ED BALLS arrived in Glasgow yesterday to celebrate the news that Scotland may elect a Labour MP next week.
With polling suggesting that Willie Bain, the Glasgow North East candidate, could be the only Labour MP to survive, the party faithful gathered in the Royal Concert Hall to pay tribute to this local hero. Unfortunately Bain couldn’t be there for the celebration. Perhaps he was out campaigning, or getting tips from David Mundell on how to deal with hearing that joke about pandas again and again and again.
The only candidates in the room were Jim Murphy, Ann McKechin and Margaret Curran. They were joined by about 40 members and some press.
This was the fourth Scottish Labour event I’ve been to in this campaign. If one thing has been remarkable of Labour’s events, apart from the fact they let The National in, it is how upbeat the party has been.
Last week at one of Murphy’s street “rallies” the people in the pastel, sloganised T-shirts were wild and enthusiastic. They were like One Direction fans, but instead of T-shirts with the face of Harry Styles, they wore T-shirts saying Guarantee the Barnett Formula.
Scottish Labour may get knocked down by the relentlessly disappointing polling, and their possible wipeout, but their attitude has always been that everything is awesome.
Yesterday, however, for the first time this campaign, everything did not seem so awesome. Things are so bad that the protesters who constantly follow the party around and dog Jim Murphy’s every appearance with megaphones and shouting seem to have given up on Scottish Labour.
In the room, the stage was decorated by six pop-up banners, each with a Scottish Labour pledge. Beside the podium, on a blue background in white letters, was the promise to "ban exploitative zero-hours contracts”.
As became apparent over the weekend this wasn’t a promise to ban zero-hours contracts, but a promise to ban exploitative zero-hours contracts. Some zero-hour contracts aren’t as exploitative as other zero-hours contracts.
Which is just as well, as a number of the technical staff putting yesterday’s event together were on zero-hours contracts. It was unclear whether or not they were being exploited.
Alex Thomson from Channel 4 news asked Ed Balls if he was a hypocrite for organising this event using staff on zero-hours contracts. Top tip for politicians – if a journalist asks you if you’re a hypocrite, the answer should be no.
Balls did not quite answer the question.
It was Margaret Curran who received the warmest reception from the audience. There were cheers. The first cheers of the day. Curran is clearly still popular and well-liked by party members. And unlike Balls and Murphy, her speech showed that she still has some fight left.
It was the Labour Party, she said, that had dominated this campaign in Scotland. Which in many ways is true, just perhaps not quite how she meant it.
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