No Question of Deals

30 April

 

• Ed Miliband indicates he would rather not be in office than deal with the SNP.

 

• Critics say this approach is counter-productive and Jeremy Corbyn may need to revisit it.

 

 

‘THEY WEREN’T TELLING us whether we were f***ed, or how to avoid being f***ed. All they told us were the different ways that we were being f***ed.’ That’s verbatim – but an abridged version of a senior official’s assessment of what Labour’s focus groups in Scotland were telling him.

The switch from trying to win ‘soft’ SNP support or win back former Labour voters to seeking the support of anti-independence ‘switchers’ from other parties was having only very, very limited success. The emphasis was now moving more decisively to shoring up the Labour vote in England. With focus groups there showing key voters were still both credulous of, and concerned about, the prospect a minority Labour government being at the mercy of the SNP it was decided to toughen the stance. Douglas Alexander, representing a Scottish seat, knew that even tougher rhetoric towards the SNP might upset former Labour voters who had backed the ‘Yes’ campaign. But that ship had not only sailed, it was well over the horizon while it was hoped that some support south of the border that was drifting away might yet be steered towards a safe haven. So as general election co-ordinator he sanctioned an even harder line towards the SNP.

The vehicle for delivering the message was to be the final televised encounter of the campaign. It was to be a special edition of BBC Question Time – special not least because the participants wouldn’t be sitting round the familiar table with veteran host David Dimbleby, and with each other. To accommodate the Prime Minister’s demands, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband would each face the audience separately for a 30-minute grilling. There would be no question of a debate between the three party leaders. Given the now indisputable resonance of the SNP question in English marginal seats, it was anticipated the issue would arise from the audience. And it did when Simon Wilkinson asked Ed Miliband why the Labour party was misleading the country over a deal with the SNP. The Labour leader was fully prepared, though rather disingenuously he suggested his message was aimed at the Scottish electorate when he declared: ‘I want to say this to voters in Scotland…’ when in fact just about everything which followed was aimed at voters further south: ‘Let me be plain. We’re not going to do a deal with the Scottish National Party; we’re not going to have a coalition, we’re not going to have a deal.’

But then he went further: ‘Let me just say this to you – if it meant we weren’t going to be in government, not doing a coalition, not having a deal, then so be it.’

Just to underline that, he raised two fundamental issues on which he disagreed with Nicola Sturgeon – renewing Britain’s Scottish-based nuclear weapons, and reducing the deficit. He could not have had a harder line towards the SNP than to suggest he would rather sacrifice a stint in Number 10 than reach an accommodation on an iota of their policy programme.

Nicola Sturgeon was quick to respond. She said: ‘He sounded as if he was saying that he would rather see David Cameron and the Conservatives back in government than actually work with the SNP.’ She knew that this approach would chime with those ‘No’ voters in Scotland who felt that there just wasn’t ‘enough of a difference’ between Cameron and ­Miliband and who were looking to the SNP to be ‘Stronger for Scotland’. Labour expected to take a hit in Scotland, and their focus groups duly delivered quite a whack. What was more surprising is that the tactic wasn’t more successful in England. Partly this can be explained by a lack of consistency – a sense that Labour was getting dragged almost against its will towards a tougher position – from a position of no coalition, to no deal of any kind, to no government at all, if need be. In other words the party and Miliband in particular always seemed to be on the back foot and not arguing from a position of principle.

But a senior SNP official felt this move towards the toughest possible stance could have achieved the very opposite of what Labour intended, and cost them support in England. By in effect buying into the Conservative narrative that the SNP were somehow beyond the pale, that they were indeed people with nefarious objectives and with whom you could have no working relationship, voters in English marginal seats were then invited to consider who would be stronger in resisting the demands of these barbaric hordes. And the answer, it would appear, was the Conservatives. Labour privately expected to be able to ‘lock out’ the Tories from Downing Street but wouldn’t publicly extol the benefits of a ‘progressive majority.’ Labour never challenged the terms of the debate set by the incumbent in Downing Street – that this would be something to be feared rather than embraced.

And the former Labour first minister of Scotland, Henry McLeish, agrees that this approach had been damaging to his party in Scotland:

Ed should have said from the beginning that he wanted a mandate to govern and that he would speak to anyone to keep the menace of the Tories out – it was a serious error to say in the end he would speak to the SNP over his dead body – it made Labour seem out of touch.

A senior Shadow Cabinet member who was involved in discussions on how to handle Labour’s SNP threat came to the conclusion that the stronger line – while worth a shot – ultimately lacked authenticity in the eyes of the electorate:

We were treating the SNP as being with us to lock out the Conservatives yet we were also saying no deal of any kind. Our problem was that we were being forced into what the public perceived to be an impossibilist position – us saying ‘no arrangement whatsoever’ just didn’t ring true in some way.

There is now a pressing challenge for the next Labour leader on whether to attack or accommodate the Nationalists. Some in the Shadow Cabinet are warning against continuing to treat the SNP ‘like the North Korean communist party’. If around half the Scottish electorate believe it’s all right to vote for the values espoused by the SNP, Labour will need to prove that their own values of solidarity and social progress are better than the Nationalists – it won’t be enough, this line of argument goes, to just ‘rail against them’.