Deeply concerned at the prospect of any post-General Election coalition with the SNP this May, the Parliamentary Labour Party [elected Labour MPs] has apparently already booked a room for three days after election day, to meet to review any proposed coalitions and to decide what elected members will and will not support.
The heart of this matter is the continuing shadow of the possibility of a Labour-SNP coalition which Labour Leader, Ed Miliband, continually avoids ruling out.
Many Labour MPs on both sides of the Scottish border are said to be furious that they have spent the last couple of years fighting for the continuation of the United Kingdom and against the SNP in the matter of the Scottish Independence Referendum – and are not prepared to tolerate the prospect of being asked to go into coalition with them.
The resolve of the Parliamentary Labour Party is interesting.
It contrasts oddly, though, with the party’s deliberate campaign strategy of telling different stories on this issue to two different electoral audiences.
There are plausible reports of anxious middle class voters being told that there is no chance of the party going into coalition with the SNP; while at the same time voters in the housing schemes of Glasgow and other towns are apparently being told that the party is open minded about this possibility and has not ruled it out.
Ed Miliband is taking a heavy personal hit on this in terms of weak leadership, unable to make a strong statement on his party’s stance on what would be a fundamental matter of political principle – were politics and principles not mutually exclusive.
While Mr Miliband is indeed guilty of weak leadership in this, it is unfair to see him as the leading figure in what is a conscious two-faced pragmatic strategy.
Labour in Scotland is deeply threatened and, regardless of the specific extent of the damage to come, it is inconceivable that the SNP are not going to take serious lumps out of the Labour vote across the country.
It has long been an ill-kept Labour secret that Mr Miliband will indeed announce that Labour will not do a deal with the SNP – but not until a later stage.
This is the compromise made with Scottish Labour Leader, Jim Murphy, the effective author of the ‘dual-narrative for dual audiences’ tactic. It is the signature of the true Blairite, of which Murphy is one: the utterly unprincipled pragmatism that led to this country being taken to war in Iraq on a consciously false premise – because Blair had already vowed to deliver the UK to that battleground to earn the personal favour of President George W Bush, which has paid to his advantage ever since.
[It will - in the prevailing timescale - be interesting to the next generation to discover just what the Chilcott Inquiry was eventually allowed to report on the nature of the advance pledge given on this matter.]
The Scottish Labour Leader is trying to win back the Labour voters who turned their backs on their party’s pro-union stance, voted for independence in September 2014 and handed Glasgow, North Lanarkshire, East Dunbartonshire and Dundee to the nationalist camp.
The narrative is that it might offend such voters were Labour to adopt an anti-SNP stance and so it needs to appear to be open to patriotic collaboration.
This is unintelligent as well as dishonest – because Mr Murphy knows as well as Mr Miliband that a deal will eventually be ruled out.
For as long as pro-indy once-upon-a-time Labour voters believe that a deal is not impossible, how and why could that knowledge possibly bring them back to Labour?
It can only make them unequivocally comfortable in voting SNP in May – because if they believe that the two will work together afterwards anyway, then voting SNP is every bit as good as voting Labour. It amounts to no more than deciding in which side of a common basket to place their vote.
Meantime this literally two-faced strategy will alienate the concerned middle class Labour pro-union vote, many of whom were left prey to personal intimidation and abuse during the indy campaign, in the absence of any effective campaign that made a pro-union stance attractive as well as risk-averse.
A Labour party with fire in its belly would say what it stood for – and fight for it.
Of course, all of the angst from the parliamentary Labour Party is unnecessary – and deployed at too late a stage.
Doing a dance of the seven veils with two audiences, each hoping for very different Labour attitudes to Scottish nationalism, makes the party literally unsupportable.
Many of the current Parliamentary Labour party busily booking a room to signal their intent not to be rolled over by the leadership into any post-election coalition they don’t want – will not be in that room after the election. They will have lost their seats – to the SNP in Scotland and to the unequivocally pro-union parties south of the border.
They would serve their party and themselves better by bringing real pressure to bear now to have their party declare a ‘red line’ position on the constitutional contradiction of contemplating going into government of the United Kingdom with a resurgent separatist party.
Moreover, unless it were to achieve an overall majority in the Commons at the election – which is not a plausible outcome, Labour is not going to be anywhere but in the passenger seat after the vote.
Protocols for the handling of a hung parliament, as we published recently, were established by Cabinet Secretary, Robert ArMstrong in the Health-Wilson election in 1974 and applied.
These protocols were revived and and reconfirmed by Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell in the 2010 Brown-Cameron election – and applied then too.
The fundamental premise here is that, in a ‘hung parliament’ outcome where no party has an overall majority – and where the party of the sitting Prime Minister may even have fewer seats that the opposition party, the sitting Prime Minister must have the opportunity to form a government.
In 2010 the Liberal Democrats accepted this protocol and, although auctioning themselves blatantly to both major major parties, gave Gordon Brown’s Labour the chance to secure their support.
Nick Clegg then added a useful nuance to the protocols by making it clear that the party with the largest number of seats – and therefore with the greater confidence of the country – holds the strongest position.
No serious psephologist today expects Labour to finish ahead of the Conservatives in May, so as the party of the sitting Prime Minister and most probably as the party with the largest number of seats, the Conservatives under Mr Cameron will get first crack at forming a government; with Labour only getting that opportunity if Mr Cameron fails to do so.
Cameron might well choose to govern as a minority administration and would probably be able to deliver a government programme capable of carrying key votes in the Commons.
What is interesting in the reported move by the Parliamentary Labour Party though, is the flexing of muscle by the infantry.
