By common consent, Margaret Beckett worked hard to produce a balanced account of Labour’s defeat, successfully avoiding ‘handing victory’ to any of the party’s warring factions. But in one respect, Beckett’s report describes an election that is a far cry from what actually happened.
Although she recognises the scale of the defeat in Scotland (and Labour’s modest seat and vote gains in England), she doesn’t spell out that the political contests in those nations were very different. The battle with the SNP in Scotland had very little in common with English Labour’s confrontation with the Tories: the issues, the language, the imagery and the framing were all quite distinct. To read the report, you could be forgiven for thinking that Scotland was just a region of the UK where Labour did particularly badly.
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