Freebies show Keir Starmer is running a government of self-service

It’s a time for “tough choices”, they tell us. You can only imagine the mental anguish the Prime Minister must have gone through when deciding whether or not to accept a corporate box at the Emirates Stadium or a multi-million-pound donation to his party from a hedge fund registered in the Cayman Islands.

Then there’s the tough choices concerning Bridget Phillipson’s decision to take freebie Taylor Swift tickets (she only did it for her kids, you see ...) and deciding to let someone pay £14,000 towards the cost of her 40th birthday party.

There’s also Angela Rayner’s free use of an apartment in New York over Hogmanay. The list goes on, but what is not in doubt is that they are hoovering up the corporate and donor freebies with all the self-restraint of looters in the middle of a riot. You could try and dismiss all this as a “bubble issue”, as Douglas Alexander attempted to do on Good Morning Scotland.

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Fair dos – he’s been away from politics for a while so is maybe a wee bit out of practice with those early-morning radio interviews.

But to try and deflect the criticisms of party figures accepting donations of expensive clothes as being a result of misogyny and because senior politicians need to “look good” – well, let’s just say that wasn’t a good look for him.

If it were only Labour women being singled out for this criticism, then he might – just about – have had a point. But as we know, the Prime Minister himself has been the recipient of lavish gifts of clothing.

In this new age of Labour austerity, party figures have some cheek telling us to tighten our belts, when we now know that Lord Alli paid for the Prime Minister’s own belts. And his suits. And his glasses.

Even taken on its own, this would all still look pretty atrocious. But in the context of Labour removing the Winter Fuel Payment from pensioners? It’s no wonder that the party is falling in the polls with Starmer’s personal ratings taking an absolute tanking in the process.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the Labour Party conference (Image: Peter Byrne)

So, what then of Anas Sarwar? With it being his party’s conference he was unable to pull his usual trick of going into hibernation to avoid bad news.

A time, then, to regain the initiative by setting out what he and his party will be seeking to do differently at Holyrood if given the chance?

Don’t be daft. Instead we’ve been treated to the usual, vacuous soundbites about Scotland somehow being “held back” by the SNP. Which kind of sums Mr Sarwar and his party up, really.

They have nothing to offer except slogans which have been focus-grouped to within an inch of their lives, and the overweening sense of entitlement that no amount of Holyrood electoral hammerings has managed to cure them of.

Namely, their absolute, unshakable certainty that they alone represent the “natural order” in Scottish politics. Yet listen carefully and there’s a discordant note of doubt which hums insistently beneath the rest of the tune.

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It can be heard in the self-serving briefings that Sarwar reckons Starmer needs to be more “optimistic” in his message ... that he needs to talk about ‘meaningful change’ being not just a “slow painful process” but one felt “in the here and now”.

And that nervousness is being repeated by sympathisers in the press. “Are Sarwar’s chances of becoming First Minister being damaged by Ker Starmer?”, they ask, as if Scottish voters judging Labour unfavourably for Holyrood based on their performance in government at Westminster would in some way be a monstrous unfairness to visit on a party branch office which thirls itself absolutely to that same London-based leadership.

Labour are relying on three things ahead of the Holyrood elections in May 2026. Firstly, a largely free ride for their senior figures in the UK and Scottish media. Secondly, for their colleagues in Westminster to play along with the fiction that Sarwar has influence in Downing Street, just as George Osborne and David Cameron used to do for Ruth Davidson.

Finally and crucially, Labour need the same independence supporters who decided to give the party a chance again at Westminster to do the same for them at Holyrood.

There’s nothing much any of us can do about the first of those, except to keep on calling it out when it happens. In respect of the second, we’ve already heard Starmer tell Scots that “Whatever I say will be what Anas says” – those Labour centralising tendencies die hard, after all. As for the third, that’s something which remains entirely in the gift of all voters who wish for Scotland to advance and prosper.

Scots can vote Labour for “change” as a slogan and nothing more, with less money for public services, signalling in the process that Labour can safely put Scotland’s constitutional question back in the deep freeze for the forseeable future.

Or Scots can vote SNP for a government that will work to protect public services but which speaks with candour about the limits of devolution; a government which respects the right of Scots to choose independence; and which will continue to work to build people’s confidence in and support for independence as a means of bettering our country and the outcomes for all who make their lives here.

It’s shaping up as a simple choice.