Unionist pact to oust SNP at next election is not the given

Would the Tories do a deal with Scottish Labour to turf out the SNP? What, precisely, would the price of this unprecedented Unionist co-operation be? Could Scottish Labour live with it? What red lines might the LibDems lay down?

These are the kinds of questions our politicians tend to mobilise their best constructive ambiguity for – “I don’t comment on hypotheticals” I’ll give you all for free – but the fact questions like this provoke evasion is why broadcasters should begin and keep asking them. Even if Scottish politicians are unprepared to ventilate these issues publicly, in private, calculations are already being made as pro-indy parties struggle to mend their fractures and defend their recent dominance.

The answers might be interesting, too. Would Darth Murdo, or Russell Findlay, or Meghan Gallacher do a deal with Scottish Labour to turf out the SNP? Would they do the same deal? What are the philosophical and policy barriers and opportunities?

READ MORE: Stephen Flynn hits out at 'hard to find' Anas Sarwar in conference

If the polls suggest a close-run thing – and they do – we’re entitled to a few outline answers. Consider the data. A recent Sunday Times poll suggested the SNP would win the most seats in Holyrood on current polling, exceeding Labour’s tally by a single MSP, but that in theory, Sarwar could cobble together a Unionist majority to insert himself into Bute House with the aid of mancub Alex Cole-Hamilton and whoever the Scottish Tories decide should take over from Douglas Ross.

Curiously, the likelihood of this Unionist grand coalition materialising in Holyrood to oust the SNP was taken for granted in much of the subsequent commentary, as if red, orange and blue strands of Scottish opinion coming together was a surefire thing about which nothing critical or thoughtful need be said. But if anything, the opposite is true.

As events earlier this year should have amply demonstrated, securing and keeping confidence and supply from even loose coalition partners is challenging, as parties lose confidence in one other when natural competition and disloyalty take over, breaking faith on critical issues, refusing to supply their votes when the going gets really political and the initial flush of enthusiasm and then the political discipline begins to wane then wither. Which it tends to, sooner or later. Standing over sweetheart deals between Scottish Labour and the Tories in local government is one thing. Bringing that kind of coalition onto the national stage is quite another.

As their conference meets in Edinburgh, the SNP are also eyeing the standing Labour are likely to have heading into May 2026. Although Sir Keir won’t have to ask the punters for their support again in England for another four to five years, Scottish Labour don’t have that luxury.

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There’s roughly 20 months till the next Holyrood election. By that time, the new Labour government will not be new. Even if the public are prepared to make allowances for an incoming regime inheriting a difficult position from the Tories – and they probably are – any honeymoon period or lingering flush of optimism seems likely to have dissipated in just under a year and a half’s time.

This has political consequences. Desperate or delusional folk who convinced themselves – despite all the evidence to the contrary – that Labour must have secret plans for Keynesian stimulus or rolling back Brexit will realise the hope they were waiting for was completely forlorn.

The SNP undoubtedly have their own enthusiasm problems, but they don’t seem likely to be confronted with a buoyant and popular first-term Labour government in London.

In order to secure the friendly silence of Britain’s feral media – which retains all of its reactionary impulses and social obsessions – Labour have swept into power by promising a sugar-free change. And now we’re all meant to enjoy the sober and serious way in which Keir Starmer and his ministers set about explaining why significant change is basically impossible.

We can add a few other factors. Sir Keir Starmer was elected in the summer of 2024 with a stonking Westminster majority, but with comparatively shallow public support and comparatively poor personal ratings. It is already clear that his policy platform – which made sticking to Tory spending rules Labour’s cardinal fiscal economic virtue – has left the incoming administration with lots of bad news to share with the public and a light portfolio of uplifting announcements.

As it stands, the best-case scenario for Labour is that they can affix blame for this to the Tories – and in Scotland, it’s clear, on the SNP – for this situation.

Rachel Reeves’s choice of first impressions remains one of the more remarkable in British political history, prioritising the removal of winter fuel allowance from millions of pensioners over everything else, and it is already proving difficult for the Government to persuade anyone that this wasn’t a political choice for which Labour must bear responsibility.

Blame vibes-based politics. From the old Johnsonian vibe of self-basting corruption and an unapologetic sense of impunity, Starmer promised to restore dignity and public service. This is as much an aesthetic judgement as anything else, neatly captured by reactions to Starmer’s trip to Berlin this week.

Instead of telling off-colour jokes about the French – “donnez-moi un break”, et cetera – Sir Keir arrived in Germany and politely explained to Olaf Scholz that he wants what sounds like a wholly cosmetic “reset” of our relationship with Europe, while maintaining all the policy “red lines” which briefly prevented the Tory Party and the party in the press from arguing that the next Labour government would sell our sovereignty and make Britain choke again on Brussels’ bit and halter, whether by participation in the common market, loosening restrictions on free movement of people or even the sinister prospect of a few more European exchange students visiting institutions of higher education for six months. The horror, the horror.

If you are honestly impressed by a boring man standing boringly beside another boring man in a boring suit and promising to do nothing substantive to mitigate the challenges Brexit Britain faces, then this smacks of an astonishing tolerance for political mediocrity and an attitude to politics which is just as superficial and performative as Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson belching best of British beer and smoke for the benefit of GB News.

Labour are going to discover – seemingly quite rapidly – that the soft bigotry of low expectations won’t propel a new government forward for long. As political slogans go, the suggestion that “stability is change” looks unlikely to stand the party for the short term – never mind in the medium run – as the grotesque chaos of recent Tory governments recedes into memory, and the political charms of glum-faced but professional Labour politicians peddling bad news with no redemption arc and no jokes wears thin.

If you really wanted to screw things up as soon as possible, having lifted hundreds of pounds out of the pockets of Britain’s grannies just as the warm days of summer are cooling off, you might imply that banning fags from beer gardens is one of your burning policy ambitions, to let the punters know that when you valorised “a politics which treads a little lighter on all our lives,” you meant cutting the state’s contribution to keeping pensioners from turning blue and cracking down on new and surprising social groups to keep spirits up.

Take the 20 months. Throw this context onto the Scottish political map. Although some superficial efforts have been made to paint Sarwar as either a valued counsellor to the UK party leader, or a brave dissenter prepared to hack out a distinctive policy position from the Prime Minister, there is really no evidence to support the idea that Starmer’s guidance or his gripes make a blind bit of difference to the Labour leader.

Why should they? Sarwar has already demonstrated himself to be a cheerful apologist for the line he is given, smoothly transitioning from advocating for a more generous and universal Winter Fuel Allowance for pensioners to the new reality where means testing is a key instrument of social justice at work in the world. If cosmetic havers and tokenistic dissent are what you’re after, Sarwar’s got you covered.

This political weathercock is going to find himself furiously spinning over the next two years. Scrutiny is also likely to increase. And as successive leaders of the Scottish Tories have learned, when you are welded into the policies and politics of a bigger political party, your political fate is pointed out for you elsewhere, by decisions you were not asked about, in meetings you weren’t invited to, while concealing your own powerlessness from the world. Your job, I think, is to grin and bear it.