Sunday, May 08, 2011

The woes of Scottish Labour (addendum)

Here's a couple of pieces reinforcing points made in the previous post.

As well as losing the election in general, Labour have lost a few of their more experienced (I decline to call them 'heavy hitters') MSPs.

This needn't have happened if they had entered their names on the list as well as standing as constituency MSPs - but they didn't because they took their re-election for granted:
"Labour also made one other mistake leading to the demise of some of their heavy hitters such as Andy Kerr and Tom McCabe.

They are so used to winning first-past-the-post in places like Glasgow and Lanarkshire, they do not put their names on the regional list. They might want to review the policy and take a lesson from their arch-rivals.

Nicola Sturgeon was a comfortable winner in Glasgow Southside but she would still have returned to Holyrood as number one on the party’s Glasgow regional list."
And on the notion that Labour still see Holyrood pretty much like a large version of the old Strathclyde Regional Council:
"A herd of wild rhinoceroses would not get Jim Murphy or Douglas Alexander to give up their careers at Westminster. I really don't see that happening," the source said.

"We have failed as a group in the Scottish Parliament and it is up to us"."
In any event, I wouldn't have thought Murphy or Alexander would have helped matters much.

The question for me isn't so much, who will lead Labour in Scotland but who on earth would even want to?

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