By Vince Mills

On August 28^th Scottish Labour Party members will begin to receive their ballot papers for the election of the new Scottish Labour Party Leader, after the flight of Anas Sarwar to the House of Lords.

There are two candidates: Michael Marra MSP and Joe Fagan MSP. Both, unsurprisingly, see themselves as very much in Andy Burnham mould. Despite an embarrassing episode last year when Marra told Andy Burham to shup up about Starmer, he now says: “Andy Burnham has shown the difference it can make when Labour gets back to offering hope and shows a willingness to fight to make a difference for people.”

There is similar praise for Burnham from Fagan: “Andy Burnham’s by-election win in Makerfield showed that the Party can win back trust when it is serious about changing people’s lives.” 

How appealing should those endorsements be for Scottish Labour members? Given Labour’s recovery in the polls following the demise of Starmer, you might think they should be well received. But last week Open Democracy reported that: “Andy Burnham’s campaign to replace Keir Starmer was backed with more than £340,000 in large donations, primarily from …Lord Sainsbury, a New Labour minister who also funds Labour Together alongside a small number of high-net-worth mega donors, including Gary Lubner, a South African billionaire.”

That malign influence appears to be playing out in the contest for the leadership of the Scottish Labour Party. The same Gary Lubner has funded Joani Reid MP, one of the seven MPs who nominated Joe Fagan for the Scottish Labour Party Leadership. This means that five of the seven Fagan-supporting MPs were in receipt of funds associated with Labour Together.  Michael Marra  is also getting strong support from Labour Together beneficiaries. Of the two dozen MPs nominating him, eleven were in receipt of financial support from Labour Together.

The strength of the right in Scottish politics and Scottish Labour in particular is often under-stated, lost in a kind of radical glow from the few episodes in Scottish history where the Scottish working-class movement really was in the van, the most recent being over fifty years ago – the UCS shipbuilders sit-in the 1970s. Since then and before, the Scottish Labour Party, as part of its British counterpart, has demonstrated all of the contradictions of a social democratic party trying to meet the material needs of its supporters, including its affiliated unions, within the bounds of a capitalist system, a system which survives by elevating profit over social need.

In this, the Scottish Labour Party has reflected rather than challenged the political ideology of the working class it represented, a class shaped by decades of colonialism and imperialism in partnership with the rest of Britain. At the core of Labourism is the social democratic notion that concessions can be won from capitalism if labour is properly organised, in the workplace but more importantly at the ballot box.

There is, however, a useful distinction to be made between those social democrats in the Labour Party who, in pursuit of a decent society, are prepared to challenge the limits of capitalist hegemony and those like Tony Blair and his contemporary disciples, who clearly were not and are not. For the Blairites, the socialist position that capitalism itself has to be transformed, and the left social democratic challenge are both seen as a threat to the political stability required for capitalism to generate profit, even while workers receive less and less of the wealth generated.  This hostility to socialism and left social democracy has intensified since Corbyn’s victory. Indeed, it led directly in 2017 to Morgan McSweeney’s take over as director of Labour Together with the purpose of removing Jeremy Corbyn as leader “by any means necessary”.

Of course, Monica Lennon, very much part of that radical Labour tradition was excluded from the race, no doubt much to the relief of ThinkLabour/Labour Together. She had said: “My vision for Scotland is rooted in democratic socialism: treating housing as a human right through a new generation of council housebuilding; creating a publicly owned National Care Service that values both those who give care and those who receive it; expanding community wealth building; and ensuring the transition to green energy and our reindustrialisation creates secure, unionised jobs.”

With only two candidates to work on broadly sympathetic to their position, ThinkLabour/Labour Together will no doubt feel secure that there will be no unpleasant shocks from North of the Border, whoever wins. The left in the Scottish Labour Party will have to think about how it rebuilds its base in a hostile Party. Given that the Party comprises around only 11,000 members, down from 25,836 in 2018 under Jeremy Corbyn, that rebuilding might well have to take place by drawing a new membership in from political activity outside the Labour Party. 

But that discussion is for another day. In the meantime, when my ballot arrives, I think I will take myself off to see Partick Thistle versus Queen’s Park. It’s a much more meaningful contest.

Vince Mills is a member of the Red Paper Collective.

Image: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestand:Scotland_Map.png Author: Topbanana op de Engelstalige Wikipedia (talk): “Ik, de auteursrechthebbende van dit werk, geef dit werk vrij in het publieke domein. Dit is wereldwijd van toepassing.”