Labour puts factionalism before nationalism.

 Biff, bash, bosh. The Scottish Labour Party is engaged in its favourite pursuit: personal infighting. Better together? Speaking together would be a start. As so often at key moments in modern Scottish history, what we hear from Labour is  muffled yells from within the organisation as factions fight it out on North/South lines, or on East/West, or Right/Left lines - any lines you care to mention

Better Together, the Labour-led campaign against independence should be capitalising on its best month yet. The Olympics have breathed belated life into the idea of a United Kingdom; the EC President, Jose Manuel Barroso, has torpedoed the SNP's policy on EU membership; Alex Salmond has threatened to break up the BBC; Iain Duncan-Smith is imposing controversial welfare reforms on Scotland while the SNP government seems obsessed with the wording of a referendum question that won't be put for two years and which the majority of Scots appear to think is an irrelevance. Alex Salmond has been booed in public, for heaven's sake.

Doesn't take a genius to realise that the SNP government is finally experiencing that “mid-term” unpopularity that afflicts all governments eventually. Yet, Labour seems determined to divert attention from all this by indulging in organisational civil war. Forget The Thick of It - they should make a black comedy out of the life and times of John Smith House.

Murphy review of Scottish Labour leaedership. Same difference?

  It may be the biggest overhaul in 90 years, but I'm not entirely sure what has changed in the Murphy Review of the constitution of the Scottish Labour Party.   Mr Murphy says that he intends to make devolution a reality within the party.  "From now on, whatever is devolved to the Scottish Parliament will be devolved to the Scottish Labour Party".  


  But that has explicitly been the case since the Scotland Act in 1998.    The Scottish Labour Party - to use the name Donald Dewar entrenched  - publishes its own manifesto for Scottish elections, and were Labour not already devolved internally it would never have been able to enter into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats in Holyrood.  


     Is clear that Ed Miliband will still be the Labour Leader, pre-eminent in all 'non-devolved issues'.  Since controversial issues like corporation tax, oil revenues and the constitution are not devolved, this still leaves control pretty much where it is now - in Westminster.   Indeed, these reforms will have to be ratified by the UK Labour Party Conference, and the Party leader - Ed Miliband. 




     The Scottish leader of the Scottish Labour Party will now be the leader of the Scottish Party, which is certainly a step in the right direction.  But the centre of power in the party still resides in Westminster with the UK leadership.  The review does not appear to set up a separate federal party in Scotland as has been recommended by the former labour First Minister Henry McLeish.  


   The biggest change will be to allow MPs to stand for the leadership, which is probably a good idea, since no one in the Scottish Parliament seems to be particularly capable or interested in leading the Scottish party.  But it will play massively into Alex Salmond's hands if the next leader is a Labour MP like Tom Harris - and he appears to be the only one interested in throwing his hat in the ring since Mr Murphy and ministers like Douglas Alexander are uninterested.  I agree with Henry McLeish that the leader should be an MSP. 


 As for setting up a "political strategy board", realigning constituency party boundaries and opening an office in Edinburgh - I think the scale of Labour's electoral defeat requires something more than a rearrangement of deckchairs.  This is not a move to rename Labour in Scotland, or create a new party as has been proposed for the Tories by their leadership candidate, Murdo Fraser. Strange that the Scottish Tories seem to  be making all the running in Scottish politics right now.