A rebellious risk: Why Anas Sarwar’s gamble is unlikely to help Scottish Labour win the Scottish Parliament elections

Anas Sarwar, the man aspiring to be Scotland’s next First Minister, addressed Scottish Labour Conference last weekend in Paisley, the town where started his career as an NHS dentist. Yet he now faces having to undertake a much more delicate procedure than that faced in his previous career: to restore the fortunes of Scottish Labour and to get them back into power for the first time in nearly 20 years after Scottish National Party (SNP) dominance.

For Sarwar, a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) in Glasgow, the root of the party’s current pain can be found in London – or more precisely, the man occupying 10 Downing Street. He took the extraordinary step, as Scottish Labour leader, to call for the resignation of his party colleague the UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. The reasoning was that there were far “too many mistakes” being made at the heart of government, including the ongoing controversy involving former British Ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson and his links to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. All of this was severely undermining Scottish Labour’s chances at the upcoming Scottish Parliament Elections in May.

But Starmer survived that particular crisis and lived to fight another week. While some Scottish Labour MSPs backed this audacious act of rebellion, the UK Cabinet lined up to declare their support for the Prime Minister, as did potential leadership challengers like former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner. While Sarwar denied being part of a wider plot, the fact that nobody followed suit made him look weaker than the man he hoped to depose. This led the Times of London sketch writer to liken him to a would-be assassin wielding a clown suit while clutching a banana.

While the UK Government was embroiled over the Mandelson scandal (a man no stranger to the word during his own time in office under Tony Blair), Sarwar had his own problems to deal with closer to home. Pam Duncan-Glancy, a fellow MSP for Glasgow, was suspended from Scottish Labour for continuing her friendship with a convicted sex offender. Bewilderingly, Duncan-Glancy had once been Scottish Labour’s education spokesperson, someone who had hoped to be the next Cabinet Secretary for Education. Sarwar had faced repeated questions since late last year about why she was allowed to retain the party whip for so long. The old adage about sweeping your own front door clean before sweeping your neighbour’s springs to mind.

Many commentators labelled Sarwar’s call for the Prime Minister to quit as bold, ruthless, and even principled, but in reality, it is a monumental gamble. He hopes that by declaring his loyalty first and foremost to Scotland, detaching himself from the PM and shifting attention to the SNP’s less than impressive record in office, he can help turn the tide and propel his party to victory. Scottish Labour has often been labelled as a ‘branch office’ of London, a sobriquet gifted by Scottish nationalists who accuse them of falling into line with the UK leadership. However, whether the Scottish electorate will be receptive to this distancing remains to be seen.

Regardless, it could be too little, too late. The latest opinion polls not only have Scottish Labour trailing the SNP, the longtime incumbent Scottish Government, but also behind the disruptors of British politics, Reform UK, who could form the main opposition in Scotland. Others have been even worse, predicting their worst ever performance of the devolved era, fourth behind the left-wing Scottish Greens. It wasn’t meant to be this way. Scottish Labour triumphed at the 2024 UK General Election, sweeping away many SNP Members of Parliament (MPs) at Westminster, and actually managing to secure a higher percentage of the vote compared with Labour at a UK level. But if the saying ‘a week is a long time in politics’ is true, that feels like a generation ago.

Indeed, Labour once dominated Scottish politics and provided a conveyer belt of talent for successive UK Labour Governments – the likes of Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Alistair Darling, John Reid to name but a few – all born, bred and educated in Scotland before making their mark at the highest offices of the British state. The Labour Party was responsible for Scottish devolution, re-establishing the Scottish Parliament in 1999, and they ran the then Scottish Executive (subsequently rebranded the ‘Scottish Government’) with the Scottish Liberal Democrats 1999 until 2007, when the late Alex Salmond took the SNP into power first as a minority government.

Devolution was intended, in the words of George Robertson, the former Secretary of State for Defence who went onto lead NATO, ‘to kill [Scottish] nationalism stone dead.’ However, it has provided added impetus to the cause. In fact, Alex Salmond managed to do what was seemingly impossible by winning an outright majority in the Scottish Parliament under an electoral system designed to prevent just that. This culminated in the (temporary) transfer of power from Westminster to the Scottish Parliament to hold a referendum on Scottish independence in 2014, in which Scots backed remaining within the UK by 55% to 45%. For what was once a relatively fringe cause, Salmond took the country to the brink of independence.

Some have ascribed Scottish Labour’s problems as stemming from their involvement in Better Together, the pro-UK side in the indyref campaign. This led them to sharing a platform with a traditional opponent, the right-leaning Scottish Conservatives, who were unpopular to many working-class Labour voters due to the legacy of deindustrialisation under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and then the austerity policies under David Cameron. At the 2015 UK General Election, there was electoral tsunami as the SNP won all but three of the Westminster seats in Scotland, eating into Scottish Labour heartlands and leaving them with a solitary MP. However, the decline of Scottish Labour began before this.

