We don’t need leaked memos to understand what Sturgeon wants

I found it difficult to get excited about the Telegraph story alleging SNP Leader Nicola Sturgeon had told a French diplomat she would prefer a Tory General Election victory to a Labour one.

This is for two reasons.

First, I think she is a professional enough politician that I doubt she would let slip her strategic objective, given the electoral damage among swing Labour/SNP voters publicising it would cause, even in supposedly confidential circumstances to a diplomat.

Second, I was already 100% certain that a Tory government was the SNP’s preference and didn’t need a real or spurious leak story to convince me.

The same naïvety about the SNP’s values, strategy, objectives and attitude towards Labour seems to be afflicting a certain section of the English centre-left as it has already suffered from vis-a-vis the Greens, and in 2010 the Lib Dems.

The tendency inside Labour associated with the Compass grouping like to imagine that we in Labour are not alone, but are part of a wider progressive alliance of parties that share a set of essential values. In fact, some people in this grouping feel they have more in common culturally and politically with “progressive” elements in the SNP, Plaid Cymru, Greens or Lib Dems than with people on the Labour right like me who have inconveniently robust views on defence, foreign policy and crime, or trade unionists of any description who can’t be relied on to bring the right kind of wine to North London dinner parties.

It is convenient for these people to look at the superficial policy positions adopted by people such as Sturgeon fishing to peel off votes from Labour’s left flank, and judge them on these, rather than the ideological values that underpin their party and its behaviour. So in 2010 the Lib Dems were viewed by Compass et al as benign based on policy stances that sounded leftwing such as their “pledge” on student fees, and those of us that were less easy to dupe were laughed at for suggesting the Orange Book pro-market ideology was actually dominant in the Lib Dem leadership and they would jump into bed with the Tories and ditch their policies. It wasn’t just that the Compass tendency saw the Lib Dems as benign, they actually looked at them as somehow purer and more admirable than their own party with its messy history in power. The same delusion is now in operation regarding the SNP.

The simple fact one needs to understand about Nicola Sturgeon is that she didn’t choose Labour. I have seen profiles that suggest she decided between Labour and the SNP and picked the SNP, aged 16, in 1986. Consider the timing. This was not a question of choosing between a Blairite Labour Party and a leftwing SNP. In 1986 Labour under Kinnock still subscribed to the unilateralist position on nuclear weapons that Sturgeon now claims is a key differentiator with us. And the SNP wasn’t the cuddly social democratic Party it likes to portray itself as now, it was a rightwing rump confined to areas of Scotland where it competed for Tory votes having totally discredited itself amongst the majority of leftwing Scots by voting (in Foot’s memorable phrase “like turkeys for an early Christmas”) to bring down the Callaghan government and usher in 18 years of Thatcher and Major. By any objective criteria, Nicola Sturgeon chose to become an activist in the more rightwing of the two parties she was considering when she chose the SNP.

This isn’t to say Sturgeon’s values on issues other than the national question are not leftwing. For all I know she may believe passionately in greater equality and social justice. It is just that everything else she believes in is trumped by her belief in Scottish independence. That’s why she is in the left faction in the SNP rather than being a pro-independence voice in the Labour Party. Her primary political identity and her primary ideological and political objective is Scottish Independence. Everything else is sublimated to this objective.

It happens that right at this moment her other political beliefs are useful marketing tools for winning over former Labour voters by making them think they can have a Labour government and advance independence. In just the same way I have no doubt it was happy coincidence that many Lib Dems didn’t much like the Iraq War and this was a useful campaigning tool for peeling off Labour votes in 2005 and 2010. Cynical opportunism and personal conviction often make such happy temporary marriages.

But ultimately it is just fact, not requiring substantiation by leaked diplomatic or civil service memos, that the SNP’s overriding political objective, it’s raison d’être, the reason why there is an SNP rather than Sturgeon being a Labour member, is independence, and that the cause of independence would be advanced by a Tory government doing Scotland down and damaged by a Labour government acting in Scotland’s interests.

If this sounds topsy-turvey, it is no different to the ideological convolutions of the Trotskyist and Communist revolutionary left, who spout deliberately un-achievable “transitional demands” for social progress here and now. These sound like leftwing versions of what Labour might want or do, but in fact are designed to not be achievable under capitalism, thereby hastening revolutionary consciousness once the working class are disappointed that they can’t have the changes they were promised. For Trotskyists and Communists, given they don’t believe real change can come without a revolution, a Tory government hastening the revolution by making the working classes more miserable and creating a crisis of capitalism is strategically preferable to a reformist Labour government making life more bearable. Likewise, for the SNP, given they don’t believe real change can come without Scottish independence, a Tory government treating Scotland badly and creating a crisis for the Union is strategically preferable to a Labour government making life better for Scots within the Union.

If you need explicit proof that Sturgeon’s attitude to Labour is similar to Lenin’s advice to the CPGB to “support a Labour government like a rope supports a hanging man”, look no further than her advice to English voters. She calls on them to vote Green. That isn’t a call to vote tactically for the party that can beat the Tories, or to vote Green where the fight is between them and Labour. It’s a call to vote Green in every one of the 106 target marginals where voting Green can only help the incumbent Tory or Lib Dem.

We don’t need leaked memos to understand what Sturgeon wants. She sees the destruction and defeat of the Labour Party as a necessary precondition to achieving the objective she has given her entire life to, Scottish independence. Understanding this malign intention towards Labour and hence the interests of working people in all parts of the UK is a necessary starting point for winning on 7th May.