With two Holyrood Labour parliamentarians now formally declared as candidates for the Leadership of Scottish Labour – centrist, Sarah Boyack [declared last night] and left winger, Neil Findlay [declared at lunchtime today], East Renfrewshire’s Labour MP, Jim Murphy has twenty four hours of intense internal analysis and interrogation ahead of him.
Whatever he does, his livelihood and his congenial career will be in the balance against a range of unstable factors, not all of which he may be able to control, some of which he may prefer not to attempt to control – all against an unforgiving timeline.
He has until Friday to make up his mind whether to run or not – but is thought by insiders to be likely to declare tomorrow.
If he runs and if he wins – in a contest where, unbelievably, Labour remains riven by Blairite/Brownite factionalism [Murphy is a Blairite] – he will, once selected, have to declare that he will not stand again in his East Renfrewshire seat in the May 2015 General Election.
That would leave him with no parliamentary salary and expenses; and, in the current climate, no absolute certainty of winning another one.
As elected Scottish Labour Leader, the SNP would swiftly shred Murphy’s political credibility if he attempted to stand again in the May election, to hedge his personal bets and prepared to be an absentee leader leaving a rookie Deputy to stem a determined and invigorated SNP at Holyrood – for five years.
And if he were to stand again, he would have no choice but to make a preemptive pledge to serve a full term. Even if he made such a pledge, the election campaign would be boisterous and possibly damaging to his chances. His SNP competitor – and a phalanx of braveheart snipers and massed choirs would, at every opportunity during the campaign – in the streets, in the halls, in the TV studios – loudly shout at him the question of how soon he would resign the seat if he won it.
And if he stood again and won? How colonialist and semi-detached would he look, with a five year Westminster buffer zone between himself and the risk of losing a parliamentary career, while leaving the Labour Group at Holyrood – its strategies, presentations, case making, attack and defence – in the care of a Number Two, almost certainly of limited experience, for a period not of five and a half months, but of five and a half years.
If Murphy believes he is the one to reform and regenerate Scottish Labour, he will have to commit to the punt of a lifetime – with a cruel timeline. If the two elections had been the other way around, he would have been home free.
Whichever seat he is selected to stand for in an arranged by-election to Holyrood, he will be a super-scalp target for the SNP to try to take.
Imagine if, with the 2015 General Election over and done [and the likelihood of a indeterminable number of Labour seats lost to the SNP], the SNP hit the Holyrood by-election chosen for Murphy with all they had – and they have plenty? Imagine if they won? They would crow to the heavens – with every reason to do so – at leaving Scottish Labour in the care of a leader who was no longer an elected member of either parliament.
And in this scenario, if he tried a second Holyrood by-election, he would go in a loser, with the SNP as triumphant Davids in the last gladiatorial contest.
None of this can be ruled out in today’s Scotland – a febrile place, with no political certainties and the only sure thing the rampant energy of the SNP, who believe they can do pretty much anything and are proving it by the day. With no opposition in Holyrood capable of laying a finger on them and the wind in their sails they are already making mayhem at Westminster, with today’s announcement that, come the day of an EU Referendum Bill, the SNP MPS will put down an amendment to that Bill – a well taken and mischievous move we will come to shortly in another article.
We have warned that the country is being moved to being a one-party state and we hold to that view.
This Scottish Labour Leadership is not the easy-as-she-goes holding operation with a well oiled machine. It is the task of accurately diagnosing and carrying out radical surgery on a terminally ill patient.
Before tomorrow, the East Renfrewshire MP has a lot of navel gazing and cold analysis in front of him. Alex Salmond, of all of Mr Murphy’s fellow Scottish politicians, will understand best the nature of the odds Murphy will have to calculate tonight.
What he chooses to do can only be revelatory in many ways.