In July 2024, Scottish Labour celebrated its best election result for over a decade. From the Central Belt to the Outer Hebrides, the country’s electoral map turned red once more. Leader Anas Sarwar hailed a “historic day”, while his colleagues predicted the resurrection of a party long since declared dead north of the border.
Less than two years later, Scottish Labour recorded its worst defeat in the history of the Scottish Parliament, scraping 19% of the vote. All talk of revival evaporated. The May 2026 result hammered home a damning trend: Scottish Labour’s Holyrood representation has shrunk at every election since 1999. ‘Labour Scotland’ – the country where the party won every Westminster election between 1955 and 2010 – has disappeared with the rise of modern Scottish nationalism.
Now, the Scottish Labour Party itself faces the prospect of irreversible decline. First, though, it must find a new leader. Opting not to wait for the post-mortem, Sarwar last month resigned to take up a seat in the House of Lords, having emerged from the wreckage of a dismal election campaign as the trade minister in Andy Burnham’s new government. While the outgoing Glasgow MSP’s decision has been roundly ridiculed – he previously pledged to abolish the Lords – his elevation is indicative of far more than arrogant hypocrisy.
Ever since Mohammad Sarwar became the first millionaire to join Scottish Labour’s executive in 1994, his family has personified the party’s shift towards a post-political, professional elite. His son, Anas Sarwar, saw this project through to its natural conclusion in May, casting Scottish Labour in his own image to fight the election with a net favourability rating of -40. His party achieved its strongest result among university-educated professionals who own their own home and earn more than £70,000 per annum, while even the Conservatives performed better among low-income voters. If the traditional constituencies of Scottish Labour support were trade unionists, renters and post-industrial communities, none turned out to vote with any enthusiasm.
In 2010, the younger Sarwar had been selected to succeed his father in the Glasgow constituency he’d represented for almost 25 years, rising quickly to become Scottish Labour’s deputy leader 12 months later. His place in the Scottish political class embodies the challenge Labour faces in reconnecting with working Scots. An archetypal neoliberal, Sarwar’s ‘born to rule’ attitude is both befitting of his new workplace, and entirely characteristic of his political generation – many of whom continue to inhabit the upper echelons of the Scottish Labour Party, which the poet Hugh McDiarmid once reflected was “educated not in class struggle but in administrative patience”.
This is not new. Scottish Labour has been in a state of political decomposition for over a decade, and it was in this context that Sarwar devised an alternative coalition, which abandoned social democracy to court the wealthy. Billionaire bus and property tycoons Sandy and James Easdale donated £300,000 to the party’s election war chest, for example. By cultivating such a narrow coalition, the leadership oversaw a dramatic downturn in membership, which slumped by a third to around 11,000 over five years. Today, Scottish Labour is roughly the size of the Scottish Greens and smaller than Reform UK in Scotland, according to the latter party’s own figures.
This decline belies a more important reality. “Most political parties, particularly old ones, are fuelled by myths,” writes David Torrance in his new history of the party, “but perhaps Scottish Labour has more than most.” Perhaps the greatest fallacy is that Labour was never entirely comfortable with devolution; the party that delivered Holyrood has never been at home in it.
The parliament’s early Labour governments lacked an agenda for radical change and opted to manage – rather than advance – the devolved settlement, constraining their offer to the electorate and reinforcing the party’s inflexible orientation on the national question, which has ultimately amounted only to a defence of the status quo. As the party’s collapse accelerated, intellectual inspiration was bequeathed to its nationalist successors. In February, Westminster’s Scotland secretary, Labour MP Douglas Alexander, argued that his party’s problem was simply that SNP voters were “immune to arguments”, ignoring the fact that Labour had not bothered to make one, instead assuming the electorate would eventually grow tired of its flirtation with nationalism.
Following his resignation, Sarwar reflected that being Scottish Labour leader was the “hardest job in British politics”. He wasn’t far wrong. His successor must not only revamp the party’s policy agenda but, more importantly, articulate who the party is for. Whether the latter task is even possible remains to be seen, requiring a fresh analysis of Scotland’s class composition that few in Holyrood would care for. Early indications do not bode well.
In next month’s leadership race, the party’s members now face a choice between Joe Fagan, who has already ruled out a second independence referendum, and Michael Marra, who represents complete continuity, having written the May manifesto that voters comprehensively rejected. Neither candidate has, to put it mildly, set the heather alight. “Who cares who leads Labour?” one senior party source told STV. It’s a good question. The leadership race might have occupied the Scottish press during ‘silly season’, but it has barely registered in the country at large.
Despite the support of two of Scottish Labour’s largest affiliated trade unions, progressive candidate Monica Lennon failed to amass the requisite parliamentary nominations to make the ballot paper in the leadership race. There is truth to her supporters’ claim of a stitch-up, but it dates back to the 2024 general election. As was the case across Britain, Scottish Labour’s Westminster selections were gerrymandered, and the Starmer Project spent big to send as many loyalists to Parliament as possible. Labour Together, for example, ploughed more than £100,000 into Scottish Labour's general election campaign. The legacy of their efforts was enough to scupper Lennon’s candidacy and prevent any wider debate about the future of the party – or its constitutional stance.
In 1937, Labour leader Clement Attlee warned his comrades that the party was prone to “underrate the force of national sentiment”. Scottish Labour is yet to heed his advice nine decades later. It still boasts by far the largest crop of Scottish MPs, but you wouldn’t know it – and that looks unlikely to change regardless of whether Fagan or Marra succeeds Sarwar. Instead, the party appears certain to repeat past mistakes and take another step on the long road to extinction.
