Anas Sarwar: The long decline of Scottish Labour

There are no permanent friendships in politics, or so the saying goes. Anas Sarwar, the leader of Scottish Labour, calls Keir Starmer a good friend. “I’m probably one of the politicians who have spent most one-to-one time with him anywhere in the UK,” he said when we met for lunch at a hotel on a wet afternoon last week in Glasgow. He respects Starmer’s “personal integrity and decency” but not his “judgement” or political instincts. He likes the man but has lost confidence in the politician.

In early February - the day after the resignation of Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and two days before Labour was defeated by the Greens in the Gorton and Denton by-election - Sarwar called for the prime minister to be replaced at a hastily organised press conference. There had been “too many mistakes”, he said. “The distraction has to end and the leadership in Downing Street has to change.”

The intervention was an act of ruthless self-perseveration. Kezia Dugdale, a former Scottish Labour leader, called it a “complete disaster”, but Sarwar says the move against Starmer was liberating.

Labour was trailing both Reform UK and the SNP, which has been in power at Holyrood since 2007 and, despite a mediocre record, is confident of winning a fifth consecutive election in May. The SNP has, in effect, become a party-state, convinced its interests are coterminous with those of the Scottish people. That belief is deluded, but the identification of party with state and its powers of patronage has given the SNP immense control over civil society. It has been mired in corruption. Peter Murrell, the former long-time chief executive, once part of an all-powerful husband-and-wife leadership team with Nicola Sturgeon, has been charged with embezzlement. He and Sturgeon are now separated.

And yet the SNP is expected to win again. Politics in Scotland does not split along a left-right axis but between those for and against the union. The 2014 independence referendum polarised the electorate, and the unionist parties refuse to work together against the secessionist threat. The result is stasis and SNP hegemony.

Labour MSPs blame Starmer’s national leadership for their loss of momentum since the general election when Labour won 37 of 57 Scottish seats. “Starmer is political kryptonite up here,” one MSP told me. “Anas did not want this election to become a de facto referendum on Starmer’s premiership. He had to do something drastic. So he blew up the bridge.”

Sarwar acted at a moment of extreme vulnerability for Starmer. It turned out politics mattered far more to him than friendship. “I was putting country before party,” he says, using one of the PM’s mantras against him.

“It’s safe to say he wasn’t very happy when I called him. Undoubtedly, he would have felt pain and hurt. He was bearing the brunt of what I said, but it wasn’t without pain and hurt for me too.”

He is proud that Starmer helped end 15 years of Conservative rule. “I’ve not suddenly decided that he is a bad human being but there’s been bad judgements. I had to do what I thought was right. It was my decision alone. I probably wasn’t clear about it till the morning [of the press conference]. Not because it was a hard political decision, but because it was a hard personal decision.” They became close after Sarwar won the leadership in 2021 and a Labour recovery in Scotland was prioritised by Starmer and McSweeney.

He believes his motives have been misunderstood. “It wasn’t some kind of coordinated plan, or coup attempt in cahoots with anybody. I was days considering this, because I was the one that’s going to be standing in front of people in Scotland, asking them to put their faith and trust in me. And I just felt I had to be true to myself and true to them. And be honest and not just think one thing in private and say a different thing in public, because people will judge me based on what my values are, what I’m willing to accept, what my standards are, what I would do differently.”

Starmer’s premiership survived Sarwar’s intervention – friends refer to it as his “near-death experience” - but only after the whole cabinet issued choreographed public statements of support.

Does Sarwar still think Starmer should be replaced? “I stand by what I said. I don’t recoil from it.” He believes his comments were “reflective of what people think in Scotland, of what they think in the country”, and that there have been “too many missteps. I’ve got to be honest about what I’m willing to accept and tolerate.”

As well as his serial misjudgements, Starmer’s greatest failure is his inability to articulate a unifying story about the country, Sarwar said. “You have to tell a story about where you’re taking the country. And if you fail to do so, other people will tell your story for you. If you went out there and asked people about many of the good things the Labour government has done most of them wouldn’t know.
And that is deeply frustrating.

“Then there’s individual mistakes like the [removal of the] winter fuel payment, which was an error. And there’s been others as well. We have an opportunity in Scotland to demonstrate to the rest of the UK, and the rest of the Labour Party, how you can campaign and govern in a way that takes on divisive politics, but does it in a way that’s hopeful and positive and brings our country together.”

Sarwar’s decision to break with Starmer led to anguish and even sleepless nights as he wrestled with his conscience. “Conscience does make cowards of us all,” as Hamlet said, but Sarwar believes he had no choice.

