Report by Dave Cartwright, Glasgow North West Labour Party
There was rapturous applause at the count in Glasgow on 18 November 2017 when the vote was announced and Richard Leonard was declared the new leader of the Scottish Labour Party. He gained 56% of the vote and Anas Sarwar gained 44%. Later on in the day the celebrations moved on to the singing of the Internationale!
Richard Leonard fought the campaign on the basis of radical change. His leadership election leaflet declared “Scottish Labour is at a turning point: we can once again become a party of real change, offering people a sense of hope out of despair. Our society is deeply divided, poverty and inequality is rife: with the richest one per cent in Scotland today owning more personal wealth than the whole of the bottom fifty per cent. Too much power rests in too few hands.”
The election of a left winger leader in Scotland is a significant turning point. There were many commentators who had declared the Scottish Labour Party to be dead and buried. The Labour Party in Scotland was reduced to just one Westminster MP in 2015 (from 40 in the previous election). The Scottish working class declared with their votes (or lack of them) their disgust with a whole range of failings by right-wing Labour politicians: the policies of Blair like the attacks on benefits and the war in Iraq, the disastrous Labour Party “Better Together” campaign in the Scottish Referendum where Darling appeared as the defender of Tory policies, and the lack of fight by Labour Councillors against Tory-Government imposed cuts.
Socialists active in the Labour Party knew that the position could be turned around if the correct policies were adopted and the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party was part of the change. The Scottish Labour Party lagged behind the general left-wing movement but is now catching up. The SNP must have been seriously disappointed with Theresa May’s snap election in 2017 because it gave the working class the chance to take back 6 seats to Labour earlier than expected.
In my own constituency, when we were nominating for the UK Labour Party leadership in 2016, the majority chose Yvette Cooper over Jeremy Corbyn. In September 2017, when we nominated for the Scottish Labour Party Leadership, it was 23 for Leonard and 5 for Sarwar. The local party membership increased by 30% in two months. There has been a steady move to the left in all sections of the Labour Party in Scotland. The organised left in the Scottish Labour Party is the Campaign for Socialism (CFS) which has been active for 20 years or so and has worked closely with Momentum since it was established. This year CFS has topped 1,000 members. The left has established a strong presence on the Scottish Labour Party Executive and the youth section of CFS has won a majority in Scottish Young Labour.
It is a sign of the changes going on in the Labour Party that Anas Sarwar tried to portray himself as a socialist. His election leaflet declared “And Tory austerity will end under my radical plan to use the Scottish Parliament’s powers to distribute wealth and invest in public services”. He is able to distance himself from the “Blairite” tag because he has always been against invasions in the Middle East but on social policy his position was always in line with Blair. His current positioning reflects the current tactic of the right wing in the Labour Party which is to “hang in there”. The election of Richard Leonard is cause for celebration but it is only the start of the fight. There is much work still to be done.
November 20 2017
