Scottish Labour’s 2024 victory has quickly turned to rubble. Gerry Hassan explains why
Less than a year ago as Labour were returned to UK office with an overall majority of 174, Scottish Labour finally overwhelmed the dominant SNP. The party won 37 seats of Scotland’s 57 – a gain of 36, thus reducing the SNP from 48 at the last Westminster election to nine.
Whereas Labour’s vote barely rose across the UK, with its mandate based on 33.7% in Scotland its vote shot up from 18.6% in 2019 to 35.3% while the SNP’s fell from 45.0% to 30.0% – a swing of 15.8% to Labour. To add to Labour’s joys, the Tories fell from 25.1% to 12.7%: their lowest vote in Scotland in their history.
So normal service resumed? Labour’s rightful hegemony is back in play – as so many thought. But this was never going to be the case, and Labour’s ascendancy has turned out to be even more transitory and flimsy than anyone including its opponents imagined.
What went wrong for Scottish Labour? Have they blown their chances in the 2026 Scottish election, or is there any way back – and any lessons they can learn from what has gone wrong since 2024?
What went wrong after July 2024?
Scottish Labour’s victory in 2024 was based on low hanging fruit: the “double change” environment of the unpopularity of the Tories at Westminster and the SNP at Holyrood – two long-term incumbents whose shine had massively gone off with voters.
What Scottish Labour had not done however was reset, renew and recalibrate their appeal despite by last year being 17 years in opposition in Holyrood. In this time the party has learnt very little. The rise of the SNP has deprived it of the allure of the centre-left cautious managerial politics which they have claimed as their own, while the Nationalists have the added advantage of the Scottish question and independence – which keeps some of their most disgruntled supporters in line.
Scottish Labour’s failure to reset and rethink meant that its victory came with little effort or energy. All Scottish Labour had was “vote Labour to get a Labour Government” which had cut through, that “double change” context and little else.
This has meant that as the vacuum of the centre of the Starmer government, and the missteps and political miscalculations by Starmer, Reeves and others have multiplied, it has undermined the case for Scottish Labour and its recent enlarged support. This has allowed the SNP to claim to speak for that centrist ground that wants a bit of social democracy along with standing up to Westminster and being pro-Scottish autonomy.
Learning from SNP historic success
Now 18 years into opposition Scottish Labour have still not learnt from the ascent of the SNP in recent times. The Nationalists reset their entire raison d’etre through three points. In 2007 they won their first nationwide election and formed a minority government, having shifted messaging to a more positive one about the upside of a self-governing Scotland. In 2011 after four years of relatively successful administration they won more than half the seats in the Scottish Parliament in a PR system and formed a majority government; and in 2014 the independence referendum saw the entire constitutional debate about Scotland reframed to the SNP’s advantage.
These three peaks brought the SNP centre-stage and underpinned their dominance – changing their core messaging, showing that they could be a competent party of government of the centre-left, and reframed independence as the new mainstream. These transformative moments under Alex Salmond’s leadership were the anchor which informed the SNP’s dominance at Holyrood and Westminster such as its 2015 “tartan tsunami” when it won 56 of Scotland’s 59 seats.
These watershed events formed the reservoir that the SNP could draw from under Nicola Sturgeon, providing political authority and capital which since then slowly eroded as the SNP’s number of years in devolved office continued, their patchy record in office grew, and the nature of the SNP’s internal governance became a public controversy and subject of a police investigation (still ongoing after four years).
Scottish Labour did not study the success of the SNP as a party: its messaging, positioning or the appeal of independence. Rather the party has been unable to adapt to the end of “Labour Scotland” and the politics of patronage and clientism which characterised the party’s hold over Scotland – analysed at length by Eric Shaw and myself in our book The Strange Death of Labour Scotland.
Scottish politics post-July 2024 has seen Labour’s poll ratings quickly collapse. The party are currently running at about 20% for next year’s Scottish elections with the SNP on about 33% – significantly down from the last Scottish contest but well ahead of Labour.
The landscape of next year’s Scottish election looks likely to shift from the “double change” election to a “triple change” contest where Labour at Westminster, SNP in Holyrood and Tories, are all majorly unpopular and toxic to large numbers of voters. This will leave the SNP under John Swinney with increasingly diminishing resources to draw upon, but still in a better place than Labour and Tories, with Reform and the Scottish Greens both well placed to pick up disillusioned voters.
Scottish Labour’s Predicament
Scottish Labour’s Anas Sarwar is the tenth leader since the onset of the devolved Scottish Parliament – an indication of the party’s lack of direction, confidence and sense of drift. Sarwar has been leader since 2021 and has been widely seen as competent, professional, articulate and media savvy, winning numerous plaudits compared to what came before.
Yet it has always been clear that the kind of social democracy he stands for and aspires to map is highly ambiguous. Everything about him – his background (the son of former Labour MP and multi-millionaire Mohammad Sarwar) and pronouncements identify him as part of the political (as well as other) establishments in Scotland, and hence with little insight or burning ambition to challenge the status quo. One Labour insider put it: “Anas Sarwar has been sleepwalking to victory until now. A bit like Keir Starmer in 2024. But now he has had a wake-up call and is going to have to earn victory in 2026.”
As British Labour’s problems have mounted post-2024 so too have those of the Scottish party. Sarwar and company have increasingly looked desperate as they have tried all sorts of announcements to reset the agenda. Sarwar has lurched across the political spectrum in a matter of weeks making contradictory statements. In one week he criticised the SNP for giving away “freebies”, in another he said that Labour would protect benefits decided by the Scottish Parliament and SNP, then had to deny charges of contradicting himself.
Scottish Labour have had a grim time since the SNP won in 2007 in the fag end of the Blair era. They have shown little insight into how to combat the SNP, break with their old ways and lay out a new language and way of doing politics.
The Scottish Labour Party still pine for a return to the normal service of representing the Scottish political establishment and not recognising that the times have changed. It does not take Morgan McSweeney or “Blue Labour” to work out that Scottish Labour need to be a party of disruption, change and insurgency. But 18 years on they are as far away from this terrain as ever – and will pay badly for this in 2026 and beyond.