‘Sugar Coating’

I didn’t get the memo telling me to start any comments on the recent election with ‘There’s no sugar coating this. These were terrible results’. If I hear another Labour spokesperson talking about ‘sugar coating’ I will scream. Yes these were terrible results, but much of the criticism coming from the disaffected Scottish Labour side is more ‘soor plum’ than ‘sugar coated’.

Many of those who are piling in with their condemnation of the strategy and the leadership of Scottish Labour in this election are either from a rejected faction of the Party now out of favour or individuals with a grievance. The most galling for me are those whose names I recognise as ‘supporters’ who never knocked a single door during the long campaign while our loyal members toiled away for well over a year night and day, in all weathers, listening to voters on the doorstep and trying to get over the Labour message.

I have little time for the arguments put forward in condemnation that try to draw from unfavourable comparisons with other election results. The 2024 General Election was quite unique. The Tories were completely discredited and voters turned to Labour to bring about the change everyone wanted. It was the spirit of the age and Labour were in place to seize that moment. You could compare it to the 2015 SNP tsunami in Scotland when Labour was almost obliterated, going down to huge SNP majorities and there was nothing we could do or say to stop it. Again it was the spirit of the age. Equally irrelevant is the comparison with the 2021 Scottish Election. At that time there was a Tory UK government and no Reform UK. Scottish Labour finished a poor third behind the Tories. In 2026, even in a crowded field, Scottish Labour more or less held on to their share of the vote and overtook the Tories. The critics have even cited the Hamilton by election but that was a local campaign with a very strong Labour ‘Get out the Vote’ strategy and the resources concentrated on making that happen. It was never going to be possible to replicate that across 30 or 40 constituencies in a national election.

Scottish Labour’s failure was to fall well short of its ambition to take 30 pr 40 constituency first past the post seats. By the very nature of first past the post, if you regularly end up behind your opponent you get no seats at all. That’s what happened. It made no difference to the result that many Labour candidates got very respectable second places to the SNP. In a number of seats like Paisley, East Lothian, Edinburgh Central, Labour is within touching distance and well placed in many more seats. There is a strong voter base to launch an attack on the SNP at a future election when the wind is behind us.

The calls for a new Labour UK leader are often equally misguided. The scale of Labour council losses is not dissimilar to what has happened a few years into previous governments both Labour and Tory. What was a disaster was the assertion that Labour had plenty time to show the electorate the benefits of a Labour government before the next General Election. The leadership seemed blind to the fact that here in Scotland there was no time for that to happen. The judgement was going to be made right now this May. The UK Government has a good story to tell - it’s just that noone has been listening. That story includes the scrapping of hereditary peers; improved rights for renters; the biggest overhaul of employment rights for half a century; changes to planning rules and lots more. Instead all voters have remembered are ‘u turns’ on winter fuel benefits and disability benefits and disastrous errors of judgement on appointments like Lord Mandelson.

Maybe there will be changes in the leadership of the Labour Party at the UK and Scottish level. But I am far from convinced that we have anyone better waiting in the wings. We can certainly do things a lot better in future and do far more to enthuse working people to support us, but the lesson of political history is that the ‘zeitgeist’ - the spirit of the age - is everything. It determines when there should be political change. In 1997 there was Blair and New Labour; in 2015 the SNP tsunami swept all before it; 2016 belonged to Brexit; Corbyn’s hold on Labour seemed secure for a generation and then it wasn’t; 2024 was a Labour landslide for Starmer and everyone thought Anas Sarwar was on course for Bute House; 2026 and Reform UK turned politics on its head.

Who knows what winds of change lie ahead and what will be the political climate when next we go to the polls. There are lots of things we can change and policies we can refine to offer working people something attractive and worthwhile next time round. But whether we win or lose will not ultimately be down to that. The hard truth is that will depend on the ‘zeitgeist’ - the spirit of the age being in our favour - and there’s no ‘sugar coating’ that

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