The SNP once had a reputation at offering competent devolved government in Scotland. This was particularly true in the administrations of Alex Salmond where they became a highly effective catch-all party; being pro-business yet also offering a socially democratic pitch. Both Mr Salmond and his successor Nicola Sturgeon offered an attractive ‘social contract’ with the electorate, whereby there is free university tuition, medical prescriptions, personal care for the elderly amongst other things. When the SNP has firmly occupied this left-of-centre territory, while simultaneously challenging right-leaning Conservative governments at Westminster, there is little room for manoeuvre for Labour in Scotland.

Nevertheless, the SNP haven’t been without their own problems. This includes their less than stellar record over key public services, to the resignation of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and the arrest of her ex-husband Peter Murrell for embezzling party funds while chief executive of the SNP (which still hangs over the party due to the court case now expected after May’s election). To lose one First Minister was careless but it then lost a second a year later. Humza Yousaf, lacking the political nous of his immediate predecessors, was forced to resign due to his decision to terminate the ‘cooperation agreement’ between the SNP and Scottish Greens which helped maintain a parliamentary majority for the Scottish Government.

Humza Yousaf happened to attend the same private school as Anas Sarwar, the exclusive fee-paying Hutchesons' Grammar in Glasgow, both being children of aspirational Pakistani migrant families who invested heavily in their education to give them the best possible start in life. Both Yousaf and Sarwar ended up at the University of Glasgow, the former read politics while the latter studied dentistry. Yousaf followed one of the usual trajectories for Scotland’s political class: obtain a social science or humanities degree, then work as a political researcher/adviser for a while before standing for election. Sarwar opted for a different path, ‘a real job’ outside the political bubble, albeit only for four years. But unlike Yousaf, the Scottish Labour politician came from a political family.

His father, Muhammad Sarwar, moved to Scotland and made his fortune in a wholesale cash and carry business, was a trailblazer: he became Britain’s first Muslim MP in 1997, representing Glasgow Govan (which became Glasgow Central) until 2010, until he was succeeded by his son. Anas’ stint at Westminster lasted one term after the SNP landslide in 2015. Interestingly, Mohammad Sarwar later became the 38^th and 40^th Governor of the Punjab, in Pakistan, after relinquishing his British citizenship. Humza Yousaf became Scotland’s first ever Muslim and Scottish Asian First Minister after winning the internal SNP leadership election, taking the reins from Nicola Sturgeon, but Anas Sarwar has a mountain to climb if he is to become the first Muslim to come to power in Scotland through a direct electoral mandate.

‘Hold your nose’ was Anas Sarwar’s message at Scottish Labour’s recent conference, hardly an inspiring rallying cry to entice many traditional Labour voters who previously shifted to the SNP. What remains of the party’s voting base is also being pulled from different sides by Reform UK and the Scottish Greens. To compound matters, some Labour leaning voters may tactically opt for the SNP to prevent having a Reform MSP in their constituency.

Last week an MRP poll, which uses a sophisticated modelling technique, suggested that the SNP would be on course to win 67 out of 129 seats at the Scottish Parliament, a second outright majority in recent history. This is significant in itself given their longevity in office but also that the First Minister of Scotland John Swinney MSP asserts this would be sufficient to mandate opening negotiations with the UK Government for another independence referendum. However, a closer inspection is necessary.

The Scottish electorate will be faced with two ballots in May: one to choose their local constituency MSP using first-past-the-post and a second to vote for a political party in their larger region. The regional additional member seats are then allocated proportionally from party lists. The SNP are only on 35% under the constituency vote, which is lower but look set to sweep the board thanks to a fragmented unionist opposition comprising Labour, Reform, Conservatives and Lib Dems, while the other main pro-independence party will largely confine itself to the second regional list vote, essentially giving the SNP a free run in many constituency seats.

In the aftermath of Labour’s landslide victory at the UK General Election, Anas Sarwar could have been forgiven for dreaming about receiving the keys to Bute House – the plush official residence for Scotland’s First Minister in Edinburgh’s New Town – and putting together his Cabinet and policy agenda for government. In little under two years later, that dream has turned into a nightmare as he faces the prospect of being pushed into third, or even a humiliating fourth place. However much Sarwar tries, he cannot erase Starmer from the national conversation; the name will crop up on the doorsteps during campaigning whether he likes it or not and if he is absent from party literature.

It isn’t only Scotland heading to the polls in May. Elections will also take place for the Welsh Assembly, as well as local authority elections in England. UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s fate was meant to hang in the balance due to Labour’s likely poor showing. However, it also appears that the man who called to depose him may also have to go too.