Political commentary

The rosette my Doug wore

Ferdinand Mount

Glasgow

Where, or whaur, is the Labour Party we knew and loved? Why, here it is, alive and spitting, in Keir Hardie House. David Wiseman, the reputedly exotic 18-stone Labour candidate, has put on a tie and seems to have shed a stone and his ear- ring, although, according to his opponents, he has not yet filled the hole with Polyfilla. And now he sits between Lord Ross of Mar- nock and Mrs Janey Buchan, looking as placid as a helping of beef flanked by the mustard bottle and the horseradish sauce.

Och, but it's a sour reek when Willie Ross gives of his best. The former Scottish Secretary is a maestro of the Lowland whinge, the sort that goes right through you like the wind at the corner of Sauchiehall Street. 'We in the Scottish Labour Party put a premium on loyalty.' One in the eye for Roy. 'Anything I have, anything I am, I owe to the Labour Party.' The Right Hon Lord Ross is not one to forget his ain folk, not like some who think themselves worth muckle mice dirt. 'The one thing that binds the SDP together is the thread that binds them to Brussels, and for some people it's a pretty golden thread.'

There is not much left of Mr Jenkins by the time Mrs Buchan comes on to horrify us with tales of the extravagance of the Com- mon Market University in Florence. People apparently come up to her in the street (in Glasgow not Florence) and say `Janey, just get us oot!' She makes a moue on the oot which results in a noise like a train-whistle.

Janey is here reminded of 'the wonderful thing Nye Bevan said about Britain being an island built upon coal and surrounded by fish'. Normally, game and set go to the first speaker to bring in Nye Bevan, but Willie is not finished yet. 'He said it in Largs', Willie interjects. Janey, somewhat put off her stride, says: 'I don't know where he said it. That's the trouble with you teachers, always putting people right.' That's the wonderful thing about the Labour Party; the is so thrillingly close to the surface.

It is hard for the rest of us to squeeze in a word with Mr Wiseman, who remains com- fortably silent unless prodded. In Scotland, the Left is learning how to box clever; on Scottish television, even the spokesman for the Militant Tendency wears a pinstripe suit.

All the same, Mr Wiseman does confirm the rumour that he is indeed wearing the rosette Doug Hoyle wore when he defeated Mr Jenkins at Warrington. The very same rosette. No doubt it will be handed on from generation to generation, and children yet unborn will lovingly finger the frayed silk and lisp the hallowed name of Doug.

Which is curious because it was generally thought at the time — and Mr Jenkins is not slow to remind us — that after the count at Warrington Mr Hoyle made a disagreeable speech, high on the Ross Ran- cour Index. However, Willie himself is not to be put in the shade of the Blessed Doug: `Is Mr Jenkins wearing the same rosette he wore then, when he finished second?'

By now the general drift is quite easy to gather. Mr Jenkins stands accused of a cer- tain lack of consistency. Here and there, it is true, one does notice a certain flaky spot on the stucco. Mr Jenkins's commitment to a Scottish Assembly with 'a substantial range of powers', for example. One hesitates to say it of a 'partnership of prin- ciple', but in the past most leading Social Democrats, particularly Mr Jenkins, had shown themselves lukewarm if' not hostile to devolution.

The Alliance continues to attract huge audiences, 1,000 when Shirley Williams came, and — possibly a greater feat — 200 on a rough night with Mr Russell Johnston as the guest attraction. SDP audiences are unnerving for the novice. They sit so still.

They give nothing away. Middle-aged, middle-class, sensibly clad and quiet as, well, a wet Monday evening in Glasgow, which it is, while Mr Jenkins talks of 'ex- truding' inflation and makes that gesture of his which is like clutching a ripe peach and slowly turning it until it drops from the branch, occasionally in moments of high emotion shaking it vigorously as if the peach had turned out to be less ripe than first thought `If the qualities of this constituency did not seize my imagination,' Mr Jenkins tells us, 'I would not seek to represent Hillhead.' The audience does not twitch a muscle at this compliment. We do not rudely purse our lips at the possibility that his imagina- tion may have been seized before.

And Hillhead does have great qualities: the dour splendour of the Great Western Road, the sweeps and vistas of Hyndland and Kelvinside, doric pillars and distant cranes, and sooty cliffs of tenement. But the reviving of Glasgow is an uphill struggle for all that. The great traditional employers are still laying off staff; this week, it was W.D. and H.O. Wills closing down their factory in Alexandra Parade and wiping out 600 jobs. And re-employment on a large scale depends embarrassingly on direct public enterprise or on fudging the sums to subsidise private industry. Mrs Thatcher, we are told, now looks more kindly on keeping the Invergordon smelter open by letting it have electricity at hydro-electric rather than nuclear tariffs.

The brute vote-buying power of a

government with an overall majority is a fearsome thing. Mr George Younger an- nounces that the £30 million National Ex- hibition Centre, which all Scotland had been competing for, is by the purest coin- cidence to be built on the derelict Queen's Dock, within sight of the Hillhead division.

To say derelict is to be kind. It is a huge wasteland: rusting bollards, stray patches of cobble and warped railway lines. Where there used to be water, the bulldozers have tipped spoil. Here and there, the spoil cat- ches fire and smoulders in the sleet.

The city was gutted by motorways in the 1960s and 1970s. The wounds still show. Unfinishedor abandoned stretches of flyover and underpass block off the view. Walking down a main street, in the gloam- ing, I suddenly found myself stumbling through a field of black mud, like in a silly dream. Except for the smart little underground railway, it would be hard to say what the people of Hillhead have to be grateful for.

Yet the Conservative candidate, Gerry Malone, bounding up and down the bleak staircases, with their bare stone floors and • waist-high tiling, is received with little whistling coos of friendliness, even in the Corporation blocks which are, if possible, bleaker than the privately owned tenements.

Mr Malone is not too bad, for a Conser- vative candidate. He has, however, been unable to resist going in for law-and-order. Pausing for breath on the sixteenth tene- ment staircase, I ask Mr Malone whether many of these old ladies express concern about law and order. 'One or two, but onlY petty crimes like vandalism, nothing serious like mugging.'

Little old ladies in Glasgow not worried about mugging? Glasgow had no riots last i

summer. Yet unemployment in the city s running at 20 per cent, among young people, nearer 50 per cent. A certain amount 01- rethinking about the social causes of crime might seem called for. All of which makes this column's usual exercise in ritual self-humiliation the most difficult yet. The Conservative vote appears to be firming up, Labour's to be holding, s° far. Yet if the Conservatives won at this stage of a parliament with 3 million unemployed, it would be remarkable. Logically, then, Labour ought to creep home, but that would be remarkable too, for Labour has won only one by-election seat off the Tories since 1964 and that was back in 1971.

The least remarkable result, paradoxical- ly, would be if Mr Jenkins won. Despite the Alliance's unmistakable slump in the na- tional polls, it still seems to be attracting 15 per cent of the vote more than the Liberals did at the General Election. You need only allow another five per cent for the bY- election fun of voting for the outsider of three plus the personal charms of Mr, Jenkins, and the result on an unchanged turn-out might look like this: SDP 10,000, Conservative 9,000, Labour 8,000, Scotnats 3,000. I did say 'might'.