On the eve of Labour's Scottish party conference, the Shadow
Scottish Secretary talks to Paul Anderson
“There was a lot of frustration and heart-searching in
Scotland after the election," says Tom Clarke, the Shadow Scottish
Secretary. "That was inevitable given the huge disappointment. There was
this expectation of at very least a hung Parliament and at best a Labour
victory. In the end, we won 49 seats out of 72 in Scotland and lost in the
UK."
Last year's general election was indeed a bad shock to
Labour in Scotland. The party had believed that the Tories' representation in
Scotland could he reduced from ten to four or five MPs, with Labour gains in
Ayr, Dumfries, Edinburgh Pentlands and Stirling. Instead, all four target
seats stayed Conservative and, to make matters worse, the Tories defeated
Labour's sitting MP in affluent Aberdeen South, Frank Doran.
Labour's poor showing unleashed a storm inside the party.
Sections of the Left joined prominent members of the Scottish TUC and the
Scottish National Party to support Scotland United, a pressure group calling
for a referendum on Scottish constitutional arrangements: others denounced
them for making overtures to the SNP, Labour's main enemy in Scotland. When
Clarke, now aged 52, took over from Donald Dewar as shadow Scottish Secretary
in July, having made it into the Shadow Cabinet for the first time, his first
task was to calm frayed nerves in the Scottish Labour Party.
He did this by promising to campaign on the bread-and-butter
issues (the economy, the welfare state, water privatisation) while keeping up
the pressure on the constitutional question and shunning the SNP. It is a delicate
balancing act, and Clarke knows that the constitutional question remains
potentially dangerous for Labour: while he was out of action with a viral
infection late last year, a demonstration for home rule largely organised by
Scotland United attracted 25,000 people on to the streets of Edinburgh, the
biggest protest in the country for more than a decade. He is nevertheless
confident that the approach he promised last summer is the best option.
On the constitution, he says that he wants a revival of the
Scottish Constitutional Convention, the body, grouping Labour, the Liberal
Democrats, trade unions and churches (but not the SNP, which withdrew), that
forged a consensus for a Scottish parliament within the UK in the run-up to the
1992 election.
"We want a reborn Convention that's out there campaigning,
much more representative of the whole of Scotland," he says, arguing
against the idea of replacing it with a new forum. The Liberal Democrats, who
had been lukewarm about reviving the Convention, are back on board following a
meeting last week. "It was perceived, I think wrongly, that people like
Malcolm Bruce, the Liberal Democrat MP for Gordon, did very badly in the election
because the Lib Dems were too closely associated with Labour. But we had a very
good meeting and the Convention's still in business. The Liberal Democrats were
outspoken and very helpful."
As for the SNP, he says: "I don't think there will ever
be a really close working relationship between the SNP and the Labour Party.
There's a lot of contempt among the grass roots of the party for the SNP if
only because it fights the party harder than anybody else." This week,
Clarke came down heavily on the SNP for negotiating a deal with the Government
during the House of Commons debate on the European regional council. His hope
is clearly that the SNFs apostasy will turn even the most nationalist in
Labour's ranks against the idea of SNP-Labour co-operation.
Meanwhile, "we're trying to be very careful that issues
like unemployment, health and water privatisation are kept in view" as
well as constitutional issues. The Scottish economy is in a dire state, Clarke
says. "There has been closure after closure in every field. I used to
represent a steel and mining area. We no longer have any steelworks or any
pits." Labour has to keep pushing its vision of a "modern industrial
Scotland", maintain the pressure over the welfare state and assert itself
as "the leading organisation which has been fighting water privatisation"
– which, unlike in England where water privatisation passed off with barely a
squeak in 1989, has sparked a major public controversy.
Clarke is confident that Labour can be at the forefront in
all this campaigning, although he admits that there was a small blip in its
water privatisation efforts a fortnight ago after a furore followed his being
misinterpreted on Labour's plans for bringing privatised Scottish water back
into public ownership. This weekend's Scottish party conference is expected to
back calls for water to be returned to the public sector, a prospect which
Clarke is "very happy" to accept.
The spectre haunting Labour in all of this is, of course,
its response to popular antipathy to the poll tax after 1989, when Labour caution
was widely seen as benefiting the SNP and Militant. Now as then, the SNP and
Militant are doing what they can to take on Labour in its urban heartlands,
with Militant, now firmly outside the Labour Party as an electoral rival,
making significant gains in council by-elections.
Clarke clearly believes that the best way to deal with the
danger of being outflanked on the left is to insist that Labour is the only
party that can actually make a difference. "The party in Scotland is very
keen that we keep our separate identity as the biggest party in Scotland, the opposition,
the alternative government, the only party that can deliver a Scottish
Parliament."
Militant, he says, has "done well" in taking
council seats from Labour and "should be taken seriously". "Because
of the attacks by the Tory Government on local government, it's very easy to
condemn local Labour councils and the Militant is very good at that. Without
being complacent about the genuine concerns of ordinary working people, we
have to make it clear that Militant cannot deliver."
One of Labour's problems is that it is seen as the establishment
in much of Scotland. Another, related, problem is that it has a very small
membership in Scotland by comparison with its electoral support. According to
official Labour Party statistics, the average membership of a Constituency
Labour Party in Scotland is 283, compared with 440 in the UK as a whole.
"It makes a very strong case for a mass party,"
says Clarke, while stressing that there are some very active CLPs with large
memberships. "I'd like to see the modern Labour Party in Scotland taking
over the role that the Co-op had in an earlier day, when everyone went to the
Co-op and it was a real part of the local community.”
Clarke is a Catholic – his opposition to abortion has made
him unpopular with feminists – and his Monklands West constituency, centred on
the town of Coatbridge, consists of the Catholic part of the area covered by
Monklands council (the Protestant part, Monklands East, is represented by John
Smith).
The council, run by Labour, has been in the news recently
after allegations that it has discriminated in favour of Catholics, and the
local party was the subject of an inquiry by Labour's Scottish executive, the
results of which were published last week demanding reorganisation of its
procedures in line with party rules.
There is no suggestion that Clarke has been involved in any
local skulduggery – executive members went out of their way last week to
emphasise that he and Smith had given full support to the inquiry – but the
Monk-lands affair has given new life to old complaints about religious
tribalism in Scottish politics. Clarke counters such rumblings by pointing out
that more of Labour's Scottish MPs are Protestant than are Catholic and argues
that religion is no longer the force it used to be in Scottish politics.
"Historically, the party has taken most Catholic votes
because most Catholics were Irish and saw themselves as underdogs," he
says. "As time has gone on, some Catholics are more reflective and don't
necessarily vote Labour as instinctively as earlier generations did. And in
1992 the party took five times the number of votes as there are Catholics. I
don't see it as a major factor in Scottish politics – although obviously I want
the party to appeal to Catholic voters."
This week, the government announced its long-awaited sop to
Scottish demands for home rule -some minor administrative devolution and an increased
role for Scottish MPs in the Scottish Grand Committee.
Clarke has had a field-day with this "weak unworthy
whimper of a plan". The solutions offered by the government only make the
democratic deficit worse," he told the Commons on Tuesday. "This is a
cosmetic exercise. It does not represent the aspirations of the Scottish
people." Judging by the sheepish look on the face of the Scottish
Secretary, Ian Lang, as Clarke savaged him, the government knows that most
Scots share Clarke's low opinion. The big question is whether Labour can manage
to make itself the beneficiary of such sentiment
