary team.”

Findlay’s advice, certainly regarding the Shadow Cabinet that Leonard assembled, was disregarded. Relations between him and Leonard became strained over the next year. At a meeting in October 2018, Findlay asked Leonard if he agreed that two key opponents, Jackie Ballie and Anwas Sarwar, should be removed from the team. Findlay records:

“You could have knocked me down with a feather when he said, ‘No, not really’. I could take no more, picked up my stuff and walked out. What is the point of investing my time in this?” Trying times – but in fact Leonard did sack them in his reshuffle three days later.

As with Jeremy Corbyn at Westminster, meetings of the Scottish parliamentary Labour Group under Richard Leonard were highly acrimonious from the outset. The right wing took a provocatively destructive attitude, attacked the leader vitriolically and leaked the proceedings to a waiting media. On one occasion, “within half an hour of the meeting, former Sun journalist Kevin Schofield was tweeting the details… They would be as well inviting the media into meetings to save time.”

Overall, it’s an exciting period. Although Findlay is not the most mesmerising diarist, drily listing the many activities he participates in, without much analysis or characterisation, nonetheless the impressive volume of commitments portrays a very hard-working representative. Findlay cares passionately about health and justice issues, in particular his successful campaign to secure a pardon for Scottish miners subjected to politically motivated arrests during their historic 1984-5 strike. But the sheer level of detail provided here occasionally obscures the bigger picture, in particular the way the Corbyn project began to run out of steam and its gradual loss of public support.

Findlay’s diary of the 2019 general election campaign makes especially bleak reading, as the attacks on Jeremy Corbyn’s invented terrorist sympathies and antisemitism intensified. When the results came through, they were as disastrous for Labour in Scotland as elsewhere, albeit partly for different reasons. Afterwards, Findlay wrote an article for the Sunday Mail, saying Labour had to end it sour attitude towards the popular demand for a fresh post-Brexit independence referendum and come out for ‘devo max’ as a third option, which he believed had a strong chance of winning. This did not go down well with some of his more cautious comrades on the left.

Then Covid hit. Most readers will be aware of the incompetence and corruption of the UK government, but less familiar with the record of the Scottish administration – allowing football matches with ten of thousands of people in attendance to go ahead as late as mid-March 2020; ignoring WHO advice on testing; and sticking to government targets to discharge elderly hospital patients into care homes. Within a month there were 1,000 Covid deaths in Scotland, the majority in care homes to which hospital patients were routinely discharged without being tested. Meanwhile, Findlay’s casework exploded.

Findlay found the disloyalty to Jeremy Corbyn and Richard Leonard from Labour right wingers and paid Party officials particularly wearing and resolved to stand down as an MSP at the 2021 election. Pressure from Labour’s right mounted on Leonard himself to resign as leader. This peaked in January 2021, when Keir Starmer called on Leonard to stand down, following an ultimatum form wealthy Party donors. “Like Corbyn,” notes Findlay, “a decent, honourable man has been deposed by a bunch of snakes.”

Writing for Labour Hub at the time, Jeremy Corbyn’s former advisor in Scotland, Tommy Kane, made these observations:

“Labour’s demise in Scotland however is… about so much more than Richard Leonard’s leadership. This is especially when considering that Labour lost votes and seats at every Scottish Parliamentary election, and that the SNP first took control of the Scottish Parliament in May 2007 when Blair was still PM.  New Labour’s embrace of the Thatcherite consensus with a few sweeteners thrown in, plus Iraq, provoked deep disappointment…

“Throw in endemic complacency and a sense of entitled electoral superiority that took voters for granted, and you had a toxic mix that festered away prior to an explosion of disappointment and anger. That explosion took place in 2015, less than a year after the 2014 referendum, when the then Labour leadership cut a deal to campaign with the Tories and told Scots that we were all ‘Better Together’.”

In the election to replace Richard Leonard, Anas Sarwar on the right beat Monica Lennon on the left by 58% to 42%. Rather like his counterpart Keir Starmer, Sarwar has nothing new to offer, but has benefited from the internal crisis of the governing party, rather than notching up any great achievements of his own. Neil Findlay, meanwhile, is now out of the Scottish Parliament – “let’s see what the real world brings.”

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.