You know when you get a song in your head and it won’t leave? Well pity me because I’ve had this song on replay, I’m sure you will recognise the lyrics:
Would you say I’m a man without conviction,
I’m a man who doesn’t know
How to sell a contradiction?
You come and go, you come and go.
You see it all began when the new Scottish Labour Leader Jim Murphy MP was elected.
Jim Murphy knows he is up against the clock to stop his party’s haemorrhaging at the Westminster elections and he has to make anew and fast.
On his appointment he said: “This is a fresh start for the Scottish Labour party.”
It certainly has been. It has felt like a fresh start practically every day. He has been 40 days in the job and each time I open a newspaper Mr Murphy seems to be a different man. As I’ve written previously, he dramatically changed his policy platform to win the job but he has continued on his quest to do an entire re-write. But it is an attempted rewrite that so far lacks substance and in many respects misses the point.
Don’t get me wrong, taking on the Scottish Labour leadership at one of the worst times in the party’s existence is a tough job but he is up for the cup as a very capable politician. He is working at break neck speed to try and shed the damaged packaging of Scottish Labour seen as a ‘branch office’ of London and in bed with the Tories after their Indyref love in.
But with all his shifting and positioning he has become little more than a political chameleon. Despite all the words we are still left wondering what he, and his party stand for?
Mr Murphy’s tactic is to say what he thinks people want to hear, even if that means speaking with a different voice, to different audiences in different parts of the country. This is a proven strategy for him and part of his original success, he turned a safe Tory seat of East Renfrewshire into his own and morphed accordingly to win and keep it.
Credit where credit is due.
But I smell a whiff of triangulation in the air.
Nicola Sturgeon made clear on getting the top job that tackling inequality and pursuing social justice now Mr Murphy does too, even though he’d rather spend £100 billion on new nuclear weapons than on something useful like extra childcare or a decent state pension.
The SNP has long campaigned that only they can stand up for Scotland’s interests. So does Murphy he now says Scottish Labour is a party that “represents Scotland first” and is a “patriotic party” and yet his “patriotic” party voted with the Tories just last week for an extra £30 billion of austerity cuts that will cause untold damage to Scotland’s public services.
Mr Murphy didn’t make it to Westminster to join the 28 Scottish Labour MPs who backed the Tory austerity plans. That’s because he was lunching with journalists telling them he wasn’t a unionist after all.
The Scottish Labour leader said his family’s Irish Catholic background meant that belief in the 308-year-old Union between England and Scotland was not part of his “political tradition” and means he is not a unionist and the unholy alliance between with the Tories was only temporary.
Well I’ve got news for you Jim, my family are from the same background and, like most I suspect, their vote is nothing to do with history or the constitution, they traditionally voted Labour but haven’t for some time. Labour’s decline has been consistent for several years because it’s lost its way and values.
I lived in Stirling when Michael Forsyth was MP and Scottish Secretary under John Mayor’s government. Mr Murphy, reminds me a lot of Michael Forsyth, who also thought Scottish voters could be beguiled by some tartan trimmings.
But Mr Forsyth failed to understand the core problem of his party in Scotland and, if the evidence of his first 40 days is anything to go by, Jim Murphy runs the same risk. He’s going for gimmicks when Scottish Labour needs to rediscover its purpose.
Voting with the Tories on austerity, and trident, is not what a Scottish Labour party should do – and in their hearts many Labour MPs and MSPs know this.
And I think Mr Murphy probably knows it too. So maybe he can be excused the politicking of these first few weeks, if it is cover for some deep soul searching.
For Labour, “Things can only get better” (sorry I couldn’t help myself) and any improvement in the polls or Westminster will no doubt be trumpeted as some form of historic victory.
But if Labour is to ever climb above 30 per cent in the polls, and seriously challenge to be Scotland’s government, then it must aspire to something more than being ‘all things to all men’.
But tomorrow is another day, and no doubt another reinvention for Mr Murphy and his team. Fair play to him, he is as gallous as they come and, whatever else, he won’t turn around his party by being a pale wallflower.
[all sing Chorus:]
Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Chameleon…