New Statesman Scotland
The weekend of 11/12 March is a big one for the Scottish Labour Party, and in more ways than one. Not only are our Labourites in the final stages of defending a very shaky majority in the first-ever by-election to the Scottish Parliament, but they are staging their first annual conference since that Parliament was set up. The conference is being held in Edinburgh's glitzy conference centre, a place of happy memory for most (if not all) Labourites: it was where the results of the devolution referendum were announced. And to add to the "first-ever" list, Tony Blair will be delivering a speech to the Scottish Parliament. No British (or English) prime minister has ever addressed a parliament in Edinburgh.
Blair's speech might be politically important as well as historic. It looks as if the First Minister, Donald Dewar, will need all the support he can get. His problems are many. Beleaguered by the unholy alliance of Cardinal Winning and multimillionaire Brian Souter over Clause 28, beset by grumblings over the paradoxes of the student tuition-fees deal and trying to sit on the row that has developed over the likely cost of the Holyrood Parliament building, Dewar is now being sniped at by some Labour Westminster MPs as an electoral liability. One of them - Ian Davidson, the MP for Glasgow Pollok - is clamouring for the Scottish Parliament to be moved to Glasgow.
In fact, our Westminster MPs seem to be growing glummer by the day. The conference has not helped. They resent the way that they have been crowded off the platform and podium by the MSPs. Apart from the cabinet troika of Tony Blair, Alistair Darling and Robin Cook, all the running is being made by smart operators from the Mound: Sarah Boyack, Susan Deacon, Wendy Alexander, Jim Wallace, Donald Dewar himself. Westminster MPs are beginning to grumble (covertly, so far) about the way they are being sidelined by the government and ignored by the Scottish media.
All of which, you might have thought, would have been of interest to Millbank. Not a bit of it. Or, at least, not to Millbank's cyberserfs. The "events" pages on the Labour Party website flags up the London mayoral elections, the party's women's conference, the national "policy forum", the party conference in Brighton in September and the touring exhibition of Labour history. There is not a word about the Scottish party's historic conference.
And at the risk of biting the hand that feeds it, this diary could not help noticing that the New Statesman's useful "year planner 2000" suffers from the same kind of Anglocentricity. The year 2000 may be the party's 100th anniversary, but there is no mention of the Scottish Labour Party conference in Edinburgh. The year planner does, however, let us know that 26 March is William Hague's 39th birthday.
Next week's by-election in Ayr ought to be a shoo-in for the Tories. Last time around (ie, July 1999) the Labour candidate won by a paltry 25 votes. Since then, the Scottish Executive has had its problems, to say the least. But, in fact, the Scottish Tories are biting their fingernails over this one. The 1997 general election killed them stone dead, and left them with not one Scottish MP. Proportional representation as it was operated in the Holyrood elections of 1999 breathed some life into the corpse. If Scottish conservatism is to stagger back on to its feet it will have to start winning by-elections like the one at Ayr. If the Tories cannot overcome a Labour majority of 25 in a part of Scotland where they traditionally do well, their credibility will be shredded. Hence the genuine nervousness at Tory headquarters about the Ayr by-election.
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