Labour may be on the starting line in the race to No10, but it’s no time for victory laps

TO be at Glasgow’s Scottish Event Campus last weekend for the Scottish Labour Party conference was to see power in formation. Around the main hall where leader Anas Sarwar delivered a confident speech on Saturday, lobbyists and businesses queued for coffee and croissants, in a break from manning the dozens of stalls erected for the occasion.

A few grand bought you access to the venue and the hope you might experience a ‘brush past’ with Mr Sarwar or, better still, a shadow UK minister up for the day.

Companies have decided these as yet unknown men and women will likely soon have their hands on billions of pounds of public money, on vital planning decisions and on mega-merger deals. Thus they thronged to the city.

How grand was the Labour hierarchy. Here came Ed Miliband, the head honcho of Labour’s green plans. There strode beardy Shadow Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds: yes, reader, He Walked Among Us. Finally Sir Keir himself arrived to make a rather good speech in which he walloped the SNP.

Money, power, momentum. It’s a heady cocktail. Time was when the annual get-together of the Scottish Labour Party could have fitted into a mid-sized secondary school.

Even this time last year, the party managed to make do with Edinburgh’s compact Assembly Rooms. But with all the political money banking that Labour will make it to Downing Street in a few short months, these days this is a party that needs a bigger boat.

For the Scottish wing of the party, being part of this ride is almost unbelievable. The past decade and a half have been barren years.

Competitive

Humiliated repeatedly by the SNP, they then saw supporters drift off to the Conservatives following the unforgivable election of Jeremy Corbyn. Now, quite unexpectedly, their fortunes have changed. Urban Scotland is coming back. SNP voters fed up with Humza Yousaf’s weak leadership are taking an interest too.

Labour is neck and neck with the Nationalists once more, competitive again and in touching distance of holding dozens of seats in its former Scottish heartlands.

There wasn’t a lot new in Mr Sarwar’s speech on Saturday, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was to see a leader who is a natural at this game and looks and smells like a prospective First Minister. No wonder, under his charge, the party has a smile on its face.

What to make of this gang? Someone like me – instinctively centre-right, solidly proUnion but content to support a sensible social democratic party when necessary – is pleased to see them making a comeback in Scotland.

In my career, I’ve worked with the Conservatives and worked close to Labour too, and it is unequivocally good to know that the Union’s Left flank is no longer barking mad.

But still something nags about the party’s top team. Beating the SNP in 2024 and then again in 2026 will require an immense collective effort from its UK operation. The party’s tendency towards hubris must be avoided. It must not allow Scotland to become an afterthought.

If Labour does win the election – and it’s still an ‘if’ in my view – it’ll make them a more grounded and attentive government in Scotland.

My problem with Labour boils down to its culture. Politics for me is fundamentally about power and trade-offs, something the Conservatives used to understand. Too often over its history, however, Labour has viewed this attitude as a kind of betrayal.

Intoxicated by its own sense of moral mission it instead has chosen to protest and preach; preferred being over doing.

At its best, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the party wedded passion to pragmatism. At its worst, this culture led, just a few years ago, to the disgrace of Corbyn. I’m afraid many of us still haven’t quite forgotten about that.

Humility

I like the party’s recent turn. In Scotland, I admire Sarwar’s instincts. But if Starmer does end up getting into power, I’d just like to see the party act with a bit more humility.

It might, for example, want to acknowledge why it is suddenly doing so well. It’s not because we’ve gone gooey over Starmer. Overwhelmingly, it is because its two main rivals – the Conservatives and the SNP – have shot away at their own feet.

With Partygate, the Johnson resignation and the Liz Truss horror show, the Tories have wrecked their credibility. In

Scotland, thanks to the police tent, the camper van and the fall of Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP has done the same.

At the conference at the weekend, there was more than a hint of self-congratulation. It’s like a sprinter praising himself for buying a pair of spikes. Yes, Labour has returned to the starting lineup in the race to No 10.

But this is not yet the time for victory laps.

The truth is that, in the face of the various meltdowns elsewhere, people are just lending Starmer their support. The mood is lukewarm at best.

According to pollster James Kanagasooriam, Starmer’s ratings are lower than John Major’s when he lost office in 1997. Indeed, the public has not been this downbeat about both main party leaders at any point in the past 40 years.

Meanwhile in Scotland, Labour’s comeback is distinctly relative. Sarwar has done a great job hauling Labour back from the brink.

The objective reality, however, is that given the Nationalists’ disastrous incompetence, they should be getting absolutely slaughtered. That the SNP under Yousaf are still even competitive with the self-defined ‘change’ party is a vivid reminder of just how much further Labour’s race has to run.

Overwhelmingly, what Labour needs to flesh out before it prepares to take on the twin peaks of Westminster and Holyrood elections in the next 24 months is a clear strategy for how it intends to run both wings of government.

In Scotland, some promising signs are there, such as a paper published last week by economy spokesman Daniel Johnson. But more is needed if the party is to capitalise on its good fortune.

Honeymoon

The backlash in the NorthEast against Starmer’s plans to penalise the oil and gas industry is a sign of the shallow support for his party.

If Labour wins the election later this year, a failure to set a very clear direction in Scotland, with specific plans to boost the economy, will assuredly lead to Starmer having the shortest honeymoon in political history – just in time for the Holyrood contest with the SNP in 2026.

Lent began last week, with churchgoers told to ‘remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return’. It’s good advice for Starmer too. The wheel has turned for him.

But the people’s party might want to reflect that the mood which has so decisively swung in its favour could, at a stroke, swing against it just as surely.

Hold on to your ashes, Labour. You were dust not long ago. And unto dust you will return.