Nationalist sentiment won’t fix Scottish Labour’s identity crisis

Scottish Labour is in a pretty bleak place at the moment. It is recovering from its second drubbing in an election in two years, and its leadership is naturally scratching its head about how on earth to recover. So the consultation that the party has launched this week that includes questions of whether it should separate itself further from the UK party is in many ways not a surprise.

But what is perhaps striking is that the party thinks that this could help its predicament in Scotland. It is another way in which it is giving in to the nationalist narrative of Scotland being separate and different to the UK, and the Labour Party needing to sound a bit more like the SNP north of the border rather than forging its own identity.

Of course, Ruth Davidson managed to bag an impressive result for her party by running a distinctive campaign that kept leading Westminster Conservatives such as George Osborne well away from Scottish voters.