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The Patriot Game’s a Bogey

7th March 2015

The Patriot Game’s a Bogey

This is an incisive critique of Jim Murphy’s ‘Patriot Clause’ that is being proposed (on a take it or leave it basis) to the Scottish Labour Party’s Special One Day Conference in Edinburgh on March 7th. The article is by a group of Party members in Glasgow and reflects the serious worries that many have about this massive change in the Party’s constitution.

By Seán Duffy   Uncivil Society editorial

In the lead-up to the General Election, Scottish politics is constrained within the stifling discourse of who best represents the national interest. Whilst SNP billboards imagine a House of Commons complete with tartan benches, Jim Murphy has foisted a commitment to patriotism and the service of the nation into Scottish Labour’s constitution. Whether by reaction or design, Labour is now mired in the patriot game. It may as well impale itself upon a thistle.
It seems incredible that only months after Jim Murphy’s parachuted-in mastermind John McTernan declared “you can’t out nat the nats” Labour is trying to do exactly that. Labour activists can’t help but suffer from the ‘cognitive dissonance’ they were so often accused of during the referendum as a result. Having identified itself as an anti-Scottish nationalist party Labour is now doing its utmost to embrace the saltire and to be seen doing so.

By playing on the wrong pitch, and by the SNP’s rules, Labour is on the verge of fully capitulating to nationalism in a match it is bound to lose. The Scottish electorate will be asked to choose between two social nationalist parties and the result goes without saying; they’ll vote for the real patriotic McCoy. The situation in England is comparatively better. For all its faults, Labour’s pitch in the rest of the UK is contextualised by something more akin to a traditional ‘left vs right’ battle with the Tories. However limited and mealy mouthed it is based upon price controls, redistribution of wealth, and is somewhat critical of private interests in unregulated markets.

Despite nationalist hegemony, there is a desire for a ‘real labour’ politics and a Labour Party that people recognise as their own. There is a space for a Labour Party that talks about work in political terms and campaigns relentlessly for secure, meaningful employment. This image of a bygone Labour Party is inherent within collective memory, however ahistorical it may be. Hence a key theme of the referendum was the Yes campaign laying claim to the Labour tradition. The irony, of course, is that civic nationalism has now written out issues of work and class power completely.

This is the field that Scottish Labour can play on and win. For all the rhetoric and contestation of the Labour tradition during the referendum, for the most part the reality of it was absent. Those who feel betrayed, those who want to vote Labour but see nothing for themselves or their families would prefer a Labour Party that constructs a ‘them and us’ narrative around empowering workers. A narrative committed to extending collective bargaining, whilst combatting blacklisting and casualisation. Most of all they’d rather vote for a party that proudly puts redistribution of wealth and power at the centre of its policies and discourse rather than substituting them for an unfit nationalism that the opposing team is well placed to defeat.