The problems faced by the Scottish Labour Party aren’t unique

If you were involved in Thursday’s election, and the long wait for results after, today you’re probably starting to feel human again. Your body clock is returning to normal, you’ve managed to resist the sugar cravings and have a Haribo-free 24 hours and your brain is beginning to process the results.

A year ago to the day, we found ourselves with a Conservative majority government for the first time in 18 years – a result that shocked and has led to a period of soul searching for our party. It was a victory for the Conservative party that was built on an appeal to English nationalism and a fear of the influence Scotland could wield.

On Friday morning, Scotland woke up to a political landscape that was the result of a similar campaign from the Conservative Party in Scotland. One that relegated policy to second place, played on the fear of independence in the face of a bullish SNP and poured petrol on a constitutional argument that has been raging since September 2014.

To give the Conservatives credit, they knew exactly what they were doing and it was a strategy that succeeded. The Conservative Party – which in the past year has been responsible for stoking anger and resentment against Scots – was recast as the defender of the union.

And what of the new political landscape? To paraphrase Macbeth, ‘stands the Labour Party where it did?’ Yes and no.

This result was a long time coming, and the consequence of over a decade of decline which has seen our vote share in every Scottish Parliament election reduce along with our seat count. The referendum – and the fallout from it – may have hastened it, but it was inevitable. In that respect, there is nothing surprising about Thursday’s result.

The movement of the Tories ahead of us, however, is something we have to take seriously. Only time will tell if this represents a permanent shift, or merely a response to post-referendum politics. What is clear is that, despite the Tory advance, there is still support for the Labour Party in Scotland. 1 in 4 voters – over half a million people – backed Labour in the constituency vote. This is a solid base on which to rebuild.

But clinging to the idea that the pendulum will simply swing back in our favour will kill us. In Kezia Dugdale, we have a leader who is in it for the long run, and the certainty of five years with her at the helm makes a big change to the constant merry-go-round of leadership elections that have done us so much damage.

Every past election defeat has also been met with a review of party structures and processes. That shouldn’t happen this time. We can’t avoid getting on with the difficult and necessary work of rebuilding by deferring it until after another period of introspection.

Our problem isn’t the structure of CLPs – it’s finding the activists to fill them. The focus of renewing our campaigning efforts shouldn’t be on how we collect data – it should be about the quality of the contact we have. And the problem isn’t how we make our policy – it’s finding the bold, radical new ideas that are going to appeal against the timid managerialism of a third term SNP Government.

I would argue there are three things we need to do to begin to overhaul the way we work, campaign and think.

First, the Labour Party needs to look like the big tent coalition that we need to build if we are to govern again. We need to be a genuine movement of working people and over the next five years we need to begin to appeal to hundreds of thousands of people who will become disillusioned with the SNP. On Thursday, lots of people who voted no will have voted for the SNP because they like the party’s brand of centrist populism and could never bring themselves to vote Tory. As a starting point in building a winning coalition, we need to win them back. A poll in the final week of the campaign suggested as many as 15% of the SNP’s supporters in this election voted no in September 2014. That’s almost 160,000 people voting SNP for whom independence is not the driving motivation.

Second, we need to be serious about rebuilding from the ground up. The constituencies we won on Thursday – Dumbarton, Edinburgh South and East Lothian – are demographically and socially very different, but all had candidates who ran organised hyper-local campaigns backed up by solid national messages. The same is true of many constituencies (such as Paisley and Renfrewshire South) where Labour still held a decent share of the vote against strong SNP opposition. Strong local leadership of campaigns and motivated local parties are crucial to our future success.

Third, and most importantly, are our ideas. The problems faced by the Scottish Labour Party aren’t unique. They are problems face by the non-nationalist left across Europe. Centre-left parties of Government have not been demonstrating much success at the polls recently. We can’t ever lose focus on fact that we exist to govern – not just to protest or cajole – and everything we do has to be done with governing in mind. We absolutely must look like a credible alternative. To do that we need to build up our ideas again, because the left is still struggling to articulate precisely what it wants to achieve with power. The truth is we still don’t have a good enough answer to what a centre-left programme of government looks like in a post-industrial, post-crash world where people’s relationship with their workplaces and communities is very different to a generation ago. In Scotland, failure to address that question will mean the political will settling along nationalist and conservative lines will be more likely.

What does all this mean? It means we have to answer the most difficult question of all – what are we for – and be open to all the answers that the people of this country throw at us.

Martin McCluskey was a candidate for West Scotland in this year’s Scottish Parliament elections.