2 days Ago By [email protected] (Paul Hutcheon)
Jim Murphy said the last Labour Government should have set the rules to allow his side to campaign Yes for Scotland to remain in the UK. Get the latest Scottish politics news sent straight to your inbox with our daily newsletter We have more newsletters Get the latest Scottish politics news sent straight to your inbox with our daily newsletter We have more newsletters A former Scottish Labour leader has said his party should have called an independence referendum seven years before the historic vote in 2014. Jim Murphy said a Gordon Brown -led Government would have campaigned for Yes to Scotland remaining in the UK.
The Better Together stalwart used a football reference to blast the eventual referendum rules agreed between the SNP and the Tories without Labour input, saying: “It was an away game with a sometimes hostile crowd, where the referees were David Cameron and Alex Salmond.” Murphy, a former Labour Cabinet Minister who runs a successful advisory firm, spoke to the Record ten years after the referendum result. He was the most high profile No campaigner and his “100 towns” tour saw him make street speeches on an Irn-Bru crate.
Although Labour were on the winning side, the referendum led to a near general election wipeout for Scottish Labour and Murphy quitting as leader and losing his seat. He said of his tour: “I loved doing that. The reason why I did it was I have watched nationalisms all over the world and every nationalism says it is different - that’s why it is nationalism - but I cannot think of a nationalism anywhere in the world which doesn’t rely on having street politics.
I thought our side of the debate had no street politics and I wanted to do politics on the street.” He said of the campaign: “It was more important than any vote where my name was on the ballot paper, because on one level Scotland was on the ballot paper, rather than any candidate. “I knew then that if Scotland voted to leave the UK it was permanent and irreversible.
If you lose an election, once the hurt heals you get stuck in again and try and win the next one. If we’d been defeated in the referendum there wasn’t going to be a next one.” He added: “An election is like a league game.
You can win next time. A referendum is like a cup game. If you are out, you’re out.
” Murphy, now 57, rues the fact that the referendum was agreed between the Tory/Lib Dem coalition of the day and Salmond’s Government, with Labour out in the cold. It meant Labour had little choice but being part of a No campaign with their Tory adversaries. Murphy said he had made the case as a Government Minister in 2007, when Brown was Prime Minister, to upstage the SNP by backing a snap referendum.
He recalled: “I had for some time as a Minister in the last Labour Government been making the case that we should have an independence referendum.” “I wanted it to be a referendum with a UK Labour Government and where we were campaigning for Yes, which was a version of ‘I want Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom. Yes or No’.
” He added: “If we had a referendum with a Labour Government, you’d be campaigning to remain in a Labour Union. You’d be campaigning to remain within a Government that had half a dozen Scottish accents round the table, that had brought about radical changes to the country, and where there was a certainty that we wouldn’t have had a Brexit referendum. “You’d have had a Labour Prime Minister in the conversation about the rules.
You’d have had a Labour Prime Minister who would be the figurehead of one of the two Governments. And you’d be campaigning as optimists. “All that stuff that you saw out of the Obama campaign, Yes We Can, all the stuff you saw in the Northern Ireland devolution referendum when you had Bono and everyone else campaigning for Yes.
We would have had that sort of campaign.” He said of the agreement for the 2014 referendum: “We were shut out of the process and yet Labour were the only party strong enough to take on the SNP. “We didn’t set the rules, we had no influence on the rules, we watched the rules being agreed by the three other parties in a referendum we didn’t feel comfortable within.
It’s taken us until now to recover from it.” He said Labour was ill-suited to the indyref: “People join the Labour party for lots of reasons, but it is rarely for constitutional reasons. And you join the SNP for lots of reasons, and it is often for constitutional reasons.
It was the type of campaign, the type of issue, that Labour wasn’t born into. It felt uncomfortable.” He said of Better Together: “It was a forced arrangement whereby we found ourselves temporarily campaigning alongside the Tories and others.
” He added: “Country first, party a bad second was the approach we took during the referendum.” Murphy hopes the election of a Labour Government will change hardened views on Westminster, saying: “I’m hopeful that having a UK Labour Government gives a younger generation a perspective that Westminster isn’t the source of problems, but can with the right Government be pretty transformative.” Although he enjoyed the campaign, he also believed it was divisive and at times “poisonous”, such as him getting egged on the campaign trail: “It was in the most part passionate, and in most parts that was great, but like nationalism all over the world it has a darker element.
“And whether that darker element was online or on the streets, it was there and we shouldn’t pretend it wasn’t.” Asked if the campaign was the most important moment of his political life, he said: “Those three months of the referendum, beyond family things, it’s the most important three months of my life. “Ministers can be hired and fired by Prime Ministers.
Elections can be won and lost, but the referendum is forever. I put more effort into that referendum because the stakes were higher than anything I’ve ever done in my professional life.” “Would I rather have lost my seat, or lost a referendum? I would rather have lost my seat every day of the last ten years than have lost a referendum for even one day.
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