Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The implosion of Scottish Labour means the battle for Britain has only just begun

Gordon Brown is holding an adjournment debate on the union this evening, which comes after an Ashcroft poll which shows precisely what danger the union is in. If today’s polls were tomorrow’s election result, the SNP would have 55 out of 59 seats in Scotland. It’s even set to lose Coatbridge, where it picked up 67pc of the vote at the last election. Yes, all this will help the Tories in the short term: Cameron needs the SNP to destroy Labour in the north and the SNP need Cameron in No10 – remember, their political model is based on grudge and gripe. Without a villain, Alex Salmond won’t have a pantomime.

But back to Brown. He designed devolution to kill off the Tories in Scotland – he succeeded, but has ended up with the SNP instead. Since the mid-1990s Brown was seen as, and acted as, as the godfather of Scottish Labour and he is now confronted with the results of his disastrous strategy. Labour treated too much of Scotland as a rotten borough, a place for safe seats where its MPs had huge majorities and didn’t have to fight. LabourList today discloses that a Scottish Labour MP told colleagues he didn’t understand the fuss about declining constituency party members – because his constituency had fewer than 100 and “win every time”.

So the party’s apparatus decayed, and Scottish Labour failed to rejuvenate – relying on clichés and tribal loyalty rather than strong, active, modern reasons to vote Labour.

The late Donald Dewar was a responsible First Minister with talent as big as his ego was small – he had no interest in antagonising the rest of the Labour Party. It was, then, a fundamentally unionist party. But because it was a unionist party, its A-team (John Reid, Robin Cook, Brian Wilson, Douglas Alexander) gravitated to Westminster while the B-team was dumped in Holyrood.

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