Welcome to the Wendy House

I've just been reading Brian Taylor, Aunty Beeb's Scottish political reporter, blogging on Wendy Alexanfer's 'campaign launch'. Campaign? Does one campaign for a coronation? But that's beside the point. Having read Brian's characteristic, well-considered article I then read the responses. Wow. Twenty-eight posts and not one in support of Wendy. And I'm sorry, the twenty-ninth isn't either.

Labour's problem is that it is focussed on the United Kingdom, and that doesn't work in Scotland for exactly the same reason as the United Kingdom doesn't work for Scotland. The English are eight times more numerous than us, and, on the whole, much more right wing than us. Their central concerns are about property, security, xenophobia, and Europe (see xenophobia). This isn't to say there aren't left wing English people, of course; but the reason British Labour has moved to the right is because they aren't sufficiently numerous to support a left-wing party.

But what Wendy is trying to do is to push the message that works in England, in Scotland; and that won't work. Brian tells us that she talks of '... in schools, a modernised curriculum, leadership and personalised learning; in health, help for patients with chronic conditions to manage their own care; in society, support for parents and aspirational home owners.'

'Modernised curriculum'? We've had at least twenty years of central politicians meddling with the curriculum; it's not obvious that our schools have benefited. 'Leadership' and 'manage their own care' sound suspiciously like code-words for privatisation, for the very good reason that Labour have used them as codewords for privatisation. And 'support for... aspirational home owners'. Aye, as they say, right. Ye cannae - ye cannae get away with that in Scotland.

Not because we don't have aspirational home owners in Scotland, but because we know what the code words mean. They mean, turn social housing into ghettos for the lumpen-proletariat, for the outcasts, the rejects of 'aspirational' society. In rural areas such as this one, it means turning social housing into bantustans for the few remaining natives after all the quality housing has been sold off as holiday or retirement homes to the 80% of people in this island who are not Scots.

Scotland is the natural home of a mainstream social democratic party. We have the traditions - both Wendy Alexander and Gordon Brown grew up, as they say, in the manse - of solidarity, of concern and responsibility for our society's less 'aspirational' members; of high quality public education; of well trained, able, committed and dedicated health professionals.

Labour needs an indepedent party in Scotland which can set its own agenda to the tune of Scotland's electors. If it cannot or will not do that - if it sees maintaining a common front across the whole United Kingdom, with its agenda tuned to Middle England - then in Scotland it will find itself reduced to a rump, squabbling over the same handful of expatriot and elderly voters who have already led the Scottish Conservatives into the wilderness.

If Labour chooses to abandon the centre ground of Scottish politics, and slavishly follow London Labour's slide to the right, it cannot complain if the SNP moves to occupy that space.