“The tipping point for me was because we were in the midst of a huge story in Scotland, which was the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital [ a scandal over patient deaths linked to contaminated water and poor ventilation]. This is something I’ve campaigned on now for eight years, with families and the clinicians. And I was asking very serious questions of John Swinney and the SNP government, at first minister’s questions, about a culture of secrecy, cover up, bullying and harassment of staff members, families not being told the truth… Asking these really, really serious questions, which, in my view should be national. And when I came out of the parliamentary chamber, the press pack were outside, and I didn’t get a single question about the hospital, about life and death issues for the people I’ve been campaigning with and for. Every single question was about Peter Mandelson, the judgement to appoint him as ambassador and the judgement calls of the UK Labour government. There comes a point where you can’t defend the indefensible. Peter Mandelson should never have been considered to be ambassador in the US never mind be the ambassador. That judgement was deeply, deeply flawed, and I wasn’t willing to defend it. I did some deep thinking in the days that followed.”

Sarwar’s predecessor as Scottish Labour leader was Richard Leonard, a left-wing Corbynite who was forced out in a plot organised and directed from London. “A Labour general election victory must run through Scotland,” McSweeney used to say. Even then, Sarwar was warning that, to become first minister in 2026, he could not “afford an unpopular Labour leader”. He now has what he most feared.

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Sarwar, the Muslim son of parents born in Pakistan, is a former dentist. “I still can’t help looking at people’s teeth when I first meet them,” he says inspecting mine. His father, Chaudhry Sarwar, was Labour’s first Muslim MP and later became governor of the Punjab when he left Scotland to live in Pakistan. As a businessman he built up a successful wholesale business; his son is referred to as Labour’s “millionaire nepo baby” by detractors because of the family wealth.

Sarwar senior recently posted a tribute to the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on social media after he was killed in an American air strike: “The Muslim Ummah has been deprived of a strong voice of resistance. May Allah the exalted grant him paradise of the highest.” I asked Sarwar about the post. “Look, I’m a 43-year-old man. And the idea that a 43-year-old man is responsible for or agrees with every opinion that their old man has is for the birds… Do parents embarrass their kids? Yes. I just hope I don’t embarrass my kids by saying anything so wrong and misjudged in the future.”

He is praised by colleagues for his energy and ability to raise funds and organise teams. He relishes the political game: the campaigns, networking, public meetings, the TV debates. He is close to Douglas Alexander, the Scotland secretary and Starmer ally, who is in Glasgow as co-chair of the campaign.

“When you are in a room with Anas you sense his warmth and energy and see how people respond and like him,” Kate Forbes, who has just stood down as deputy first minister, once told me. Others accuse him of opportunism and insincerity and a lack of policy depth. “Anas is a good campaigner but disappears between campaigns,” one former MSP complained.

Sarwar believes Labour has a narrow pathway to victory in May if it can mobilise its voters and replicate the success it had in the central belt and the Western Isles in 2024. Its campaigners are motivated and well-funded, and its ground operation is effective as it demonstrated last June when it surprisingly won the seat of Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse from the SNP in a Holyrood by-election. The SNP is struggling to defend its poor record on education, NHS waiting lists and public services more generally. Nigel Farage has called Glasgow the “asylum capital of Europe” and Sarwar concedes that a housing crisis in the city has exacerbated unease over uncontrolled migration and open borders.

The mood in Scotland has darkened since the independence referendum when what the Scottish writer Gerry Hassan called an “independence of the mind” flourished. The zeal and intellectual fervour that characterised the independence movement back then has curdled into a kind of sullen resentment. Support for the SNP has fallen from its peak but remains resilient.

Swinney is an uninspiring but shrewd first minister. Sarwar says he specialises in the “politics of fear and blame”. Swinney’s campaign strategy has been likened to the meme of Homer Simpson backing into a hedge: an exercise in apologetic retreat. Swinney claims he can still deliver independence and win an overall majority as Alex Salmond’s SNP did in 2011. Even committed nationalists are sceptical and Forbes, the most accomplished politician at Holyrood, is no longer with him.

After May, nationalist secessionist parties could, for the first time, be in power in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. That’s something entirely new in British politics. What if the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Sinn Fein start to coordinate and lead a Celtic rebellion against Westminster? Are Labour and the political class in London prepared for the turmoil to come?

The United Kingdom may be the most successful multinational state in modern history, but its unity is fragile and the old party system has fragmented. As Sarwar recognises, Labour is Britain’s last true one nation party, the only unionist party capable of winning in England, Scotland and Wales as it did in 2024. He praises what Andy Burnham has achieved in Manchester as a model of how Labour can rebuild in Scotland: he calls it unity through activist government and greater devolution.

He has not spoken to Starmer since February. “He phoned me a couple of days after I’d done the press conference, and he was absolutely unequivocal that he wanted me to win. I obviously thanked him. It was a very human conversation rather than a political one. I said I was always acting on what I thought was in the interest of Scotland.”

If Sarwar were to deliver an improbable Labour victory - as he believes he can, despite the SNP beginning the campaign with a 15-point lead – he might yet, paradoxically, save Starmer’s premiership. How would he feel about that? “I want to save Scotland from the SNP. We’re choosing the first minister of Scotland. Let’s not pretend we’re choosing something else.”