To understand the Labour Party, you first have to understand the importance of Scottish Labour. From Keir Hardie to John Smith, Ramsay MacDonald to Gordon Brown, Scotland runs to the very core of the labour movement. For goodness sake, even Tony Blair was born in Edinburgh.
The party is so Scottish that, although it was founded in 1900, it took six leaders and 21 years before John R. Clynes became the first Labour leader to have been born in England. As a result, its collapse in Scotland in recent years has created not just an electoral nuisance, but a deep psychological bruise.
