 | 'Jim Devine, victor in Livingston, is a fine fellow and will be an able MP, but I'm sure he would be the first to say that he is not in the same league politically as the late Robin Cook. But here's the rub: would someone with Cook's views on Iraq be allowed anywhere near a selection committee today? Would Robin Cook even have joined the Labour Party in 2005?' Iain Macwhirter in the Sunday Herald, 2 nd October 2005. |  |
It was a plague on all their houses Ð SNP, Labour, SSP, LibDem, Tory. Fewer than a third of the electorate bothered to vote in the Glasgow Cathcart by-election, and fewer than 40% in Livingston. It was a mute but devastating verdict on the state of politics in the Scottish parliament and at Westminster. No political party can take comfort from results like these.
Labour's campaign was hampered by the image of Lord Watson Of Fire-raising. But the antics of the Labour candidate Charlie Gordon, with his less than coded remarks about First Minister Jack McConnell, didn't extinguish the flames of lurid controversy. Only one in eight of the voters in Cathcart voted Labour.
But a win is a win. The real losers were the Scottish National Party, who should have won Cathcart comprehensively. Sure, they ran Labour close, cutting Labour's majority in half in the Glasgow seat. And in Livingston they slashed Labour's majority by 10,000 on a 10% swing. (The Liberal Democrats were nowhere in Livingston despite their anti-war stance, a big disappointment for their new leader, Nicol Stephen.)
The SNP insist that they were the only party to gain votes and that this is a solid basis for their campaign for the next Scottish parliamentary election in 18 months. But they really can't afford to miss opportunities like this. Cathcart could have been a Holyrood version of the Glasgow Govan by-election in 1988, when the charismatic SNP candidate, Jim Sillars, overturned a 19,000 Labour majority and ignited Scottish politics for a decade. Cathcart was a far easier proposition, with the sitting Labour member jailed for fire-raising and his replacement caught mouthing off about his own leader. It was like Neil 'sleaze' Hamilton crossed with the Monklands by-election. Cathcart even has takeover-threatened ScottishPower's headquarters and a local accident and emergency unit closing. What more could an opposition want in a by-election?
If they can't win in Cathcart, the SNP can't win anywhere. The votes of both the Scottish Socialist Party and the former lord provost Pat Lally collapsed, leaving nearly 4000 votes going spare Ð easily enough to have secured an SNP victory. Labour were always more worried about Cathcart (and indeed Livingston) than they let on, and many can still hardly believe they actually won.
The Cathcart was an open goal. So how did the SNP miss? Well, in a nutshell, because of the candidate. Maire Whitehead would have been perfectly acceptable in a general election, but a high-profile by-election needs something more: charisma, vision and style. It speaks volumes that even on polling day, people still didn't know how to pronounce her name. Ill-considered remarks about council cuts led to her being effectively gagged. The SNP cannot afford to lose seats like this just because they are afraid of hurting the feelings of the local party. They should have parachuted in an experienced candidate with the ability to win.
Imagine if, for the sake of argument, the former chief executive of the SNP, Mike Russell, had been chosen to fight this seat. He would immediately have put Cathcart on the media map. It would have become a referendum on Labour's conduct both locally and nationally, a crusade against Labour cronyism and moral turpitude. Russell would have focussed relentlessly on the clash of personalities between Charlie Gordon and Jack McConnell, 'the odd couple of Scottish Labour politics'.
So there are no excuses here for anyone. A potential watershed by- election where only 32% bothered to turn out and vote is a dismal commentary on the new Scottish political culture. Inevitably, some have seen Cathcart as an electoral repudiation of devolution, and Holyrood can't help but share some of the blame for voter apathy. But it isn't just a problem for the Scottish parliamentary community.
The lowest Westminster by-election turnout was Leeds Central in 1999 at an incredibly dismal 19%. Then there was Tottenham in 2000, with 25% turnout in Bernie Grant's old seat, showing that the black vote was staying home in droves. And Kensington and Chelsea's 29% in 1999 showed that the white upper-middle classes were no slouches themselves when it came to avoiding the polling booths Ð and that was for the Tory star, Michael Portillo.
Across the board, black, white, rich and poor, we are losing the habit of voting. Part of the problem is the absence of real political issues and the erosion of civil society. Voting is increasingly seen as something young people just don't do, like going to church. However, there is no shortage of idealism around, as events like Make Poverty History demonstrated this summer, when a quarter of a million people marched in Edinburgh. People are still interested in politics Ð just look at Iraq Ð and can be moved to action. But not moved enough, it seems, to go out and vote.
I'm afraid parties are becoming their own worse enemies here. One of the unfortunate by-products of one member, one vote has been the way that power over candidate selection has been handed to the membership just at the moment when activists Ð in all parties Ð have been leaving in disgust or boredom. Labour's membership has collapsed by nearly 60% since 1997. What is left is a rather eccentric rump of party functionaries and office bearers. It's hardly surprising that these unrepresentative cliques should select candidates in their own image. This has coincided with an obsession with party discipline which has made independent thinking almost impossible.
Jim Devine, victor in Livingston, is a fine fellow and will be an able MP, but I'm sure he would be the first to say that he is not in the same league politically as the late Robin Cook. But here's the rub: would someone with Cook's views on Iraq be allowed anywhere near a selection committee today? Would Robin Cook even have joined the Labour Party in 2005?
Would Jim Sillars have joined the SNP? Margo MacDonald, the best SNP politician of her generation, was frozen out of her party by SNP apparatchiks who preferred mediocrity. It was the same with Mike Russell. And it's not just a problem for the SNP and Labour. Look at the Tory leadership shambles. The Tories have discovered that activist democracy can lead to people like Iain Duncan Smith being elected instead of Ken Clarke. But they can't reverse it.
The Scottish Socialist Party achieved an extraordinary feat for the far left by winning six seats in the 2003 Holyrood elections. Now mad party disease has all but wrecked them as a political force. They lost 2000 votes in Cathcart and came sixth. Petty factionalism caused the fall of their charismatic leader, Tommy Sheridan. Puerile antics in parliament did the rest.
You can't help thinking that politics is just too important to leave to politicians Ð to those cliques of sociopathic obsessives whose idea of a good night out is to pursue their poisonous feuds and occult disputes in stuffy meeting rooms. Politics needs to get out more.
Tribal politics, of the kind we have in Scotland, has clearly had its day. The problem is finding a different template, another way of doing politics. Imaginative politicians such as Douglas Alexander, Mike Russell, and Charles Kennedy freely admit that they have to do politics in a different way to re-engage the voters. And the media has to as well. Mea culpa on that. But this is too serious a matter to be left to the party machines or to the newspaper hacks.
The only solution I can see for the malaise is to introduce proportional representation. That's the only way to break up the elective dictatorship in Westminster and revive democracy. But it wouldn't have prevented the Cathcart effect: Holyrood already has PR.
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