Was Clypegate a planned response to the BBC's The Fall of Labour?

Last Monday, the BBC aired a program called The Fall of Labour, though a better name would have been The Continuing Fall of Scottish Labour. In the documentary, senior Scottish Labour figures aired their dirty laundry in public (read my write-up of it here).

One of the moments that haunts me from that program is when Jackie Bird interviews Johann Lamont, the leader of Scottish Labour during the independence referendum but who was forced to quit afterwards, and asks: "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."

If you have access to the documentary, such as on iPlayer here, the section of Lamont quitting begins at around 47 minutes. Watch it. She smiles after delivering that line but she can't hold it. It quickly disappears and we see the look of hurt and trauma in her eyes.

Whatever you think of Lamont's politics, she's as human as the rest of us and has the same human rights as Nicola Sturgeon. No one needs to be treated so badly as it would appear the Labour party have treated her.

What else she confided in Jackie Bird but was never aired, we'll probably never know. But given many in the Labour party were appalled at her attack on Labour as she quit, I imagine Scottish Labour would be deeply worried about this program and Johann Lamont's contribution to it.

The very next scene in that documentary is David Whitton, a special advisor and former MSP, stating that the way she went was very damaging to the party and still damaging it today. So I can imagine Scottish Labour getting their heads together to try and come up with a strategy to mitigate the devastating impact of that documentary.

And their solution was to rope in the Scottish Daily Mail to help them whip up a storm about vile cybernats, the supposed mass ranks of independence supporters who like to send abuse via Twitter and Facebook.

First up was a front-page piece ("First Minister's links with vile cybernat trolls") about Nicola Sturgeon's supposed links with a vile cybernat, followed by more hideous details inside and accompanied by former Labour Shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran's piece about a "cesspit of ugly vicious, sexist abuse" from the cybernats. Wings over Scotland details them well. (I'll assume that not even Scottish Labour can pull the strings of the Royal household and that the false rumour that Scotland would not continue to financially support the monarchy was pure coincidence and not part of the plan.)

Then on Thursday, the Scottish Daily Mail had another front-page piece ("Sturgeon: I'll purge party of cybernats"), courtesy of a piece written by Nicola Sturgeon herself. Quite how they roped her into this, I don't know. Perhaps the intervention by Harry Potter author JK Rowling a few days before the BBC programme aired was part of the plan too? Given she's a Labour supporter and donated to Better Together, perhaps she was asked to complain about Twitter abuse. Labour must have loved it when Iain Macwhirter gave them the perfect opportunity when he wrote that there was no anti-English sentiment in the SNP - but I guess anything would have done for them. Again, Wings details them well (here and here).

Then came the final cherry on the Scottish Labour damage-limitation cake: Clypegate, with the release of a 51 page dossier containing a list of all the abusive tweets SNP members had posted on Twitter. It contained the tweets of 45 people. As Wings pointed out, 20 of those users were in the dossier for using the words "quisling" or "traitor" - not exactly the vile swear word-filled abuse we'd been led to expect.

Hardly surprisingly, the press mostly ignored this collection of evidence that completely destroyed the whole vile cybernat campaign they'd been running for years. Anyone looking at the list will see that the evidence - compiled by Scottish Labour themselves - shows the press for the spin masters they are.

Even so, it has been an effective strategy by Scottish Labour. Given that the PDF of the abuse dossier contains Blair McDougall's name as author in its metadata, one can assume he was behind the whole, week-long campaign.

But the real story should have been The Fall of Labour. We finally have Scottish Labour admitting just how badly they've handled devolution and how they came to expect to be voted into power in Scotland no matter what. And the press concentrated on cybernats. They should have been concentrating on what Scottish Labour were saying.

There are deeply distressing things revealed in that show, such as:

1. an old trades union man saying "New Labour left me. I didn't leave Labour"
2. former Labour MP saying Labour's local government was "cronyism" and "near corruption"
3. former Labour First Minister saying Labour in Westminster would not publicly celebrate the achievements of Holyrood
4. former Labour MSP and Health Minister saying that when they were in power at Holyrood, they had no long-term aims and it was all 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."
5. former Scottish Labour party leader saying "the core of our problem... is the inability of the party to really come to terms with the new political context created by devolution."

I gave a brief analysis of what this meant in my post Devolution is to Labour as Europe is to the Tories. A free press in Scotland would have ran with something similar. But they didn't.

Then there were the things the programme didn't say but only hinted at. Just how much control did Gordon Brown have over Holyrood when he was Chancellor down in Westminster under Tony Blair? This isn't investigated in the documentary at all. This takes us back to Johann Lamont. She claimed Scottish Labour was being treated as a branch office and, in that documentary, former Labour First Minister Jack McConnell confirms that by stating the Scottish Labour party "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."

The BBC's programme The Fall of Labour and the airing of some of Scottish Labour's dirty laundry, with the not-too-subtle hints that there's a lot more they are keeping secret, is the story of the week. In fact, I'd say that second only to the general election result, it's the story of the year. 

Will Gordon Brown and other cabinet members from New Labour's time at Downing Street now come out and contribute to a similar programme, looking at how Westminster Labour viewed Scottish Labour and how Westminster worked to pull Scottish Labour's strings at every turn?

We know the stories are there. If Labour want to recover, they need to lance this boil. With Labour decimated in Scotland, they have nothing to lose. The party can't be damaged any further. A full and frank admission of how essentially Labour hated devolution and controlled the Scottish Parliament from Westminster could be the start of their healing process. 

If nothing else, it would at least help to remove the troubled, traumatic look from the eyes of Johann Lamont.