Andy Maciver: What Labour needs is simple ... a bit of patience

This year is proving to be a hard, hard slog for the Labour Party. Last week’s polling had them at anything from seven to nine points behind the Conservative government, which by any measure is unimpressive against a mid-term government which has already locked the Labour Party out of power for 11 years.

In normal times, with numbers like these, some might question whether Sir Keir is up to the job. Indeed, some are. But these are not normal times. Polling has proven to be exceptionally fluid. It was not altogether long ago that Sir Keir entered his sixth month of beating Prime Minister Boris Johnson in head-to-head polling (he is now six points behind).

From Labour’s perspective, Sir Keir is in the eye of the vaccine storm. For every journalist, commentator, citizen lamenting the UK government’s handling of the Covid pandemic in its early stages, there is now one lavishing praise on its world-leading vaccine rollout.

Boris bet the house on the vaccine, and won.

It is an inevitability of human behaviour that the public will be, to a degree, beholden to the leader who oversees a route out of the most calamitous event of their lives; all the more so when they see near neighbours across the English Channel moving in the opposite direction.

For Sir Keir, however, all is far from lost. Were there an idiom for Labour, it would be “where there is time, there is hope”. And there is time.

Sir Keir’s ultimate electoral test may not come for three-and-a-half years, during which much can change. By then, we assume, the acute pandemic will be over and Covid, as Professor Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, has indicated, will be treated much like the annual influenza.

Furthermore, we will be locked into what will inevitably be a hugely painful recovery. Unemployment will be higher. Taxes too, probably. Interest rates, perhaps. In other words, our Potemkin economy will have lost its facade.

And there is little doubt, at least in my mind, that Sir Keir is the right person to take advantage of that political and economic environment when it emerges. His move to Downing Street is far from locked-in; writing off Mr Johnson is a fool’s errand, and he is at least as deserving of the Comeback Kid moniker as its more famous owner, President Bill Clinton.

However, it seems to me that those in the Labour Party who doubt it made the right choice seem to believe they live in a country inhabited by a mythical population of committed socialists. They don’t.

It is unclear what more empirical evidence is required to make them understand this. Tony Blair won three elections for the first time in the party’s history, because of centrist politics and economics, before the party gradually deteriorated over the following 13 years as it steadily moved further and further to the left. A centrist resurgence in the form of Sir Keir immediately flipped the polls. Some things in politics are simple. This is one of them.

In Labour land, Sir Keir’s job is not the only one occupied by the right person. Enter Anas Sarwar, the star-so-far of the Holyrood election campaign, having clearly won the first leaders’ debate, and emerged from the second with at least a score draw.

Much like Sir Keir, Mr Sarwar is a man with time on his hands. The worst possible thing he could have done, having replaced his predecessor so soon before an election, would have been to over-promise before inevitably under-delivering.

He has assiduously avoided taking that well-trodden path, so much so that he appears to have already started telling his 2021-26 story, ready for a tilt at Bute House in five years time.

That is by no means a fanciful prospect. For the Labour Party sits on electoral gold, which can be cashed in if and when the second independence referendum is called, and can accumulate value after it is over.

We are currently locked in constitutional polarisation, with the two poles occupied by the SNP and the Tories. This will change, particularly if the SNP wins a majority next month. The denial of a democratic request, for a second referendum, will see the Tories become as isolated as they were in the 1990s; Labour will surely avoid falling into that hole alongside them, and will endorse a referendum.

At that point, Mr Sarwar will be in a position to grasp the leadership of the pro-UK lobby, with he and Sir Keir advocating the sort of enhanced devolutionary agenda which historic polling has always shown to be the likeliest vote winner.

A third way on the constitutional question, sensible economic policy, a partnership with an equally sensible Labour leader in London. In a post-referendum environment, those are enviable attributes, and could see Mr Sarwar with a realistic prospect of being First Minister in 2026, by which time the SNP will have been in power for almost two decades.

And whilst Scottish Labour has a distance to travel in terms of voting intention, it has much less far to go in terms of voter trust. This month’s Ipsos MORI polling for STV showed Labour, again, recording very solid figures on whether the people trust them to run public services and the economy, and to stand up for Scotland’s interests. They remain well behind the SNP, as we might expect, but on each of these measures they are ahead of the Tories, despite trailing them in voting intention.

In other words, people are ready to, and want to, vote Labour again, when they see sensible, relatable leadership (which they now do), and when they see a credible position on the constitution (which they soon may).

Not so long ago, many commentators, me included, wondered out loud whether Labour was dead, north and south of the border. We were wrong. They are not. The rose is still wilted, but this is Labour’s spring.

Be patient, I say. Summer is coming.

Andy Maciver is Director of Message Matters

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