Changing fortunes: Scottish Labour's Holyrood challenge

Seven months ago, Scottish Labour was on a high. The UK party had triumphed at the general election, returning to Downing Street after 14 years spent powerless and churning through leaders from the opposition benches.

The win had been bolstered by the victories of 37 Scottish Labour MPs in a result which saw that bloc swell from just two, achieving the party’s best seat tally since 2011. Hailing the result, Anas Sarwar had Holyrood in his sights, vowing to “deliver change in 2026 with a Scottish Labour government”. But not everyone in the party was convinced. And now polls suggest that Labour won’t only lose the Holyrood election, but will lose hard, potentially suffering its worst result since the creation of the Scottish Parliament.

How did the party of devolution get here? “They thought they were waltzing into Bute House,” says a critical source within Scottish Labour. “Myself and my colleagues always believed Starmer would be a disaster for Scotland, and sadly that’s been proven to be the case.”

A Norstat poll for the Sunday Times suggests Labour could emerge with just 18 seats, the same tally as that projected for the Tories. Both parties would lose numbers, it is suggested, with support for John Swinney’s SNP on both the constituency and regional lists shown at around twice the rate of that for Labour.

It’s a better picture than that suggested by some within Scottish Labour, who fear their party may remain in third place. And while others suggest that the poll may be an outlier, or that Sarwar’s team will build back over the next 15 months, Dr Eric Shaw, a former Labour Party researcher, is unconvinced.

“The next 12 months are unlikely to see a revival of Labour’s fortunes,” says the University of Stirling expert, who has written five books on the party. “The chances of coming first are slim. The gap between Labour and the SNP is pretty wide and I think they’ll struggle to reduce that unless something unexpected happens or the Scottish Government makes a big mistake on something or another.”

Further welfare cuts are “likely” on top of the unpopular change to the Winter Fuel Payment and the retention of the two-child cap on benefits, Shaw suggests, predicting that this means “the SNP will position themselves to the left of Labour and say, “only we can be trusted to defend Scotland’s interests”. 

“What does Scottish Labour really stand for? What does Keir Starmer really stand for?” he asks. “We know from lots of polling that people are unsure what the answers to those questions are.”

It has been almost six election cycles since Scottish Labour last formed the administration in Holyrood. Since then, it has burned through a succession of leaders. Jack McConnell, the last Labour first minister, stood down after losing the 2007 election to the SNP by just one seat, and said his party had to “re-engage” with its traditional supporters and listen to their concerns. His successor Wendy Alexander, who was recently ennobled, stood down amidst a donations row.

Iain Gray, who followed her, had his FM ambitions thwarted after ducking into a branch of sandwich chain Subway to avoid anti-cuts protesters. Johann Lamont, who came next, claimed her leadership had been undermined by UK Labour colleagues who treated the Scottish operation “like a branch office of London”, a line which has stuck to the party ever since. 

Next, former government minister Jim Murphy lost his own seat in the general election wipe-out which preceded his resignation in 2015, when he called Labour in Scotland the “least modernised part” of the movement. His replacement Kezia Dugdale, who opposed Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the UK party, said she was leaving Labour “in better shape” than she found it but stepped down before having to steer it through a Holyrood contest. After her, Richard Leonard brought Scottish Labour’s branding into line with that of the Corbyn-led UK party, adopting the “for the many, not the few” slogan, and survived attempts to oust him before eventually resigning. And then came former MP Anas Sarwar in February 2021.

At four years and counting, Sarwar’s leadership has lasted longer than anyone since McConnell – Murphy’s tenure was over in just six months – and it is arguably he who has been considered the party’s best hope at returning to government in Scotland. But if the Norstat poll is correct, he is more unpopular with the public than Swinney, rated -17 per cent to his rival’s -2 per cent.

That worries some insiders. “If Richard Leonard had had the poll ratings of Anas Sarwar there would be daily calls for him to resign,” one tells Holyrood, suggesting that the Labour shadow cabinet is “bereft of ideas”. “Ask them ‘what political direction do you want the Labour Party to go’ and they won’t have a fucking clue. They’ve not got a philosophy, they’ve not got an ideological position, they just want to win and think ‘we’ll be better managers than the SNP’.”

Sarwar’s backtracking on his party’s support for the Gender Recognition Reform Bill has brought his management into question afresh. His MSPs were whipped to vote for the Scottish Government bill, rebels Claire Baker and Carol Mochan lost frontbench positions over the matter, and he described the veto laid against it by former Scottish Secretary Alister Jack as “wrong”. But ahead of Scottish Labour’s conference he told interviewers that he had “deep regrets” around the bill and would not have voted for it “knowing what we now know”, suggesting that the party had been misled about the legislation by the Scottish Government. His own MSP Pam Duncan-Glancy was on the parliamentary committee which scrutinised the bill and it is unclear what Sarwar knows now that he did not know in 2022.

The comments coincided with a Scottish Labour announcement that was aimed at grabbing headlines. However, news that the party would scrap peak rail fares was drowned out by the U-turn.

