Wendy and the Peter Pan-jandrums of Scottish Labour

Posted on | March 28, 2008 | No Comments

“Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”

Thomas Paine: “The Rights of Man”

“Nobody on the centre-left should be in any doubt that if the Nationalists ever came close to achieving what they want, the winners will be few and the losers will be many.”

Wendy Alexander: “Change is what we do”

Paine’s reputation as a pamphleteer is under no threat from the current leader of the Labour Party in Scotland. Wendy Alexander’s pamphlet was published to coincide with the Scottish Labour conference in Aviemore this weekend. I would predict, having worked my way through its painful prose, that it will have precisely no effect whatsoever on the electoral prospects of the Labour Party in Scotland, and it will have even less effect on the overall political dynamic in Scotland at the present time.

The problems are many, and the solution, it seems, is to play ostrich and to stick our necks deep down in holes in the sand, hoping that the good times will return anew when the Scottish people eventually recognise the SNP government for the bunch of charlatans that it so obviously is. Not much of a policy.

As someone who has been a lifelong supporter and member of the Labour Party, the current slough into which the party panjandrums have cast themselves and the party as a whole is painful indeed. I am no fan of the clamjamfrie of zenophobes, naÃ¯fs and the occasional political sophisticate that is the SNP, but every Labour Party member I have spoken to in recent months, and that includes many current activists, are clear that Alex Salmond is doing a very good job indeed. The main opposition, on the other hand, is most decidely not doing a good job.

One reason for this, I believe, is that the heads-in-the-sand attitude has lumbered the party in Parliament with various leftover dregs from precisely the same group of people who put the Scottish Labour Party where it is in the first place, in the doldrums, and the SNP in government. A shift from Jack McConnell to Wendy Alexander was no shift at all, merely a change of wallpaper from one dated design to another. Despite the pamphlet’s title, change is most certainly not what these people do. All they really do is whatever bidding comes their way from the ‘gifted politician of the centre-left’ currently gracing 10 Downing Street.

One former Labour minister, Henry McLeish, dares to express what we all know is a widely held view within the wider Scottish Labour movement – namely that we should at least contemplate the option of independence for Scotland – and he is immediately stamped upon from on high by Sam Galbraith, the former Minister of Education who managed to achieve precisely nothing for Scottish education whilst in office. These people forget that ‘home rule’ has been an honourable and abiding strand within Scottish Labour thinking since the days of the ILP.

The fundamental problem with Scottish Labour is that, while this interchangeable group of adolescent-like in-fighters were vying with each other for so many years, both before the foundation of the Parliament in 1999, and in Government until the last election, no one bothered to nurture the next generation of Labour politicians to take on the challenge of the SNP and the challenge of a world that this group is simply unable to comprehend. Their only hope in the medium term – and it could happen – is that one or two of the more eccentric nationalist MSPs within the SNP will find a way out from under the lid that Salmond and Sturgeon are sitting so tightly on at the moment and cause embarrassment to the party of government. Again, not a positive policy for change, I would suggest, for Scottish Labour.

And the pamphlet itself is a massive disappointment as an agenda for change. How can a statement of policy for the Scottish Labour Party have nothing to say about poverty, about trade unions, about workers’ rights, about unemployment (and under-employment)?

I found my way to the section on education with at least some hope, thinking that this was a subject that might be kept away from the petty party politics that dominate the rest of the document. But I was disappointed, of course.

Alexander, it seems, simply has no conception of what education in the 21st Century ought to look like. Her policy for primary education, for instance, can be summed up as ‘making sure that primary pupils are properly prepared for secondary schooling’.

“At the primary school stage, parents want to know whether their child is guaranteed a firm grasp of the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic, and oral communication before they go to secondary school. Lack of these basic skills is a prime cause of the disciplinary problems that blight too many of our schools. Scottish Labour must seek out ways to guarantee that all children leave primary education fully equipped for secondary school.”

Where does she get this tripe from? The sad fact is that the SNP have no more idea than Wendy does about what a relevant education for today’s young people might look like, so she has missed a chance to offer some genuinely radical thinking on a core area of government policy.

“Children learn differently and many will have a time in their school careers where they struggle with a subject or a concept. It is a time when they could do with extra support to maintain their enthusiasm and confidence. If we want all pupils to leave primary school ready for secondary education, we need to be willing to put our resources into much more individual attention for those who need it. This would take the pressure off the classroom teacher and other pupils who may be suffering when their classmates are disaffected or disengaged. Getting it right for every child through their own ways of learning and discovering their interests and strengths should increasingly be part of the school experience from the primary years.”

All I can do when I read this kind of meaningless guff is to shake my head in disbelief at the chasm between this particular politician’s view of education in Scotland and the reality that will be faced by every child currently in Scottish schools as they leave over the next few years to enter employment or to continue their education in other ways. This verbiage does not even begin to meet their needs.

I’ll leave the last word to Thomas Paine:

“A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.”

“Change is what we do” does not even manage ‘moderately good’.

Technorati Tags: scottish labour, wendy alexander, thomas paine, snp, independence, politics, education