If some polls are to be believed, Labour won’t exist in Scotland after next week. All suggest it will be a considerably pruned branch of the party. Whatever happens, the campaign Scottish Labour has had to fight since the referendum shows a party coming to terms with the shocking realisation that safe seats cannot stay safe if you don’t bother to talk to voters in them.
One Labour MP is notorious among colleagues for boasting in the years before this election that his canvassing involved walking around in the high street of his constituency and marking down people who greeted him as Labour voters. What a shock this election, where the party is having to go to those voters’ homes, knock on their doors and make an effort with them, must be.
Still, even though today’s STV poll suggests there will be no Labour seats left in Scotland from next week – and this is not based on individual seat polling, so should be treated with some caution – there are some constituencies that the party regards as a bit safer than others.
Earlier this year it allocated resources to seats according to a formula. MPs were told that this formula takes into account the strength of the SNP in their constituency, their own profile, and so on. Cynics within the party suggest that the first section of the formula asks ‘is your name Douglas Alexander?’, and then filters through Labour big names whose seats it would be embarrassing to lose, down to those MPs who aren’t so well known. Whatever the truth, the formula means some Labour candidates for re-election get paid organisers in their seats, MSPs and activists practically camping out in order to join in the great door knocking effort and as much help as they need. Others are left to run their own campaigns with their local parties.
One of those ‘safer’ seats is Rutherglen and Hamilton West, just outside Glasgow. Tom Greatrex is currently fighting to hold the seat he won for the first time in 2010 with 21,002 majority. The former adviser and trade union official has not been blessed with paid organisers. His seat is described as ‘ultra-safe’ in this profile, though no-one uses that sort of language about Labour seats north of the border any more. Perhaps it is best to say that if Greatrex loses – and his seat will declare reasonably early – then Scottish Labour is probably on for a catastrophe.
In Parliament, Greatrex is a leftish sort who has run a jolly good campaign on the poor quality of work capability assessments by Atos Healthcare (which eventually left the contract early), and sits on Labour’s frontbench for energy.
His was a constituency I visited during the referendum, and Greatrex’s team seemed then to be running a very organised operation for the ‘No’ campaign in the area. The group of activists I followed around the streets of Blantyre last week gave the same impression, not just of being organised, but of being quite used to knocking on people’s doors. That sounds like the sort of observation you should be able to make about every MP and his or her ground war, in the same way as you should be able to say that all cats are furry, but this clearly is not true for some parts of Scottish Labour.
What does seem to be the case for Greatrex is that he bothers to talk to and do things for his constituents outside election panic time. One activist, noting that Greatrex has stopped again for a chat to someone in the street, asks me if I’ve been subjected to the ‘Greatrex Special’ yet, which turns out to be the candidate talking at length to people rather than speeding from door to door, chucking leaflets along the way.
One voter tells him he’s the only politician who has ever replied to one of his emails, and then engages the candidate in a long debate about school buses. Greatrex actually knows the detail of the row about the buses, and spends about 20 minutes talking about it in the spring drizzle. Afterwards he admits he’s not very good at getting round as many houses as his campaign team, as he always ends up talking for ages to people, which is easier to do when you know about the detail of the things someone is complaining about. Other voters want to thank him for fixing various problems. And there’s a path running past some of the houses that Greatrex persuaded the council to resurface. Some of his colleagues might be finding out about the quality of pavements in their constituencies for the first time – indeed, some of them who seem to be in the biggest trouble were apparently barely talking to their voters at all until recently.
The SNP billboards in the constituency feature huge photos of a smiling Nicola Sturgeon and the promise that ‘my vow is to make Scotland stronger at Westminster’. The Labour leaflets feature neither Jim Murphy nor Ed Miliband (though a previous one included the candidate on it), and Greatrex tells those wavering voters he talks to that ‘at the end of the day, I’m the name on the ballot paper’.
This is all very impressive, but working hard for your constituents doesn’t guarantee re-election. If that were the case, then Danny Alexander, who has all but gold-plated the roads in his seat, would be on course to increase his majority (I can’t find a single Lib Dem who will now say they think he’ll survive). Labour has to give voters a reason not to get more excited about the SNP promise of a ‘stronger voice for Scotland’.
We meet a few wavering SNP voters on the doorstep. One is a party member, the other one was thinking either of voting SNP or not turning out at all. Each gets the same squeeze message: that the SNP cannot win this Westminster election and that to vote for them will make it easier for the Tories to govern. They also get this leaflet, which says the same:
The front is a negative squeeze message about the danger of a Tory government, while the back is an attempt to show that Labour has positive ideas for Scotland.
The problem is that the SNP is the party that appears to energise voters the most. At a hustings last week, Greatrex’s SNP opponent, Margaret Ferrier, gave a rather unimpressive response to questions about her party’s plans for full fiscal autonomy, which you can read below:
‘Full fiscal responsibility: what we are saying is that a modest increase in spending of half a per cent per year every year would free up money to spend on other things like the NHS, education. The £7.6 [billion] shortfall is a myth that has been created. The 7.6 shortfall is if the Barnett consequential was gone, which it wouldn’t be, plus the fact that the, um, sorry, I’ve lost my train of thought, the Barnett consequential will remain in place until any… I think it is what she says… will remain in place and that’s where the 7.6 shortfall is coming from, so until that goes and we free up money elsewhere and we collect our own taxes from what we get from the Smith Commission as well, so there’s various powers that we’re supposed to get that we haven’t got through the Smith Commission, then the Barnett consequentials will be tweaked and eventually we would then have our own tax-raising powers.’
As awkward as that answer is, it is unlikely to make much of a difference to her standing in the seat, because the SNP’s ‘stronger voice in Westminster’ relies on a bulk of MPs from the party being elected in a show of defiance to the two main parties.
Nothing is certain for Labour in its Scottish fight. But what seems clear from an afternoon in Rutherglen and Hamilton West is that even if fixing the pavements you pound isn’t a guarantee of success, working harder as an MP does make it a little easier to get a hearing when you’re in the fight of your life.
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