So last night, they finally gritted their teeth and aired a programme called The Fall of Labour (viewers in the UK can see it on the iPlayer here).
Presenter Jackie Bird's opening remarks highlighted the changed nature of Labour - its only Westminster seat in Scotland was in the affluent Edinburgh South constituency of million-pound homes. Affluence was now its new heartland in Scotland. Later, in a piece about the demise of the Ravenscraig steel plant under Thatcher, a former trade union man at the plant, Tommy Brennan, confirmed that picture. Asked by Jackie Bird if the failure of politicians to build the promised new town on the site of Ravenscraig was why he left Labour, he said what many former Labour members have been saying for years:
"No - New Labour left me. I didn't leave Labour - I'm still a socialist and I always will be till the day I die. Labour left me, as it did with many, many people like myself - many, many activists in the trade union movement, people who gave their life. I gave 39 and a half years to the Labour party.You don't do that and walk away from that lightly.
His pain and anger was palpable, literally spitting at the end.
The programme looked into the history of Labour, from its formation by a Lanarkshire miner to today's woes. One issue it highlighted was that the Labour party was originally in favour of Home Rule for Scotland. However, the issue has torn the Labour party apart. Jackie Bird commented:
"This was a big problem for Labour. The idea of Scotland being governed from Scotland was championed by its founding father Keir Hardie and was a key pillar of its existence. But over the decades, division within the party over devolution meant its relationship with this crucial policy was, at the very least, an uneasy one."
Speaking about the 1979 referendum on devolution, which was voted for by a majority of those who voted but was lost due to a Labour wrecking motion that 40% of the entire electorate had to vote for it, Jackie Bird commented:
"The effects of that referendum are profound. It was seen as a blow to Scotland's self confidence. But did it damage the Labour party? Well, it did see the emergence of Tam Dalyell's West Lothian Question: how could Scottish MPs, after devolution, vote on matters affecting English seats? And that question has reverberated down the years. And Labour has yet to come up with an answer."
Labour's heyday in Scotland was undoubtedly when Thatcher came to power. Having a clear enemy boosted their profile. In the first two years of Thatcher's government, Scotland lost one-fifth of its heavy industry. Scottish Labour membership surged but they were powerless against Thatcher and could not stop her destructive forces, perhaps most iconically summarised by Ravenscraig's demise.
Even though Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had to change the party to appeal to centre-right 'middle England,' and thus won a landslide in 1997, the anti-Thatcher image kept Scots voting for them. This led to complacency within SLAB.
Ian Davidson:
"There were of course some parts of local government where it was done on Buggins's turn, it was cronyism - in many cases it was near corruption. There was a degeneration of Labour in local government because they were there because they were there because they were there. They weren't really there with any particular burning purpose."
Gerry Hassan:
"It's not an accident that some of the greatest scandals of British post-war local government have happened in Scotland. One of the most significant was in Monklands. In 1993/4 this comes out and is brought to attention. And what it turned out was a Labour group that was predominantly Catholic was dispensing public funds to the predominantly Catholic area of the council. And Labour were prepared to just let that fester. It was also partly John Smith's constituency and it only came to light really when Tory English MPs continued to make it an issue in the House of Commons when Smith had become leader post-1992. And eventually the party has to act on it, to do an enquiry into it, clean up Monklands and then when John Smith tragically dies in 1994 there's then a very difficult by-election for the Labour party which Helen Liddel just very narrowly manages to win for the Labour party."
Tribalism was a real problem for Labour. Instead of representing all of the people, they simply represented their own interests.
Under Blair and Brown, who stormed to victory in 1997, devolution was brought in, championed by the new Secretary of State for Scotland Donald Dewar. The BBC obviously has a sense of humour, showing a 1995's George Robertson's statement on the idea of devolution:
"A Scottish Parliament inside and strengthening the United Kingdom would kill the SNP because the majority of people in Scotland want control over their own lives, over domestic affairs, but they don't want to wrench Scotland out of the United Kingdom."
If devolution was only a political tactic to weaken the SNP, it failed badly.
The rest of the program really concentrated on the impact on politics that the Scottish Parliament had. First up was the SLAB selection process for MSPs, with accusations that the process was controlled from Westminster via Donald Dewar. As a result, some of the best talent in SLAB was denied a seat within Holyrood. When Dewar died within a year of becoming the inaugural First Minster of Scotland, it left SLAB headless. No one in SLAB knew what to do with the SP it had created.
SLAB's problems were made worse because they had a tradition of looking to Westminster for guidance. This created friction between the MSPs and the MPs. This was worsened when Holyrood wanted to go in a different policy direction from Westminster. If Scotland gave its residents something for free, England would only want it as well.
