Jim Murphy is quitting frontline politics with a bang. The outgoing leader of the Scottish Labour party addressed Policy Exchange this afternoon, offering his thoughts on why Labour lost the election and did so badly north of the border. Murphy revealed that he thinks another independence referendum is inevitable:
‘There will be another referendum whenever the SNP can get away with it. Why wouldn’t there? If you were an insurgent nationalist party with unprecedented power and with an absolute majority of parliamentarians in both parliaments, why wouldn’t you try and engineer certain circumstances that get you another referendum?
‘My frustration is that Cameron is so lame-assly dumb on it that he would stumble into it and give them an excuse to do it.’
Murphy did not hold back on his criticism of those evil Tories, blaming the Prime Minister’s talk of English nationalism for Labour’s ‘terrible’ defeat at the general election:
‘David Cameron seized the time and was out on the morning after the referendum to make an announcement about English Votes for English Laws. At 2am on referendum night I was in the BBC studio to be told by Michael Gove that the Prime Minster would unveil his plans that morning. Instead of travelling to Scotland to celebrate and thank Scotland he did the opposite.
‘His aim? To create a grievance to engender an English nationalism. He failed initially. But then he succeeded beyond his wildest ambition. The SNP seized on Camerons actions as proof of the bad faith of Westminster and used it to bind the Yes vote together. The full force of this wasn’t felt until the short campaign.
‘But an infernal machine had been created in which the threat of the SNP holding the balance of power at Westminster fuelled an English backlash which in turn added to some non-nationalist Scottish voters who last year voted No then voted for the SNP last month.’
Murphy did have his own mea cupla, repenting for the time wasted on the Brownite-Blairite feuds of yore. ‘In the last two months of the election I have spoken more to Ed Balls than I did in the last two decades,’ he said. But overall, it’s a shame that Murphy is ending his political career on a sour note. The few notes of optimism about reforms to limit trade union influence within Labour are overwhelmed by the negativity towards the SNP and the Tories.
Yet, despite this failing there is a sense that unlike his colleagues, Murphy is facing up to the scale of Labour’s problems. As he conceded in the speech today, Labour has just lost the easiest election it is likely to face in the next twenty years.
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