Last July a Labour red wave swept across Scotland as the party surged from one Westminster seat to 37 at the expense of the Scottish National Party, which dropped from 48 to nine.
Seven months on the landscape has been transformed. The red that now seeps across the body of Scottish politics is not a continuation of Labour’s march. Rather it is the party haemorrhaging support at what must be an alarming rate for Anas Sarwar, leader of Scottish Labour.
Sarwar at one stage looked a shoo-in to become the first Labour first minister of Scotland since Jack McConnell in 2007, after next year’s elections for the devolved parliament in Holyrood. But a slew of recent polls suggest the SNP, which has been steadied by its leader John Swinney, has staged what once seemed an unlikely comeback amid the Labour implosion and could retain power in a minority administration.
The rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in Scotland has complicated the picture, but there is no denying the main reason for the landscape shift. Whereas the SNP for years looked south to Westminster to lay blame for problems in Scotland, now Scottish Labour legitimately can do the same.
“The worst thing that ever happened to Anas Sarwar was Keir Starmer becoming prime minister,” said political polling guru and University of Strathclyde professor John Curtice this week.
It was a devastating comment on how the unpopular UK Labour leader and his new government, which was dealt a dire economic hand but has also struggled politically, has so quickly snuffed out the party’s revival north of the border with England.
On Wednesday during prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons, SNP MP Dave Doogan goaded Starmer by asking if he agreed with Curtice’s “withering assessment” that he has dragged Sarwar down: “If he doesn’t – and he should – is Labour’s decline due to] stripping Scottish pensioners of their winter fuel payments or abandoning workers in [closed oil refinery] Grangemouth or attacking the National Insurance payments of farmers?”
The prime minister tried to laugh it off, but the polling numbers are no joke for his party. Unless the British economy rebounds quickly, Labour may be on course for yet another disaster in Scotland.
Holyrood’s 129 MSPs are chosen in two ways. Most are elected in constituency votes, with a minority chosen from a regional list system based on party support.
A Find Out Now poll for the Herald newspaper this week put Labour on 20 per cent in the constituencies compared to a high of 37 per cent last summer, while it has dropped from the low 30s to 16 per cent on the regional list.
The SNP, meanwhile, has staunched the leakage from its recent party turmoil and was on 34 per cent in the constituencies – other polls in recent weeks put it at up to 37 per cent. This was well down on three years ago in the wake of former leader Nicola Sturgeon’s assured handling of the pandemic, when it would have polled deep in the 40s. But it was still a fine performance considering the trajectory it was on last summer.
The SNP led a regional list poll this week with 27 per cent. Recent surveys, however, suggest Labour could be losing as many voters to Reform and the Greens as it is back to the SNP.
Curtice this week crunched the numbers and predicted that if a Holyrood election matched the polls the SNP would win 51 seats, down from the 64 (one short of a majority) it won in 2021 but still enough to be the largest party and lead a government.
[ SNP lays traps for Labour in Scotland’s draft budgetOpens in new window ]
Labour, meanwhile, could return as few as 16 MSPs, six lower than a dire result in 2021 that was a low watermark in the devolution era. The Tories, Greens and Liberal Democrats would each return about 15 MSPs. Reform could take nine seats, with Alba, founded by late former SNP leader Alex Salmond, potentially winning eight.
For the veteran Swinney the prospect of returning as first minister in 2026 for another five years – by then the SNP would have governed Scotland for nearly a quarter century – must have seemed remote when he took over a fractured party last May in advance of the hammering in July’s Westminster vote. “[With] the conditions that I inherited we could easily have been wiped out,” he told a BBC political podcast in Scotland just before Christmas.
Although the collapse in Labour support has driven the SNP’s renewed hope Swinney is seen as having reintroduced a sure touch to the leadership that critics of his predecessor Humza Yousaf felt was absent then.
Swinney has steered clear of the culture war debates that hampered Yousaf and, before him at the end of her time in office, Sturgeon. He has also reunited a fractured party by forging a steady governing partnership with deputy first minister Kate Forbes, a doyenne of party conservatives.
But once again Labour in Westminster has given the SNP a lifeline. In October’s UK budget chancellor Rachel Reeves handed Scotland an extra £3.4 billion (€4.1bn). The SNP deployed the bounty with largesse in its own budget in early December, which passed a Holyrood vote this week.
Scottish Labour acquiesced to help the SNP budget through. With his party in free fall Sarwar couldn’t risk the early Holyrood election that might have happened if the budget had not passed.
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