Eddie Barnes: Leading question for Labour

Little-known outside party circles, condemned as B-listers by their critics, three candidates are fighting it out to succeed Iain Gray as leader of the opposition at Holyrood. Our Political Editor sizes up their challenges

AT THE Scottish Politician of the Year Awards ceremony in Edinburgh’s Prestonfield House last week, the hosts played a video montage of the year’s events on a large screen, with appropriate music played as an accompaniment. For Ruth Davidson, the new leader of the Scottish Tories and kickboxing aficionado, the tune was Kung-Fu Fighting. When a clip appeared of the three contenders for the Scottish Labour leadership job, the director’s choice drew some sly laughs: The Who’s Who Are You?

Davidson’s election almost two weeks ago for the Conservatives has been the box office draw this autumn at Holyrood, following an acrimonious campaign. By contrast, the more important contest to become leader of the Scottish Parliament’s main opposition party has been a side-show. It has meant that those contenders – Johann Lamont, Ken Macintosh and Tom Harris – have not received the kind of attention they might have expected. With the Tory race now over, however, the candidates have six weeks of uninterrupted campaigning to convince party representatives, members and union affiliates that they are fit for the job. It is not just the crowded news schedule that has ensured the threesome are not yet household names. Neither Lamont nor Macintosh nor Harris come to the contest with the kind of profile that assures them recognition on the street.

So far most of the questions about the campaign have been about why two Scottish Labour politicians who are known – Douglas Alexander and Jim Murphy – aren’t going for the job. Inevitably, just a few months after Scottish Labour was hammered by the SNP after being portrayed as a B-team up against Alex Salmond’s group of A-listers, the same warnings are now being made about the three people who aim to succeed Iain Gray.

The matter is given added relevance this time round because, whoever wins, becomes the de facto head at the Scottish Parliament of the campaign against independence. Psephologists reckon that the pro-Union camp can rely pretty solidly on Liberal Democrat and Conservative identifying voters in Scotland. Not so with Labour voters, who may be persuaded to back secession come referendum day if they see the SNP representing their values, rather than Labour. It puts a heavy responsibility on the three unknown candidates. Are any of them up to the job?

Scottish Labour has had a summer and autumnof agonising after its spring of despair. In 2007, after losing the election to the SNP by one seat, the sense was that the party had done pretty well to come so close to winning, in the face of a well-resourced and well-organised Nationalist campaign.

The unexpected scale of the 2011 loss, when previously staunch Labour redoubts in Glasgow and the west of Scotland fell to the SNP, has put the party collectively on the couch. Lamont, Scottish Labour’s current deputy leader, admits it didn’t read the signals right after 2007. “In 2007, it was like a Scotland game where we lost to a dodgy penalty in the 90th minute. It was a moral victory and because the defeat was so narrow it was a case of what-if. I didn’t accept early enough that what happened represented a trend.”

It didn’t help that polls and the press were clear that Labour was going to win right up until March of this year, she says. As a result a fatal caution struck the party – and policy proposals which were ready to be published, on the council tax and on university funding to name two, were pulled. Lamont adds: “After four years, realising the consequence of losing in 2007, we really, really wanted to win and we really didn’t want to do anything that would damage that. We wanted this so much, we knew how important this is, people across the country were working their socks off. It wasn’t complacency, it was caution … the caution became too much.”

Harris agrees, noting that one of the failures of the party north of the Border is that “we have been too conservative”. Harris, a Blairite MP and former transport minister under Gordon Brown, says: “We haven’t been willing to change when the electorate wanted us to change and one of the symptoms of that was that we didn’t embrace Blairism.

“It is important that we display our willingness to change. The problem is that we have been cast as too unwilling to look at any alternative.”

Macintosh, one of Labour’s MSPs, also makes this case – although his language borders on the anodyne. “My key message is that the party needs to change. We need to be more positive and less negative. It is about not being framed as negative but about what the Labour party has to offer. Everyone knew what we were against. We need to be for something.”