While predecessor Leonard presided over a fractious time for Scottish Labour, Glasgow MSP Sarwar has succeeded in presenting a unified front, with one frontbencher telling Holyrood that the party is “feeling good” and “all on the same page”. Though others talk of “factions”, Shaw says Sarwar’s “powerbase” is stronger than that of his predecessor, arguing that instead of sharp-elbowed rivals, the real challenge he faces is the “institutional tension” between MSPs and MPs, London and Edinburgh. 

The “primary loyalty will be to Starmer”, not Sarwar, for those 37 Scottish Labour MPs, he argues, which will limit Sarwar’s ability to command and control them. “The ambitious amongst them will have to please and impress Starmer, nobody else,” he says. “That’ll be central in their minds.”

The decision to give trade minister Douglas Alexander, a former Scottish secretary, a second role in the Cabinet Office, working with devolved governments, may also generate stronger links between Labour in London and in Scotland. 

Energy minister Michael Shanks | Alamy

The decision is far from universally popular, with some seeing the East Lothian MP as the wrong man for the job. The government has said the move will help to deliver its Plan for Change, which aims to boost the economy, but it is also seen as a way for Labour to shore up its focus on Scotland and Wales before next year’s elections and will see Alexander work with fellow Scot Pat McFadden, who coordinated the general election campaign.

But for energy minister Michael Shanks, whose victory in the 2023 Rutherglen and Hamilton East by-election marked something of a turning point for Labour in Scotland, there is no division to heal. The party has “turned a lot of things around” since entering government at Westminster, he told The Herald on Sunday, and “everybody feels like we now need to be far more enthusiastic about selling a lot of those things”. Winning the general election was “really, really important”, he added, but “the massive test on the horizon has always been” the Holyrood vote. The party has reached a “vital moment”, he went on, while colleague Michael Marra MSP, Labour’s finance spokesperson in the Scottish Parliament, said the MP team worked with him to deliver the record settlement for Scotland in the latest budget.

However, the positioning of Scotland’s Labour MPs on some policy issues has affected Sarwar’s ability to deal with public outcry in some cases, and to articulate a clear position on others. Sarwar has described the two-child cap as “wrong”, but 36 of his MPs voted against an SNP amendment seeking its scrappage, with the other – Katrina Murray – not recording a vote. And while Scottish Labour said it would reinstate Winter Fuel Payment entitlement in the event of a 2026 victory, the party’s MPs had already voted to cut it.

“Sarwar has not differentiated himself anywhere near enough from Starmer and Rachel Reeves,” according to one former office-bearer. But Shaw says doing so is difficult. “The Scottish leadership would be very reluctant to step out of line,” he says. “Unless the popularity of the Starmer government revives they are going to suffer from the backwash of that. Their only option is to some degree to disengage, but that will invite pressure from the national leadership.” 

It’s not that there have been no attempts to put, in the words of former Welsh Labour leader Rhodri Morgan, “clear red water” between the operations. For example, in December Sarwar had the guts to say the UK Government was “wrong” in its decision not to compensate Waspi women for lost pension income and stated that a “fairer compromise” could have been sought. But Shaw says more definitive action could be taken, with the forthcoming closure of Scotland’s only oil refinery at Grangemouth providing one such opportunity. 

Anas Sarwar, Keir Starmer, Ed Miliband and Martin McCluskey on the campaign trail | Alamy

Prior to the election, Sarwar said Labour would “step in and put our money where our mouth is” and “save the jobs at the refinery”. But redundancy notices have now been issued to more than 400 workers and despite Sarwar’s claim that “hundreds of millions” would be funnelled into securing the site, the UK Government has delivered half of the cash for the £100m growth deal for the area, which is instead spread across 11 projects. 

Speaking to STV News, Sarwar was asked if he had let the workers down and answered that “it’s really important here that we recognise the concerns in the Grangemouth community, that we are working to deliver a positive transition for the community of Grangemouth and that industrial site, and that’s something that we’ll continue to press”. 

It wasn’t enough for local MP Brian Leishman, who is one of the Scottish Labour 37 and told the BBC’s Sunday Show that he is “angry” at his own government, saying that it “should be doing an awful lot more”. When asked what happened to Sarwar’s pledge, Leishman answered that he didn’t know. “I want to know,” he went on, “because I believed Anas when he said that”. 

“To reform its distinctive Scottish credentials, Scottish Labour would have to say ‘we are against the closure of Grangemouth’,” Shaw suggests. Without doing so, he says the party makes it easy for floating voters to switch allegiance to the SNP and make the projected 2026 result a reality.

“There’s not much that distinguishes between the two parties. A lot of voters sense that, it’s not a difficult leap.

“There’s a swirl of voters between Labour and the SNP. Although the parties can be very antagonistic there’s a lot of people who switch between them. Labour has a slight advantage at Westminster because in a general election you’re voting for the UK Government, so if they’re anti-Tory they will vote for Labour,” but that dynamic does not exist in a Scottish Parliament election.

“There was this dip in popularity for the SNP for a whole range of reasons” last summer, he continues. “What did not follow was anything in particular about the Scottish Labour Party which mobilised voters. There is an argument within Labour that Sarwar did very well because ‘they like our policies, they like our platform, they like our leader’.

“All of a sudden the party’s polling rather poorly,” Shaw says. “But it probably had little to do with him in the first place.”