However, Ian Davidson blames McLeish, who followed Dewar as First Minister, and then his successor McConnel, for being too weak and not doing enough - their failings were nothing to do with Westminster friction.
But there was also the accusation that Gordon Brown influenced every decision made by Scottish Labour. Did this discord between Holyrood and Westminster damage the Labour party? Jack McConnell commented on the lack of Westminster praise for Holyrood's achievements:
"You will find rarely, over the last decade, a leadership figure in the Labour party in Westminster - Scottish or from elsewhere in the UK - who has made a speech celebrating those achievements. And there was something, something somewhere, deep-rooted, that stopped those achievements being celebrated. And people in Scotland noticed that."
Former Holyrood Health Minster Susan Deacon suggested that Labour's achievements were less than stellar:
"Week on week, discussions about policy and so on were driven not by kind of long-term aims but rather about how you'd win the vote that week, what the headline would be, how we'd be seen to be getting one over on the Nats. And I know that many of my erstwhile colleagues will despise me for saying that, but I'm sorry, that's what it felt like to me, and that's what I disliked, and I firmly believe it's what an awful lot of the Scottish public disliked too."
With the rise of the SNP as a credible Holyrood opposition, they eventually won power in 2007. McConnell comments that from then on, Labour were driven by "defensive anger" at their defeat. Iain Gray took over as SLAB leader. He comments:
"I think if you do any kind of job like that, the dangerous thing, but the thing which nobody can avoid, is you look back and think about things that you could've done differently. My view of the core of our problem - this is not the only problem but I think it's at the heart of it - is the inability of the party to really come to terms with the new political context created by devolution. I think I maybe half understood that when I was a leader. I think I understand that much better now."
With the SNP Holyrood landslide in 2011, Johann Lamont became the new SLAB leader. She describes the period then as SLAB being in "intensive care." As Jackie Bird noted, there was also a brand problem - big Scottish Labour names like Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling were all at Westminster, not Holyrood.
Then, of course, came the Scottish Independence Referendum. Various commentators on the program all bemoaned the fact that Labour had to go into bed with the Tories and that the Better Together campaign was created in London and then dumped on the Scots to run. Labour had no way of putting forward their vision of progressive politics because they were chained to the Tories, so the campaign became a negative one - which Scotland didn't like.
After the indyref, Johann Lamont quit, accusing Labour in London of treating SLAB as a "branch office." Discussing the internal party fight over whether Lamont should go or not, Jackie Bird asked her "But isn't that an indictment of a Labour party which has been accused down the decades of backstabbing and infighting?" Lamont's response is legendary:
"That's only on the good days."Jack McConnell sums up Labour's problems since the creation of the Scottish Parliament:
"Well, I think there were two really significant problems that faced any leader of the Scottish Labour party over the last fifteen years. One was that they did not have control over the Scottish Labour party headquarters and the tendency in the Scottish Labour party headquarters was to turn towards the Westminster leadership and Westminster elected representatives rather than Holyrood."
Jackie Bird intervened to ask "Why did they not have control? Explain that to me." McConnell continued:
"Well, the party's staff are all employed by the Labour party as a whole but also in terms of the personalities - and to some extent the tradition - the tendency was to turn towards the Westminster end of the party rather than the Holyrood or the Scottish end."
Jim Murphy, a Westminster MP, then became the new leader of Scottish Labour. Iain Gray summed up their Westminster defeat in the 2015 general election:
"I think that we failed really to understand the difference that devolution had made and I think that's carried through all the way really until 2015 and the effect of that has gradually eroded our position in Scotland and in 2015 eroded it disastrously - just disastrously."
Jim Murphy resigned as leader and a leadership contest is now under way. Predictably, the programme ended with a bit of Labour's song: "We'll keep the red flag flying here."
However, for this blogger, the flag looks to be stained blue and is lying tarnished on the ground. Still, at least the BBC now have no excuse for stuffing their TV studios with Scottish Labour MPs or MSPs. Given there is now only one MP and it looks as though the 2016 Holyrood elections will significantly reduce the Labour MSPs, it is likely the BBC will struggle to find enough Labour faces to grace their studios.
I predict the BBC will instead have lots of historical programmes about the past successes of Labour. It's interesting to note that many of the quotes from the senior Labour figures that I use here are missing from the BBC News website's quote collection in The fall of Labour in Scotland - in their own words article. Perhaps some of it was just too painful to write down.
But the message of the programme is clear: the Labour party did not understand devolution and it probably still doesn't. By insisting on remaining tied to UK Labour, SLAB look to be perpetuating that exact same mistake. Will they ever learn?
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