Alexander lost in search for radical road

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Mike Small (Fife, The Guardian): As Iain MacWhirter wrote the other day in the Herald: "You have to wonder if Labour has acquired a death wish. How could it be so stupid, so irresponsible, as to plunge into another self-inflicted crisis just as Alex Salmond's honeymoon was beginning to wear off? The Scottish Labour Party had an opportunity to make a fresh start with a new leadership and it is throwing it away."

MacWhirter, who, like many columnists, has swithered and swayed with the Union writes: "How much of this is Wendy Alexander's fault? Well, the problems in the Labour Party are systemic and can't be put down to one individual, no matter how headstrong....this is nothing to do with her sex, or even her famously explosive temperament. It is all about her politics and the nature of her party. Above all, it is her failure to delineate a clear political direction in Scotland."

Before she was elected, Wendy declared that she would be "uncompromising in my commitment to change". "The road ahead for Labour," she said, "must be the radical road." Well, that's not quite true now is it? And it's not at all clear whether ‘the radical road' is in her power to give. As Iain writes: "If you arouse such expectations, you have to deliver - especially when you are up against an SNP administration that is taking radical action on everything from local income tax to nuclear power, that has launched a major review of the constitution and has put a bomb under every institution from BBC Scotland to Scottish Enterprise."

What have we heard from Wendy? Nothing apart from inconclusive talks with the LibDems and the Tories, in a pan-Unionist front. Talks which, it should be pointed out, strike an odd note with Wendy's speech to the Labour Un-Conference: where she suggested that the English Tories and Scottish Nats are in some kind of gruesome alliance. None of which makes the remotest bit of sense, despite Wendy's much heralded ‘massive intellect'.

We remain (uniquely in Western Europe I believe) in a situation where our govt has no support whatsoever in the mainstream media in Scotland, a reality that seems to have escaped MacWhirter, who writes: "Like most in the Scottish media, I have been willing to give the new Labour leader a fair wind, if only to allow some balance into coverage of Scottish politics. Alex Salmond has had it all his own way since May, and that is not how it should be in democratic politics." Balance?" I spluttered into my entirely British Porridge Oats. True the corporate press has taken a summer pause from its ritual kicking of the SNP. But puff pieces and whole supplements (Sunday Times Ecosse (sic) and Scotland on Sunday spring to mind) are devoted to cuddly Labour drivel. The media has studiously ignored an amazing revelation leaked from Labour (either by sacked spin-man Brian Lironi or by Wendy's team) that they will now support a referendum on Scottish independence, since repeated by David Cairns.

But even this bias guarantees Labour nothing. Wendy Alexander said that the SNP had won because it "disingenuously" persuaded people it could deliver Labour's agenda. The reality is that Labour and the Conservatives have had a virtual policy merger, and the relentless Britishness of Brown's message simply won't wash North of Galashiels. People voted for the SNP because they had a visceral reaction against the Iraq war, Trident 2, new nuclear power in Scotland and the sort of ongoing cultural hegemony that drowns national and regional diversity in a torrent of Englishness. If this is really Labour's analysis of why they lost they have learnt nothing, and will lose again, and again.

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