Perception trumps reality!
Belief beats truth! What you see isn’t necessarily what is there. What is there can be anything or nothing; if the story about what is there is strong enough, it will give form to the anything and substance to the nothing. Narrative warfare rages around us, and we are all collateral damage.
Take a look at this item in The National. In it, “top pollster“ Mark Diffley, who runs the Diffley Partnership, is asked to comment on Anas Sarwar’s characteristically clumsy attempt to scrub the stink of Starmer out of his own image. Describing Sarwars “pitch” he says:
The pitch is 'I’m my own man, I don’t answer to anyone else, see that really unpopular guy down in London he’s nothing to do with me'.
This is a lie, of course. But truth is not what matters. What matters is the “pitch,” regardless of the fact that the ‘branch office’ tag flatters British Labour in Scotland (BLiS) with a degree of autonomy it does not possess. The presentation of ‘Scottish Labour’ in the media has been telling a very different story for decades. The fact that the media uses the term ‘Scottish Labour’ in a manner that gives BLiS equivalence with real political parties, such as the SNP, has established a manufactured truth in the public mind. Even if ‘everybody knows’ that BLiS is just British Labour with a Saltire backdrop, they nonetheless tend to read about ‘Scottish Labour’ in the context of party politics with a default assumption that it is just like a political party.
It is a testament to how inept Sarwar is that he imagined he could piggy-back on this very tentative default assumption so as to give the impression that he is a real leader of a real political party and thus able to take positions that differ from those dictated by the British Labour leadership. He totally failed to take account of the tentativeness of the public perception of ‘Scottish Labour’ as a real political party. He failed to realise that people go along with the portrayal of ‘Scottish Labour’ as a real party for the sake of the story. It makes for very stilted storytelling if the audience has to constantly correct such details in their own minds.
Nothing is better designed to break the illusion of ‘Scottish Labour’ as a real political party than the ‘leader’ talking or acting as if ‘Scottish Labour’ is a real political party. Sarwar fails to recognise the difference between passive acceptance of a fiction and active embracing of that fiction as fact. The illusion of Emperor Sarwar’s new robes held until the moment he tried to do a twirl.
What I found interesting, however, was Mark Diffley’s apparent attitude. I got the strong impression that he doesn’t see the issue as being ‘Scottish Labour’s’ lack of autonomy, but rather their failure to tell a good enough story about their autonomy. The absence of autonomy is the real problem. But the solution isn’t to increase the autonomy, but to tell a more convincing story about it.
Problem-solving has ceased to be part of government’s function. Problems remain unsolved because government has become a machinery of deception and distraction. Nothing changes except the story.
Sarwar is simply a(nother) political careerist. What makes him stand out is that he is more inept than most.
As things stand Labour in Scotland look like they will take a hiding in May and, in so doing, register their worst performance certainly since the advent of Devolution and probably in all the time that they have been active in Scotland.
So Sarwar's effort to push Starmer out was a shot to nothing. Either he was successful and Starmer exists stage left or he failed but Starmer can't get rid of him (as the latter is too weak to do so).
So Sarwar may have calculated on improving the public perception of himself by either helping topple Starmer or trying but failing. Either way he might hope to get a boost in the polls as the election approaches.
Come May either Starmer or Sarwar will be gone. Or possibly both, depending on how the respective elections go (for Labour) in England and Scotland.
The media, particularly the BBC, were bigging up Sarwar in advance of his press conference. Now that it seemingly hasn't had the desired effect the 'story' is all about how his 'call' has backfired.
It is no great significance other than it gives those (tiny amount of self-interested persons) in the protected politico-press bubble something to keep them gossiping about between now and the Holyrood election.
Bearing in mind Mark Diffley ex of Ipsos Mori formed Progress Scotland a few years back with Angus Robertson of the SNP to work on Independence, I'd guess he sees things the same way as me and an increasing number of people. For Scottish Labour to survive, it needs to break free from the apron strings and become its own party, called Labour of Scotland or Your Actual Socialist Scotland or whatever.
And to be blunt Scotland needs it to get away from the prissy puritan cliquey antisocial weird SNP who call everything progressive and inclusive even when it very clearly ain't.
They would of course need to put Scotland first, and as we know, the only way to actually do that is - Independence. Moving on, if Scottish Labour came out for Independence it would be a complete 74.6% cert, AND they could take the credit for it. It would be the SNP's worst nightmare, hence why the SNP hate Scottish Labour and some cliquey SNP members sneer at them by calling them "British Labour in Scotland", instead of treating them as possible allies.