In a roadshow of emergency services on the edge of Loch Lomond, ambulances, police vans and fire engines line up outside a row of souvenir shops. There’s the cacophony of little children crying, and then there’s the cacophony of their older siblings being lifted into the cabs of vehicles by police and paramedics to turn sirens on and off, and on and off. I am sitting on a low wall gritting my teeth because this is where Anas Sarwar told me to meet. Then the other emergency services vehicle arrives: Labour’s bright red Scottish battle bus emblazoned with a picture of his smiling face. Despite high hopes and a strong showing in the 2024 general election, Scottish Labour’s fortunes have fallen rapidly along with the national party and Sarwar’s dream of becoming first minister – only recently within touching distance – appears to be slipping away.
The bus left the auto shop a few weeks before polling day to take Sarwar across the country, or rather the central belt of the country. Despite its massive sweeping landscapes, Scotland’s population distribution makes it one of the most urbanized countries in Europe. Most Labor voters are aiming directly at this generation of towns and cities. The central belt was Labour’s big success in 2024, when the party won 37 seats, mostly from the SNP, on a margin of 16.7 per cent – its best result since 2010. Two years on, the party is trying to consolidate these MSP wins and control of the Holyrood parliament.
The bus is already littered with evidence of use, including discarded Irn Bru bottles (Sarwar himself is avoiding the stuff). He’s announcing a new mental health policy and the press team wants to take him in front of an ambulance. He’s also the best baby-kissing and hand-squeezing Scottish politician of his generation, so a venue packed with running families seemed the ideal venue.
When he leaves the bus to hit the streets on foot, Sarwar is accompanied by the flight of a camera drone piloted by his personal social media manager. He has an easygoing demeanor and is happy that most of his interactions with the public would be caught on camera – his team were particularly shocked about a chance meeting with Glasgow pensioner and Sarwar megafan that became part of an election broadcast.
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The story that has come out of this election for Scottish Labor is Sarwar’s decision to publicly disown Keir Starmer before the campaign started. His allies say he’s been thinking about it for a while and that a weight was lifted from Sarwar when he said out loud that Starmer should go. There were elaborate theories at the time that he had done so as a starting weapon in a UK Labor leadership challenge from Wes Streeting, with whom he is closely associated politically. But a simple electoral calculation seemed clearer: a first for a UK Labor leader, the Prime Minister is now less popular in Scotland than Nigel Farage, and Sarwar had no choice but to distance himself. Labor MSPs describe Starmer as “electoral krypton”. UK Reform now thinks it has a chance of winning second place, a remarkable turnaround for Farage, once considered a toxic totem of English nationalism north of the border (his party is benefiting from the collapse of the Tories).
Sarwar has faced a strange dynamic in the campaign where Scottish Labour, long derided as a UK “offshoot” of the party and considered suspect by some for its English links, suddenly found its leader being asked by the press whether his relationship with Number 10 as first minister was so bad it could damage Scotland. Sometimes you really can’t win.
“Look, I said what I said, I stand by it and I’m not backing down from it,” he tells me on the bus, “Obviously, it was personally difficult, but politically liberating in many ways. I’m the one who’s standing up to the people of Scotland asking for their trust and support and I think it’s very important that my loyalty doesn’t look elsewhere or to a politician in London, my loyalty is to Scotland because I’m the first minister of Scotland, and this country has so much amazing talent, skill, resources, potential under an SNP government and turning my country around is my number one priority.
His open lack of loyalty “to a politician elsewhere” has helped him avoid the opening pitch of the SNP’s campaign, which focused heavily on punishing Labor for the Prime Minister’s unpopularity. The joke in Labor is that John Swinney is a Scottish nationalist who thinks he is running in an election in England.
Despite the split with Starmer, Sarwar still has close ties to the cabinet – Douglas Alexander was in Edinburgh for the launch of his manifesto, where the pair made the top five, and Wes Streeting has hailed him as the greatest Scottish Labor leader since Donald Dewar. He is wilting while still being kind to Starmer and Rachel Reeves, saying that as first minister he would like them to stay behind their desks and continue to invest in Scotland.
Every poll since the election has had the SNP ahead. Some initially even predicted an outright majority for them at Holyrood, which is rare in the electoral system, although the margin has tightened. But despair is not beginning. I’m told that internal Labor polls show that up to 40 per cent of voters remain undecided and they could make the difference. Some may call this optimism, others fantasy.
