Deal or No Deal

16 March

 

• Ed Miliband hopes to defuse speculation about the SNP before the campaign begins.

 

• He rules out a coalition with Nicola Sturgeon – on a visit to Yorkshire.

 

• The issue will come to dominate the campaign – and hasn’t gone away for his successor.

 

 

ED MILIBAND LAID bare his divisions with Nicola Sturgeon, not in Paisley or Perth – but in Pudsey. The Labour leader had been limbering up for the election campaign with a ‘People’s Question Time’ event in this marginal Yorkshire seat – though it was an appearance on the real Question Time that would prove even more controversial in the last week of the campaign. But under the cosh from what he would describe as the ‘unholy alliance’ of the Conservatives and SNP, he had decided to strike back.

These apparently public events are organised by local party activists and usually the ‘people’ are a select bunch of floating voters, not opponents. Policies tend to be explained, and not announced, in this type of forum. Today would be different.

The Conservatives had shown their hand. On the internet and at selected poster sites, the star of their campaign wasn’t David Cameron – it was the SNP’s Alex Salmond. Ed Miliband featured too, though only peeping out from Salmond’s shirt pocket. Those masked activists in Birmingham had been a foretaste of what was to come. Clearly a key theme of the campaign would be that a weak minority Labour government would meekly cave in to left-wing SNP demands.

Ed Miliband’s response would at least settle what had been a remarkably long stand off at the very heart of the Labour party – and which had been every bit as tense as the denouement of Reservoir Dogs.

He had faced competing but equally robust advice from the moment Jim Murphy had been elected as the leader of the Scottish Labour Party the previous December. Or as one insider put it, ‘he was dragged into a massive argument’. Murphy’s position was completely at odds with the stance taken by UK general election co-ordinator, Douglas Alexander. The two different approaches can best be summed up like this – metaphorically, Alexander wanted to shake former Labour voters until they came to their senses, and Murphy wanted gently to woo them until they became more pliable.

Alexander argued strongly that Miliband should rule out a coalition deal with the SNP early, and hard. If the key message was to be that the only way to guarantee a Labour government was to vote Labour – and an SNP vote risked letting Cameron in by the back door – then this hard fact had to be rammed home. No soft options.

As one strategist put it:

Douglas’s view was ‘we need them to think they have to vote Labour… it’s a fact we need to establish – if they don’t like the fact that more Labour votes will reduce the chances of a Tory government, it’s still a fact.

Miliband was being advised to do no such thing by the new leader in Scotland. Murphy’s argument wasn’t that there should be a deal – simply that now would be the wrong time to rule it out well before the formal – or ‘short’ – election campaign began. That’s because he took the view that the starting point in winning back voters who had supported Labour in 2010 but had voted ‘Yes’ in the referendum was not, in effect, to tell them they had been wrong, or to deliver an ultimatum. Yes, a coalition would have to be ruled out in due course, but his view was to see how many people could be won over before doing so. After all, in the post-referendum landscape, polls were suggesting that Scottish voters liked the sound of an SNP–Labour coalition, however impossible that was going to be.

Jim Murphy had also obtained funding for focus groups which initially explored the views of ‘soft’ SNP supporters – that is, those who had backed the Nationalists at Holyrood but wanted a Labour government at Westminster. The views of these voters, however, soon suggested that ruling out working with Nicola Sturgeon’s party would be counter-productive. As one insider described it:

It felt to them like we were penning them up – we said if you vote SNP, you will get a Tory government. But that’s because we won’t work with the SNP. So in effect it seemed we were saying ‘f*** you’ and that made them more SNP and less Labour.

At this stage the sheer scale of Labour’s defeat in Scotland hadn’t seemed inevitable. John Curtice, Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University suggested that Labour could keep most of their seats if they could pin back the SNP lead to around five per cent. It was a tall order, but coming a good and not a distant second could bolster the prospects of Labour returning to power at Westminster. So it was decided to handle these potential defectors from the Labour-voting camp with care. Data from the vast, academic British Election Study had also distinguished between the attitudes of 2010 Labour voters who had voted ‘Yes’ in the referendum and who were likely to vote SNP, and those who were remaining loyal. The ‘defectors’ tended to be more left-wing – far more of them agreed with the phrase that ‘cuts had gone too far’, and also that they wanted to see more powers devolved to the Scottish parliament.

A record £2 million was spent on the campaign in Scotland, with some of the funding devoted to convening far more regular focus groups. At one stage there were as many as three or four a week. They were carried out by the party’s UK pollsters Stan Greenberg, and, more often, James Morris. The latter had advised Ed Miliband on his leadership campaign nearly five years previously.

