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DOUGLAS Alexander has come up with a novel explanation of why his party were dealt a humbling defeat at this year’s Scottish Parliament election.
It wasn’t because they were led by the vacuous nobody Anas Sarwar, nor because they failed to put forward any memorable policies, or a even a vision of what Scotland could be.
It wasn’t even – to use that cliche that tells you a politician is truly out of ideas – that they didn’t have a story to tell.
No, for the Scottish Secretary, it was because they had underestimated how popular the SNP were.
That will be surprising to many, not least those in the SNP. Their constituency vote share was the lowest it’s been since 2007. The regional list proportion was the worst since 2003.
Alexander himself in knots as he tried to explain why the Scottish Labour campaign he helped run bombed so badly.
Firstly, he said that Labour “misjudged” when they assumed that “the really poor governing outcomes that the SNP have had” would “have a dampening effect on their support and on their vote”.
And then, virtually without pause, he goes on: “If you’ve got a lock on 30% of the population and the natural anti-SNP majority is then divided between a range of other parties, that makes it really hard and really challenging.”
What he is dancing around here, what he cannot admit, is that the SNP won not because they are popular but that Scottish Labour lost because they are so unpopular.
These are different things. The SNP have benefitted massively from the fact that the Unionist vote is so hopelessly divided between Labour, the Tories, the LibDems, and now Reform UK.
But if we are to take Alexander’s strange diagnosis on its own terms, it is surely the statement of a man content to see his party consigned to the fringes of Scottish politics.
It offers no update on Sarwar’s vainglorious pitch to the electorate: “It’s my turn now.”
God only knows why no one bought into that, and Alexander certainly doesn’t.
If he was concerned about Labour’s fortunes as an electoral force – as the Labour right so often claim to be – he would surely twig that his party’s loss has, by and large, been the SNP’s gain.
In virtually all of the central belt, the sea of red that stretched from Gourock to Dunbar has turned SNP yellow.
Instead of grappling with why that is, Alexander consigned such questions to the realms of psychology, or maybe the kind of pseudo-anthropology which saw former Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont declare: “We’re not, in Scotland, genetically programmed to make political decisions.”
In Alexander’s view, there is “about 30% of the Scottish population who now see voting SNP as both a habit and an identity”.
“It is about who they are more than what the SNP do,” he added.
Short of Andy Burnham mandating re-education for recalcitrant Scots, it doesn’t seem like there is much Scottish Labour can do about that.
If Labour are ever to regain dominance in Scotland – and it is a long way to climb – their analysis must consider why they have dwindled to irrelevance in a country where their votes were once famously “weighed instead of counted”.
Fortunately for the SNP, there seems to be little chance of that happening any time soon.
Leadership contender Joe Fagan has said he will not countenance another independence referendum ever if he becomes leader, closing the door on any consideration of whether Scottish Labour’s constitutional intransigence has any bearing on their deep unpopularity.
His main rival Michael Marra literally wrote the 2026 manifesto which saw them drop five seats to a historic low.
It’s an impossible choice: more of the same with a nobody, or more of the same with the architect of Scottish Labour’s worst-ever election defeat?
I’m just glad the choice isn’t mine.
