THE departure of the Scotland Office Minister David Cairns has caused blank astonishment among the Scottish political classes in Britain precisely because he seemed the ultimate party loyalist. If Cairns can turn against his leader, Prime Minister Gordon Brown then anyone can.
There may be no evil genius orchestrating this rebellion — except perhaps the leak machine in No. 10 — but the “revolt of the clones” seems pretty effective nevertheless. First “Blair’s babes” burned their pagers and demanded a leadership election. Then the Lancashire mafia, led by George Howarth MP, stuck in their knives, along with left-wingers like the former minister, Peter Kilfoyle. Now the Scots — supposedly the last bastion of Brownism — have broken ranks. This is a multicultural, cross-gender, north-south, left-right rebellion led by people who never normally rebel. That’s what makes it so damaging.
Cairns is well equipped to deliver the message that something must be done. He had the misfortune to be Labour’s official spokesman for the Glasgow East by-election, when Labour lost its third safest seat in Scotland on a 22 percent swing to the Scottish National party. It was a salutary experience discovering that, in the very citadel of Scottish Labourism, in the constituency of John Wheatley, Labour’s core vote was disintegrating. Cairns genuinely believes that doing nothing, while Labour is 20 points behind the “vacuous Tories” as he describes them, is morally indefensible.
Nor can Labour afford to hand Scotland over to the SNP which is effectively what is happening. Nowhere is Brown more of an electoral liability than in his homeland. This may sound surprising given Scotland’s propensity to get behind its favorite sons. But there is widespread disillusion, verging on a sense of betrayal, among Labour’s Scottish tribe over their leader’s performance. He’s become a national embarrassment.
The Scots wanted a clean break from Blairite “modernization”; they got Blairism with an unacceptable face. They hoped for someone who understood Labour’s roots and would return to recognizably social democratic policies. What they did not expect was the scrapping of the 10p tax band and bungs to the wealthy like the abolition of inheritance tax on £600,000 estates. The proposal for tackling the energy crisis by loft insulation has gone down particularly badly in a cold country where a lot of working people still live in tenements and don’t have lofts to insulate.
Cairns was a Catholic priest before he entered politics and represents a Christian socialist tradition which is still very much alive in west-central Scotland. He was a researcher to the rebel MP, Siobhain McDonagh, who was sacked last week for calling for nomination papers to be distributed to MP to precipitate a leadership election. Cairns says it was the abrupt dismissal of the matter by Labour’s national executive committee that finally forced him out.
Well, increasingly, Labour MPs see Brown as the great diversion. Cairns is being denounced throughout the party organization as a “traitor”. But he is also a realist.
There is no way out for Gordon Brown. If ministers like Cairns have been prepared to sacrifice their careers, then it is surely time for someone in Cabinet to have the cojones to do likewise. David Miliband must realize that if he doesn’t act now, he will lose the moment and end up as a footnote to history.
