Tavish Scott's 'Call It Off' Moment

Following on from my earlier post regarding calls at the LibDem Conference to support the 2010 Referendum, Tavish Scott has entered the debate, and opted to play the man and not the ball:

"I remember what it's like to be a young, thrusting, energetic parliamentary candidate and you were desperate to get your face on the television.

"I can well understand the need to say something which commentators and television reporters are very, very, keen to talk about, but I don't really think the people are."

Well, pity poor Kevin Lang, slapped down in such a patronising fashion by Tavish Scott.

Except... George Lyon made the same call.

That's George Lyon, former Holyrood Junior Minister and Party Whip, MSP for Argyll & Bute for eight years and recently elected Member of the European Parliament. He won't be quite so easy to brush off.

So you have PPCs, the MEP and a large percentage of LibDem supporters backing a referendum. Tavish Scott won't budge.

You have LibDem supporters backing the decision to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Tavish Scott wanted him to rot in prison.

Two big issues of this political year, and Tavish Scott is on the other side of the argument to his own party.

Perhaps his title ought to be "Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the Scottish Parliament"?

Great Scott?

Tavish Scott is the new LibDem Leader: he won a majority of the votes cast, polling 1,450 members to Ross Finnie's 568 and Mike Rumbles' 439.

He has a tough job - he is now the Leader of Scotland's third opposition party. There's no doubting that the LibDems, particularly in Scotland, are in a mire: Scott's predecessor Nicol Stephen inherited a party that had just come second in terms of Scottish seats and votes in a Westminster election. On his watch, the LibDems won Dunfermline & West Fife. They were the 'Party of Real Momentum' and people in the party were talking about being the largest group in Holyrood after May 2007, with Nicol Stephen as First Minister, and they weren't giggling when they said it.

But the bubble burst: when the votes were finally counted last May, the LibDems had ended up with one seat fewer than in 2003. They ended up on the Opposition benches, alongside (and behind) Labour and the Tories.

That on its own is grim, but the way things unfolded made the situation far worse. The Greens secured some kind of basic working deal with the SNP, with got them a sneak peak at big policies and a Committee Convenership, in return for support for SNP First Ministerial, Ministerial and Junior Ministerial candidates. The Tories exacted huge concessions on the Budget. The LibDems aimed for nothing. They got nothing. They went into a massive strop and when they came out of it, they had zero relevance.

So the task of the new Leader should be to get them out of that mess.

But it was the new Leader who did the most to get them into it. Scott reportedly threatened a walkout if his party spoke to the SNP, then went on the BBC the Sunday after the Election and pretty much unilaterally called off any Coalition negotiations with any party. He did more than anyone to cut them adrift.

And Scott's initial speech on assuming the Leadership - during which the only thing actually said basically amounted to a casual egg-throw in the direction of Alex Salmond - shows that he may not have much to offer besides a visceral hatred of the SNP. Now that's more than Nicol Stephen had to offer (also Tavish Scott's voice is more suited to public speaking than Stephen's feeble whine, but that's beside the point) but it's presently being offered by Labour. If you want to kill the First Minister simply to watch him die, you already have a party to vote for and they're in second place, which is far more credible and far stronger than fourth.

Therefore, you get the feeling that the Local Income Tax is screwed. You get the feeling that Scott just won't work with the SNP even when it's plainly in the LibDem interest to do so, when they have a chance of getting one of their biggest policies implemented, at least in part. You get the feeling that he won't even sit down and work out some sort of deal on the basis of LibDem policies being put into practice in a way that the Tories have managed. So you don't get the feeling that the LibDems will have any real impact on the country until 2011 at the earliest.

And his position means that by default, the LibDems will find themselves aligning closer and closer to Labour - a Coalition that will have lasted twelve years in both Government and Opposition by the time of the next election. Now, that will disturb Scottish LibDem MPs like Danny Alexander, Jo Swinson and Willie Rennie who are in direct competition with Labour, and will make life hard for PPCs in Edinburgh and Aberdeen: they'll be arguing that they and only they can get Labour out, but LibDem MSPs will appear to be trying to put Labour back in again. And in the eyes of the voters, it will be come increasingly pointless to vote for the LibDem monkey when Labour's organ grinder is also on the ballot paper.

Basically, whichever way you look at it, this was the wrong choice for the LibDems. LibDem members have voted for irrelevance.

There will, of course, be a reshuffle to watch out for in the coming days - let's hope it's sorted out quicker than Nicol Stephen's post-Election reshuffle was. But to put it bluntly, I don't see much reason beyond that for posts about the LibDems in the near future: their MSPs aren't likely to say or do anything that may generate a post.