At last, some exciting news from the election front: voters can’t seem to make up their minds, which suggests we’re going to have a real race in May. Two opinion polls published on the same day last week, by the same pollster, could not agree whether Scotland was rushing headlong towards independence or whether support for the union remained steadfast.
This probably reveals more about polling techniques than voting intentions, but, from the mist, two things emerged crystal clear. One is that Jack McConnell, the first minister of Scotland, wants to lead us until (perish the thought) 2011. The other is he has almost no chance of doing so.
The Scottish polls may present a conflicting picture of the various parties’ fortunes, but they are united on the leaders’ prospects, and it’s not looking good for McConnell. In poll after poll, his personal popularity rating is well below that of the SNP leader, Alex Salmond. In fact, almost twice as many Scots now believe Salmond would make a better first minister.
Faced with such a grim verdict on his five years in the top job — a milestone he reached last week — McConnell might have feigned a little humility. But, apart from an unconvincing reference to the strains of office on his family, most of whom also work for the Labour machine in some capacity, he brazened it out.
Devolution might have had a few “credibility problems”, he told one interviewer, but that was before he stepped in and rescued the situation. If he was unpopular, it was because he’d had to make some tough decisions as leader. “I have achieved more in five years than Alex Salmond has achieved in his lifetime,” he boasted, with Salmond-like gall.
If this was just pre-election posturing by a giant of the political arena, the swaggering could be forgiven. But this is Jack McConnell. What does he mean, “tough decisions”? What does he mean, “achievements”?
When asked to name one of the latter, he mentioned the smoking ban (he always does) in public places, including some bus shelters and all lorry cabins. This also falls within the “tough decisions” category: “I put a very brave face on it publicly, saying at all times that I was convinced it would work and Scotland would follow it, but behind the scenes I was a bag of nerves,” he confessed last week. You would think he was leading a nation to war, not stubbing out its cigarette rations.
Another of his favourite “achievements” is low unemployment, and it is true his administration has been responsible for creating thousands of jobs — devolution industry jobs. Never have there been so many smoking-ban enforcement officers, or trading standards officers soon to be policing shopkeepers who supply underage smokers or open on public holidays, or press officers, or consultants (though not of the medical variety). Unfortunately, the expansion of the public payroll has been at the expense of Scotland’s growth rate, but politicians of McConnell’s calibre assume voters are too dim to notice.
If he avoids taking any decisions at all, let alone tough ones, by welcoming a debate, or by introducing an initiative or instigating a review, who, bar a few noisy MSPs on the opposition benches, will care? Such is the cynicism of our first minister after five years. If he sticks to a handful of eye-catching ploys, and repeats often enough the “quality of life is improving” refrain, surely the Scottish people will keep the faith and continue to vote Labour?
But how wrong he is, if he thinks the voters are hoodwinked. McConnell’s quality of life has improved no end, but most ordinary people can spot the chasm between the perks of the hugely swollen political classes and their own increasingly tight budgets. They may have tolerated (different from backing) his banning fixation, but on the important issues such as schools and crime and hospitals and council taxes and public services, there is a growing impatience with his government.
“Developing the education system to be among the very best in the world” is a noble goal, but why has McConnell only just thought of it? Hasn’t he been first minister for five years, and wasn’t he education minister before that? It’s fine suddenly discovering that streaming children by ability is beneficial to all children, as McConnell appears to have done this week, but why has it taken him so long when the evidence was there all the time?
Is it that Scotland’s standards of literacy and numeracy — which have dropped in two-thirds of local authorities — have belatedly shocked him out of his complacency on education? Or did he simply have more pressing matters to attend to, such as a kilt competition in New York, or an Olympics ceremony in Australia, or a warm reception in the Canadian parliament?
If Scottish Labour does badly in May, it will blame Blair, the war in Iraq, the cash for peerages scandal, anything but itself. But the leader of Scottish Labour should have the guts to take responsibility for a disappointing result. He is putting himself and his own re-election at the heart of Labour’s campaign, launching his personal manifesto for power at the party’s conference in Oban this weekend.
He talks about his ambitions for Scotland requiring a third term, but it is only his ambitions for Jack McConnell that require him to serve a third term. His interests are not necessarily the same as Scotland’s.
In the event of a Labour meltdown he must resign immediately. And even if the Nationalist advance is contained, it is time for McConnell to make way for someone with bigger ideas and the courage to implement them.
Before he took over, people “were questioning whether we would ever do anything that really directly affected their lives”, he said. If he got out more he would realise they are still asking that question.
McConnell has survived so far because there has been no obvious alternative — his greatest success has been to sideline most of the younger talent on his backbenches. But now several credible challengers are breaking cover and it is they and the electorate, not McConnell, who will seal his fate.
