(Monday 10 November 2008)
MALCOLM BURNS reviews the latest goings-on north of the border.
Tale of two by-elections
I DIDN'T tell you so. In fact, I admitted last week that I had no idea which way the Glenrothes by-election was going to go. Like most people, I thought that it would be a narrow win for either Labour or the SNP - most people apart from smug Alex Salmond, of course, who declared outright nationalist triumph days before the defeat.A 6,700 majority in a mid-term by-election is a thumping win. There was nothing narrow about it. But what accounts for the scale of the Labour victory?
Labour, with fewer activists on the ground, managed to turn out even more voters than it had in the previous Glenrothes election. It was an impressive improvement over Glasgow East in July.
Learning from your mistakes is always wise. Glasgow East was called in a snap and the curtailed three-week campaign revealed an empty shell of a local Labour Party with no voter contact and hardly any active members. The parachuted-in campaign team had insufficient time to identify and turn out Labour voters. This was not the case in the lengthy eight-week campaign in Fife, where a similar team had time to identify and turn out the vote.
Thousands of Glasgow East voters had fallen so much out of love with Labour that they weren't voting and many more went over to the SNP. That clearly didn't happen in Glenrothes. And Labour seized its chance to play as the opposition to the local SNP-led council and the Holyrood government, despite it being a Westminster by-election.
I don't know about a Brown bounce due to the global financial crisis - that will be tested in the year or more between now and a general election. I am sure, though, that Salmond's inability to comprehend and respond to the failure of his beloved Scottish banks has been a turning point, possibly not unlike the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when Obama recognised the scale of the problem and McCain claimed that the fundamentals remained sound.
Ordinary folk on the sharp end usually have a good grasp of the fundamentals and vote accordingly.
Some pundits have compared Glenrothes to Glasgow Garscadden in 1978, when Donald Dewar held off a nationalist challenge at a time when theSNP appeared to threaten Labour's dominance in Scotland.
Up to a point. The position is more complex now, with the SNP actually in government at Holyrood, albeit as a minority administration.
After Garscadden, what happened next? In 1979, SNP MPs voted with the Tories against the struggling Callaghan government to usher in the era of Thatcher.
Salmond's strategy now is to hope that Labour loses the next UK election and that then Scots will turn to the promise of independence to escape from a Tory Britain.
I stand by my view that the SNP had more to lose in defeat at Glenrothes than Labour, though.
The nationalists' leader believes that his party's success depends on sustaining confidence among the Scottish people. He really needs continual spectacular by-election victories to keep the momentum going.
The law of diminishing returns kicks in here. The more you win, the more you are expected to win. When you lose, the magic evaporates.
But, crucially, the SNP has not won the argument for separation from the UK. Independence is still only favoured by about a third of Scots.The local income tax and the Scottish Futures Trust policies are unravelling. The arc of prosperity has turned to ashes.
I might be wrong of course, but, after Glenrothes, I think that the independence referendum promised for 2010 is going to become a poisoned political football which Salmond will wish he had kicked further into the long grass.
THE innocence of youth. Sean, who is just six, was concentrating last week on the wall-to-wall television coverage of Barack Obama's victory.
"Can we get a black government, mum?" he asked, clearly envious of the exciting new development in the US. "Well, we have a Brown one," shejoked.
"But he's not even brown, he's just peachy," said Sean in disgust.
If only he was just peachy, Sean, if only he was.
Late-night clamouring of the inarticulate cybernats
THE cybernat is a curious form of virtual life. It cannot be seen, but obviously sleeps during the day, because its bilious trail of fury only ever begins late at night.As tomorrow's politics stories find their way online after the first editions go to press, a series of bizarre postings by SNP web surfers appears on the websites of the Herald and the Scotsman or their Sundaysisters like a trail of droppings behind a flock of wandering sheep.
These describe the evil dealings against Scotland of Maggie Broon and his New Liebour party and the heroic defence of the nation by Wee Eck Salmond and his SNP bravehearts in terms so juvenile, inarticulateand sometimes offensive yet so insistently off-planet that it is indeed a wonder to behold.
Some, notably the cybernats themselves, believe that they have contributed to whatever successes the SNP has gained. I take the opposite view and, if I was Alex Salmond, I would issue a cease and desist order.
Sometimes, a comment thread becomes so faecal that the papers just switch it off. Who needs it? The cybernats then gather round another completely unrelated thread and add the complaint of censorship to their anti-English clamour.
I would say that they swarmed - they do like to give that impression - but I think that there are only about seven of them altogether.
You could tell that something catastrophic had happened in the Scottish political environment around midnight on Thursday, as it became clear that Labour had won the Glenrothes by-election with a rather large, indeed splendid, majority.
The cybernats were silent, virtually all night.
But the nuclear blast of Glenrothes clearly hasn't wiped the cybernats out - they have blearily continued to buzz helplessly beneath online articles over the weekend with the bizarre view that the election was rigged.
But somehow I think that it may never be glad confident one in the morning for the cybernats again.
What about more cash in our pockets?
AS the economy slides into recession, what better way for government to mitigate the crisis than putting some more money in the wage packets of ordinary workers.You'd think that, after we've part-nationalised the banks and slashed interest rates, a simple old-fashioned Keynesian measure like that would be a no-brainer.
But right-wing monetarist orthodoxy still holds sway with the Labour government and it still says: "No, cap pay rises at 2 per cent." The Scottish government follows suit.
Thirty thousand Scottish civil and public servants were due to be on strike today, along with hundreds of thousands more across the UK fighting for a decent pay award.
A last-minute offer of talks means that the action has been suspended, but the mandate for striking is maintained. If there is no progress, more strikes will follow.
Meanwhile, ballots on further action are due to close this week in the long-running Scottish local government dispute and at Scottish Water, where the same hard-faced pay policy is being dictated by the Scottish government to an employer which admits that it could afford a better offer than 2.5 per cent.
Other workers in the public sector, such as meat hygiene inspectors, and in the private sector, such as the lorry drivers at CarntyneTransport, are also balloting on action over similar paltry pay deals.
Unless you're a banker, it looks like you have to fight hard for your money.
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