The pollsters registered that offers to extend the Holyrood parliament’s welfare powers – along with a concentration on left-wing issues such as denouncing the need for more food banks and arguing for stronger employment rights – had helped to restore a Labour brand tarnished in the eyes of ‘soft’ SNP voters by a close association with the Conservatives during the referendum campaign. However, these same voters still felt Labour would ‘put Westminster before Scotland’.

So initially Miliband had followed Murphy’s advice, and when he was asked on the Andrew Marr Show in January about what would happen in the event of a hung parliament he responded with a rather bizarre and contorted formulation: ‘I am not about deals’ – which raised more questions than it answered.

But the disarray and disagreement over what to say about the SNP didn’t end there. Lord Falconer, the eminent barrister who had been Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary in Tony Blair’s government, had been tasked with doing detailed work on the transition to power, particularly in the event of a hung parliament. He knew a formal coalition would not happen, but also didn’t want it ruled out early on because it might then invite further questions about other deals short of a coalition – such as ‘confidence and supply’. Under this scenario, the SNP might sustain a Labour government by voting for its budget in return for concessions, but not ministerial positions. He felt the door to informal pacts should be kept open as a minority Labour government might need them, certainly in the second half of a parliament.

Crucially, he believed there was another good reason for Labour to avoid being dragged in to saying ‘no’ to every permutation of a deal when in opposition. There was a grave danger that even any discussion of future legislation, or budget measures with SNP MPs when in government would be characterised, however inaccurately, by a hostile press as a ‘deal’. If voters saw this the same way, then that could cause the party to suffer the catastrophic loss of trust which had beset the Liberal Democrats after making their pledge to scrap tuition fees in opposition – and then messily, divisively, abandoning it in power.

Then, there were those that argued quite simply that a day talking about the SNP was a day not spent talking about Labour’s plans for government, so the best way to make a problem go away was not advertise its existence. In this camp were Bob Roberts, the head of communications, and Spencer Livermore who had been put in charge of the election campaign at Labour’s head office.

So on Murphy’s instructions, Miliband initially didn’t rule out a ­coalition – and on Roberts’s advice tried not to mention the elephant in the room.

By March it still wasn’t quite clear that there would be a stampede of trumpeting elephants in that room, but it was obvious that the issue had transcended the question of Labour’s prospects in Scotland. The senior aide to the Shadow Scottish Secretary, Martin McCluskey, recalls being driven in to central London after his flight from Glasgow had landed at Heathrow – and witnessing some of the most expensive advertising sites in the UK, bought up by the Conservatives, warning of a Labour–SNP deal.

In the end, Miliband had felt pressured to rule out a coalition before the formal election campaign had begun. Many of those around him now concede he should have done so even sooner. He had failed to be as explicit earlier in the month when addressing Scottish Labour’s pre-election gathering in Edinburgh. One insider said: ‘Ed and Douglas and Jim were all in different rooms, barely talking to each other.’

So when the anti-SNP line was at last articulated, the anticipated slap in the face for ‘not listening to Scotland’ was subsequently delivered by the attendees at Labour’s Scottish focus groups. But it wasn’t as vicious as had been imagined, partly because the announcement had been made south of the border, and partly because voters had by then seen it coming. It’s also possible, though, that they were less bothered about it because they had little intention of returning to the Labour fold.

Once Miliband made the anti-SNP announcement, one of Labour’s spin doctors triumphantly but hubristically declared ‘we are not going to talk about this for the next eight weeks’. They assumed the ticking time bomb had been defused. But there were secondary devices.

As Charlie Falconer had predicted, the ground swiftly moved on to other options – especially as Nicola Sturgeon said she wasn’t asking for a coalition anyway. But she did offer to help Labour keep David Cameron from going back through the door of Downing Street, so speculation about what type of deal could be struck continued to mount.

More damaging for Labour in Scotland was the finding in their focus groups that the argument that you need to vote Labour to get a Labour government wasn’t being believed. The SNP had said they would help ‘lock’ the Tories out of office, and, as the Nationalists were the one party that hadn’t co-operated with the Conservatives on the referendum, this was seen as credible. Frankly, Lord Falconer believed it too.

Following the election, Labour is now nearly 100 seats behind the Conservatives – and has 55 seats fewer than the SNP in Scotland. So the party is still likely to face questions over whom – and on what terms – they would work with to form a government in future. Taking a hard line with the SNP could mean closing off options they would prefer to keep open, so the dilemmas Ed Miliband faced still exist for his successor.