SNP can only rely on Labour’s incompetence for so long

It is one that has plagued the Tory Party for decades. It has enjoyed enough support south of the Border to dominate Westminster while Scottish voters have shown a reluctance to touch it with the proverbial bargepole. Now it’s Labour’s turn to grapple with the problem and the results are proving hilarious.

The timing could not have been worse for a party which was shown the door almost 20 years ago and banished to the freezing fringes of mainstream politics. It once held Scotland secure in its power, running the majority of local councils and then the newly reconstituted Scottish Government.

But in recent years, Labour have been ignominiously stripped of their power and reduced to having just one MP at the Westminster parliament. Had the party for one instant grasped the reason and scale for their fall from grace, it might have been possible to feel a little sorry for the position it found itself.

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Instead it pouted and grumbled, displaying an almost insulting denial of the fact that Scotland had turned its back on its vision of the country. It simply refused to accept its support had withered and was therefore incapable of understanding why it had fallen so low.

This year, though, it believed itself to be on the brink of a return to the position in our hearts it believed to be rightly its own. First it won the Rutherglen by-election from the SNP and then went on to notch up its first half-decent Scottish result in a UK General Election for years.

The truth is that Labour won that election in Scotland and throughout Britain because they were not the Tory Party.

After a series of woeful prime ministers, policy disasters and an almost criminal mishandling of the economy, voters were so desperate to be rid of the Conservatives they would have backed almost anyone that looked capable of replacing them. In the UK’s dysfunctional political system, that could only be Labour.

If Keir Starmer’s band of lightweights had fooled themselves into believing they had recaptured the Scottish heartlands on their own merits that delusion was not to last.

The first months of the new Labour UK Government have been a disastrous. There has not been a challenge it has not transformed into a catastrophe. Promises have been torn up, core values ditched, hopes of change extinguished.

The polls tell their own, bleak story. Labour’s popularity has plummeted; Starmer’s personal ratings are now lower than even Rishi Sunak’s before the General Election – a drop described by leading pollsters as “unprecedented”.

The news just keeps getting worse for Labour as they prepare for a Holyrood election in 2026 which they hope will seal their return to political dominance here, a myth supported by those sections of the Scottish media which have never really abandoned their support for the party.

All this is a continuing headache for Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar. As very much a Starmer underling, he has no influence on ditching those decisions which have undercut Labour’s “revival” yet he will be the first to feel the brunt of voters’ anger at a general election.

Prime among the many issues driving that anger is Labour’s decision to axe the Winter Fuel Payment for pensioners. Although the UK Government can afford to pour billions into the coffers of British banks when they screw up the economy, it can’t, according to Starmer, afford to keep paying out a benefit vital to keeping millions of older people warm this winter.

Figures published this week show the axing of that benefit will push 100,000 pensioners into poverty in the months ahead.

Nothing symbolises the abject failure of Labour to protect those who voted for it as brutally as its decision to stop this payment.

Sarwar knows it. Ian Murray – until relatively recently Labour’s sole Scottish MP and now their Secretary of State for Scotland – knows it too, although, in a recent debate with SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn, he tied himself in knots trying to deny its effect.

Sarwar’s challenge now is to deliver that overhyped and over-promised victory at the Scottish election while tied to the coattails of Labour as their popularity plunges off a cliff.

This week we were given an advance preview of how he intends to do that – by cutting that tie with Starmer. His pledge to reinstate the Winter Fuel Payment if he forms the next Scottish government is nothing less than a blatant bid to hoodwink Scottish voters.

Fool them first by using the word “reinstate”. In fact, the benefit he plans to pay pensioners is not the same one axed by his boss. The Sarwar version includes some version of means testing, whereas the original benefit was paid equally to all.

The Sarwar inferior reboot will be sold as a “fairer” version because we can’t just be paying out millions to people who should be paying it for themselves. If that means ditching the core concept of a universal benefit, then we’ll just have to suck it up.

Sarwar is also fooling the public by pretending Labour in Scotland is a different entity to UK Labour with different principles and policies. It isn’t and it doesn’t.

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This is a tactic often used by organisations based in London but with Scottish branches. Take for example UK national newspapers which have Scottish editions. How often have we seen The Sun, for example, endorse one political party down south and an entirely different one north of the Border?

I don’t know about you, but I’m always suspicious of that. It looks like window dressing for a different audience. How can the same brand have two completely different opinions?

The Labour Party increasingly faced the same situation as devolution underlined different political cultures north and south of the Border.

After the 2014 referendum, the former leader of Labour in Scotland Johann Lamont described the party’s treatment of their Scottish operation as that of a “branch office”. Since then, they have treated the party in Scotland as simultaneously the same as the UK party and slightly different.

One aspect of the relationship that remains resolutely unchanged is its power structure.

The UK leader is the boss, the Scottish leader some considerable distance below.

When Sarwar speaks out about Israeli actions in Gaza, he can do nothing about Labour’s unquestioning support for Israel. That power is Starmer’s alone.

And when Sarwar promises to “reinstate” the Winter Fuel Payment, he cannot do so without the express permission to do so.

This begs two questions: 1. Why does Starmer believe the Winter Fuel Payment is justified in Scotland but unjustified in Liverpool? If I were a pensioner in Liverpool I’d take a dim view of that.

2. Sarwar believes the Winter Fuel Payment should not have been scrapped, why did he say nothing when his “boss” scrapped it? And why did Scottish Labour MPs vote for it?

The obvious truth is that neither Starmer nor Sarwar are acting out of concern for pensioners but only for Labour’s electoral prospects in 2026.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking but hardly surprising. To a certain extent this is politics and it’s up to the SNP to put forward a more coherent and honest prospectus for that election. Right now, they seems to be doing an OK job in doing that. Polls suggest they are back on course to have more MSPs than any other party in 2026.

However, they won’t have enough to form a pro-independence majority, even in the unlikely event of a collaboration with the Greens.

That would be a blow to the independence cause, despite the recent poll by Survation which shows support for independence increasing by two points.

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Also worrying is an increasing suspicion that the SNP have forgotten how to do politics. Recent months have suggested they are determined to alienate communities they used up a great deal of energy on winning over.

They have put in place a deputy leader whose beliefs contradict LGBTQ rights. They abruptly ended its deal with the Greens without accurately calculating the cost. And they are currently embroiled in a row over Stephen Flynn’s plan to stand for Holyrood while keeping his Westminster seat.

The SNP can still “win” the Scottish election, particularly as Labour are regularly proving themselves untrustworthy. But they needs to restore the sense of internal discipline they were known for not so long ago, and they need to rediscover their sense of purpose.

They can only rely on Labour’s incompetence for so long.