KEIR Starmer will U-turn on his refusal to work with the SNP following the next General Election, the SNP’s leader in Westminster has said.
The Labour leader has repeatedly ruled out working with the SNP if Labour do not achieve a majority government.
However, with projections following the local elections in England suggesting Starmer’s party could struggle to gain an overall majority at Westminster, Stephen Flynn said his party can hold the “balance of power”.
It comes after the SNP appealed to Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters to lend their votes to the party in a bid to “lock out the Tories”.
Speaking to BBC Radio’s Good Morning Scotland programme, Flynn said: “I’m actually quite excited about where we are at the moment because what we see is a big shift away from the Conservatives in England.
“But it’s a shift that is not going to deliver a majority government for Labour at Westminster and that very much brings us into play because it affords us the opportunity, the very real opportunity, of holding the balance of power at Westminster.”
He said the SNP would be “very clear” in terms of the issues they want prioritised which would include the cost of living and to see “Brexit rolled back”.
“And of course, we would be very, very keen to see a UK government, particularly a UK Labour government, deliver the powers to Holyrood to hold an independence referendum.”
While Starmer has rejected previous calls to work with the SNP, Flynn said the Labour leader had a track record of changing his mind.
He told the programme: “This is the same Keir Starmer who quite openly dropped his opposition to Brexit, he dropped his opposition to nationalisation, he dropped his opposition to scrapping tuition fees, and he dropped his opposition at the weekend to repealing anti-protest legislation.
“We know that Keir Starmer is desperate to be prime minister. The key thing here is that the Tories have continued to ignore Scotland – will Labour?
“Keir Starmer is a man who has broken many of his pledges, not just to the Labour Party but to the wider British public in order to try and become prime minister.
“He’s not going to walk away from becoming prime minister simply to deny many of our asks.”
