IN the digital age Scottish Labour is destined, it seems, always to be operating in analogue. The election of Anas Sarwar as its new leader means this party is destined to skulk around the fringes of Scottish political debate for another few years. Mr Sarwar’s insistence on opposing a referendum on Scottish independence effectively neuters anything else the party might have to offer as the country seeks to tackle the long-term economic effects of coronavirus.

The reasons why the party has inherited from the Liberals Democrats the discretionary title of Her Majesty’s Holder of the Jaikets are not difficult to divine. The most significant of these is their persistent failure to reclaim the multitudes of its supporters who migrated to the SNP following the 2014 referendum on independence.

Mr Sarwar and the party he now leads have had seven years to offer them a route back but insist on proving George Santayana’s aphorism: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Independence – for or against – is still the only game in town and Mr Sarwar’s leadership victory means Labour will continue as an end-of-the-pier act while the big stuff unfolds on the national stage.

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Even if the new leader had like Monica Lennon, his leadership rival, endorsed the spirit of a second referendum he’d still have had a lot of work to do trying to persuade Labour’s lost generation that the party is fit for purpose. Mr Sarwar has only been a politician for 10 years since inheriting the Westminster nomination for Glasgow Central from his multi-millionaire dad in 2010. In that short time though, he has come to epitomise why Labour in Scotland is an electoral make-weight. Indeed, his career defines it. At the 2010 UK election Labour took 41 of the 59 available seats; this has since been reduced to one. The party’s last stand, rather fittingly, is in Edinburgh South, a constituency which includes Morningside (North and South).

During this time, Mr Sarwar threw himself into the No campaign throughout the 2014 referendum on independence, touring Scotland on a battle-bus with his political master, Gordon Brown. Both wrapped themselves so tightly in the Union Jack that it still holds them in its red, white and blue embrace. Mr Brown has since taken up residence with the – how can I put this – more esoteric faction of the pro-Union community, setting up with them a think-tank called Our Scottish Future. This aims to make the social justice case for Scotland within the Union. The family firm from whom Mr Sarwar derives his fortune built its success on poverty wages and refusing to recognise a trade union.

A properly-functioning Labour Party in Scotland could have exploited the SNP’s current weaknesses, of which there are many. While the causes of long-term, multi-deprivation in Scotland’s poorest communities remain unaddressed, the SNP leadership – in power for 14 years – now panders to the whims of middle-class, identity narcissists who exist solely for the purpose of cancelling anyone who doesn’t agree with them. And – as the Salmond inquiry is currently demonstrating – it believes that legal due process is for other people.

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The party is daily shipping members who feel hounded and disenfranchised by its own leaders. Scottish Labour should be picking them up. It continues though, to give allegiance to a Union currently in the grip of a party that has acted like prohibition-era gangsters while people suffered the effects of the pandemic. Meanwhile, its UK leader has hit on an imaginative strategy to regain power at Westminster: he’s positioned Labour to the right of the Tories on social and economic issues. There is still no home in this party for those of its former members now seeking a way out of the SNP.

Last week, a briefing paper by Public Health Scotland on how Covid-19 is affecting children, showed that the pandemic’s iniquities are increasing social and health inequality – by every possible indicator – in our most deprived communities. Last week, the UK’s main political parties unveiled their road maps out of coronavirus. What these communities need though, is a road map which will offer hope for the next 10 years. This is when they will come to endure the full impact of Covid-19 in lost jobs; high suicide rates; rising crime and increased rates of mortality.

Anas Sarwar says the next session of Holyrood should be a “recovery Parliament” and wants to bring the country together. The main problem with posturing such as this is that, as Pubic Health Scotland’s research shows, we’re not all in this together.

Once, when Labour was a great party, it provided all of the means by which working-class people were able to lift themselves out of poverty and poor health. It created the NHS, improved social housing and revolutionised our system of education so that ordinary people could enjoy their life rather than merely endure it.

In the course of this pandemic our governments were forced to get creative to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed by the infection’s spread. They introduced a tiered system that targeted infection rates in those areas worst affected and permitted those least affected to maintain a degree of normality. Naturally, it was working-class communities, being the most populous, which were asked to make the majority of sacrifices. They have earned the right to expect a similar approach from government when they begin to encounter Covid’s full fury in the years ahead.

Thus, we could have a tiered approach to addressing the poverty gap which threatens to widen in the next decade. In this, an imaginative suite of measures could be devised such as flooding these communities with more nurses, doctors and teachers at better rates of pay. By giving them rates relief and interest-free loans and by continuing furlough long after it’s stopped in more affluent areas.

This is prime territory for the Labour Party. It won’t happen in England for as long as Sir Keir Starmer thinks the key is to reach out to big business and back the armed forces. But if Anas Sarwar could fight free of the Union Jack which has suffocated Labour in Scotland his leadership might yet have a chance by being imaginative and daring to be brave.

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