A FORMER Labour MP who lost his seat to the SNP has called on both his own party and the nationalists to "grow up" as he described Nicola Sturgeon as Scotland's most successful politician in history.

 

Tom Harris, a Glasgow MP for 14 years before he was ousted last month, said that the issue of Scottish independence aside, there is little that separates Labour and the SNP in terms of political ideology.

He accused both parties of coming up with artificial "red lines" between each other and "manufacturing absurd differences" rather than working together to devise ways of addressing problems facing Scotland.

Writing on the Labour Hame website, he said: "On the main devolved areas of policy, it's very difficult to see much difference in the approach of Nicola Sturgeon's Scottish Government to that of Jack McConnell's Scottish Executive. That's not to say we don't try. Scottish health and education are not the success story the SNP would like us to believe. But then, neither were they under the last Labour-LibDem regime.

"Policy is still pretty much the same, and in an alternative universe where Labour were still in power at Holyrood, the budgets would be indistinguishable too.

"Certainly, there are disagreements at the fringes, on emphasis. But in broad principle? Not remotely. But modern politics demands "red lines" and "clear blue water", even where they don't exist. Which means that, in order to retain the attention of the public and the media, they have to be created artificially.

"So the SNP accuse Labour of letting Scotland down and Labour accuses the SNP of screwing up NHS waiting lists and exam results, and everyone accuses the Tories of being generally evil and uncaring... It's all a little tiresome. And dishonest."

He added that the First Minister was a social democrat with similar values to the vast majority of Scottish Labour members and that criticism of her on the basis that she was "Scotland's most successful politician ever" was "hardly justified". He added that those who sought to portray Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson as a modern-day Margaret Thatcher "should get a grip" and suggested that nationalists accept Jim Murphy is a "good guy, with a strong moral core".

Mr Harris, who stood for the Scottish Labour leadership in 2011, offered an apology for the role he had played in stoking up bad feeling between parties and criticised Labour supporters who attacked SNP MPs for voting with Tory rebels on an amendment that would deliver their manifesto commitment of full fiscal autonomy.

He hit out at the practice of publicising abusive Twitter comments from members of the public and claiming they were representative of entire parties, and revealed that he had found himself in hot water with the Labour leadership before the 2011 Holyrood election for suggesting a possible coalition agreement with the SNP in a newspaper article.

He added: "Here's the bottom line: the vast majority of people who stand for election, from every mainstream party, are good people. They have far more to agree about than to disagree about. Yes, we're let down by the fringes, by the abusive who use Twitter to make up for their own lack of friends. But they can be so easily ignored. Instead we raise them up to the full glare of publicity and invite the world to regard them as typical of whichever party they represent. They're not. They're dicks. Now move on.

"There are no circumstances in which I would ever vote for Scottish independence. So what? On every other policy area that's been devolved to Holyrood (so, every policy area that's been devolved to Holyrood, in fact), there's room for agreement. Is there any grown up reason we all can't start using that room?"