Sarwarit thoroughly enjoys mocking journalists who make strong predictions about the result. He delights in reminding us that we were wrong about the death of Scottish Labor in the 2021 election, wrong about the Rutherglen and Hamilton by-elections which Labor won and wrong about Labour’s margin of victory in 2024. “I understand why you do that,” he says. “That’s your role, to ask questions, to hypothesize and hypothesize, to comment. I’m a participant, not a commentator. My job is to try and influence the outcome of the election by winning people’s trust and arguing for the outcome I want. Rather than talking about the outcomes other people might want, I’ll focus first on which minister will change Scotland. The Labor Government.”
His only clear prediction is that Reform will never win, either in Scotland or in the UK as a whole. “I honestly don’t believe they will win,” he says, dismissing their politics as “divisive poison.”
And yet, he will certainly need them if he is to achieve his goal of becoming prime minister. With six parties fighting it out and an additional member system producing separate results, the possible outcomes in this election range from an outright SNP majority to a collective majority of the unionist parties: Labour, Lib Dems, Conservatives and Reform. In the latter eventuality, Sarwar will install himself as first minister with a vote in the Scottish parliament and he will need reform MSPs to back him.
Whenever he is pressed about it, he gives the answer of a politician. He tells me: “I have been unequivocal, there will be no deal, there will be no deal, there will be no secret deal, but I will go out on a limb to win this election and my job is to convince people in this election campaign, rather than comment on what may or may not happen. Ultimately, the people of this great country will decide.”
And yet Malcolm Offord, the leader of the reform, says Sarwar has tried to put together such a deal. Sarwar calls him a liar. We will find out when Holyrood appoints the next First Minister. One of Sarwar’s closest allies tells me, brazenly, that Sarwar can do a lot with the powers of the first minister without seeking Reform’s signature – even if he is elected by Reform votes. However, in Scotland and the rest of the UK, the Greens and nationalist parties would have a field day with the prospect of a Labor government in an informal deal of confidence with Reform.
And so Scottish Labour, brimming with optimism just two years ago, is now faced with a rather dismal set of options. Still, Sarwar and his team remain in high spirits. The camaraderie of that team is put together by long hours. There are those who work in the office until 10 pm, even on Fridays. A senior Labor figure tells me I should think of Sarwar as an entrepreneur running a startup. The point is this: the party was reduced to nothing in the 2015 general election meltdown, in which he lost his Glasgow seat, and he has since been trying to rebuild it from the ground up. Old tensions within the party, for example the suspicion by Scottish MPs that MSPs were interfering with their patchwork, have melted away. “It’s a uniquely cohesive team,” one of his lieutenants tells me.
Well, they say that publicly. Members of his shadow ministerial team are playing nice as the campaign continues. Privately, it’s a different story and there will be hell to pay if Reform’s dreams come true and Labor slips into third place. Sarwar is quite frank about the rigors of Scottish politics. He has set himself the difficult task of becoming prime minister. But will it crash if it fails? “I’m determined to win, be prime minister and do the hard work of delivering for this country! Look, I’ve done this job for five years. I think I’ve done a good job of uniting our party. I think there’s no doubt, being a Labor politician now for 16 years on the front line, there’s always criticism, but I want to unite the needs of our party and meet the needs of our party.”
As for the criticism, even people who like him say he can be a politician who tells people what they want to hear. Some in Labor even use the term “slippery” and use his rejection of Starmer as an example of this (“it would have seemed a bit more authentic if he had done it last year, not just before the election,” said one).
But Sarwar’s fundamental problem is not a lack of skill, energy or appeal. It is that he is running in a national election in Scotland on a change agenda, when he already won a national election on a change agenda in Scotland two years ago. Two years after the red tide of July 2024, Scotland feels nothing has changed. Unfair, perhaps: Scottish Labor will remind you that public services, the things people are really fed up with, were run into the ground by the SNP and the Tories, not Labour. The result has not been a resurgence for Labour, but a general apathy: the turnout is expected to be terrible, perhaps even in the low 50s.
Sarwar’s pitch is to make that case for a second. There is only one group of voters he has really written off, and they are those who are committed to independence and will vote SNP for that reason alone (a senior Labor figure says the party estimates it is 30 per cent of the population). “I think there’s clearly a core of the electorate that even if they don’t agree with the SNP’s performance, they might vote for them, partly because of the constitution,” says Sarwar. “I don’t support independence. I don’t support a referendum, but I know a lot of people who support independence who might want a referendum at some point in the future but still think this government in Scotland is not that good. I’m saying to them, let’s work together now to make our country better now and then, if Scotland chooses a different destination in the next generation, that will choose for future generations of Scotland.”
(Further reading: Britain is still falling apart)
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