Keir Starmer and senior ministers have been urged by Scottish Labour to “stay behind their doors” in Whitehall to avoid turning the next Holyrood election into a referendum on UK government failures.
Anas Sarwar, the leader of Scottish Labour, said the prime minister’s policy failures and missteps had left voters “angry, frustrated and impatient”, leaving his party clear underdogs before May’s election.
Asked during a speech in Edinburgh whether he wanted Starmer to campaign in Scotland, Sarwar said: “I would say the best thing that Keir Starmer and the UK Labour government can do is be behind their doors and in their departments getting things right and changing our outcomes.”
Addressing a room packed with Labour parliamentarians, candidates and activists, Sarwar said the party had failed to communicate its achievements to voters – including raising wages and tackling NHS waiting lists – while making serious errors, such as cancelling the winter fuel payment.
Scottish Labour’s leadership and strategists are privately furious about what they see as No 10’s policy and communication failures, believing they have squandered substantial polling leads, after resoundingly beating the Scottish National party in the 2024 general election and in two byelections.
Polling over the past three months shows the SNP comfortably ahead, hovering in the mid-30s, while Scottish Labour has slumped from similar levels in 2024 to the high teens, with Reform overtaking the party in some surveys.
Sarwar said Scottish Labour was used to proving detractors wrong. In recent months, the party has built a £1m election war chest and delivered more than 1m campaign magazines to households.
He said his central challenge was to prevent John Swinney, the SNP leader and first minister, from turning May’s Holyrood election into a protest vote against the UK government.. Instead, Labour would focus on domestic issues such as NHS waiting lists, education and the housing crisis.
Sarwar also acknowledged that Reform UK posed the biggest electoral threat to Labour, with repeated opinion polls suggesting voters were using Nigel Farage’s party as an outlet for their discontent with the UK government.
The SNP struck a less bullish but more optimistic tone at its campaign event in Glasgow’s west end on Monday morning. Prospective Holyrood candidates spoke of hope, a “year of opportunity” and “a positive vision for the future” – all anchored in Swinney’s insistence that an SNP majority in May would, by precedent, justify another independence referendum.
Spending little time focusing on Scottish political rivals, Swinney instead contrasted this hopeful mood with what he described as a UK “lurching further and further to the right”, citing Brexit, austerity cuts and “disgraceful” language used around immigration and asylum.
“With each passing day, Westminster becomes ever more distant from offering solutions to Scotland’s challenges,” he said, pointing to recent polling suggesting a renewed voter confidence in his government’s running of public services.
With independence “utterly central” to the SNP’s election campaign, Swinney said it was “a fundamentally basic democratic point, that the UK has always accepted, that the people of Scotland have the right to decided their own constitutional future … based on the precedent set out in 2011 [when the SNP won a majority of 69 seats at Holyrood and Alex Salmond went on to negotiate the 2014 referendum with David Cameron]”.
While successive UK governments have refused to grant Holyrood the powers to hold another vote, Swinney later told reporters that, if faced with continued intransigence, he had “various tactics I could deploy when the time is right”, declining to elaborate.
Also speaking to supporters in Edinburgh on Monday, the Scottish Conservative leader, Russell Findlay, said cost of living pressures would dominate this year’s elections. Support for his party has collapsed as Reform has gained ground in Scotland, with several defections to Farage’s party, which has yet to appoint a Scottish leader.
