Anas Sarwar’s Dream

As Betwixtmas trundles on, it’s a plaintive time of year for some. Here, Euan McColm rues the decline in fortunes of the First Minister in Waiting ‘Anas Sarwar’s dream of ousting John Swinney as first minister all but dead’:

“For a brief moment, the idea that he might one day become First Minister seemed not only plausible but likely” he writes, unconvincingly.

“In the early days of his leadership, Scottish Labour’s Anas Sarwar connected with voters once thought lost by his party [Huge if true – Ed]. Quick in debate and affable in person, Sarwar charmed his way up the opinion polls.” Writing seemingly through a portal from a parallel universe McColm ends with a flourish: “By the time Labour claimed victory in last summer’s General Election, Sarwar looked on course to take the keys to Bute House from John Swinney next May.”

I don’t know what the circumstances were that McColm thought these things were going to happen, and at this stage, it probably doesn’t matter.

It’s fair to say that the Quality Street’s are finished and the decorations are taken down in the McColm household.

“As 2025 draws to a close, Sarwar’s dream of becoming First Minister is over.”

“A recent YouGov poll put Scottish Labour in fourth place, behind The SNP, The Greens, and The Liberal Democrats. With Nigel Farage’s Reform UK nipping at Scottish Labour’s heel’s, Sarwar’s immediate fight is to stop his party slipping into a miserable fifth next year” he laments.

Sarwar’s desultory position is largely, according to McColm all the fault of Keir Starmer, a politician whose political project he was an enthusiastic cheerleader for a long time.

He continues: “There’s nothing Anas Sarwar can do about Sir Keir Starmer. Until, inevitably, members of his cabinet move against him, the Prime Minister will continue to hurt Scottish Labour and help the SNP.” This is a line, he and his colleagues in the Unionist press are all holding. Yes. it’s coordinated, yes we’ve noticed.

Apart from waiting for this mythical insurgency in which the Grand Scottish Labour Party rise up against their foes, there is one thing that Anas Sarwar can do. He can apologise for him and Jackie Ballie supporting the Gender Recognition Act (as all parties did).

That’s it.

That’s the plan.

Whatever you think about gender recognition, and in my experience, the whole issue is less ‘binary’ than you might think, but whatever you think, this is extraordinary as a solution to Scottish Labour’s woes.

McColm’s not alone in his diagnosis. Over the pages at the Scotsman, Brian Wilson chips in (‘Labour’s Mistakes have cost Sarwar dear – but he’d still make the best First Minister‘):

“That is the battle with past pitfalls that Labour now has to fight, from a far lower base than if more political wisdom and experience had been applied in these early months. The daddy of them all, of course, was Winter Fuel Payments which as a self-defining action from an incoming Labour government remains beyond comprehension.”

McColm also references the Winter Fuel Payments: “Without question, Sir Keir Starmer bears some responsibility for Sarwar’s woes. Early decisions, including the announcement, within weeks of the election, of limits on winter fuel payments for pensioners, played terribly in Scotland and fed the enduring SNP narrative that “Westminster” is uniquely cruel.”

But, no, this is not to think that Westminster is ‘uniquely cruel’ but there is an ideology at play here. It is your ideology. Wilson and McColm pretend that Labour has stumbled into its current crisis through a series of clumsy errors. They didn’t. This was the plan. This was always the plan. They told us, and you supported it.

It’s like another chapter in a fantastical tale, similar to the reverie in which Anas Sarwar was a hugely popular figure about to enter Bute House.

Wilson writes, bristling with indignant complacency: “…the basic premise holds good. The offer of two governments of the centre left working together in Scotland’s interests, without any diversion around the constitution, is by far our best bet for social and economic progress. On health, on education, on housing… Labour’s challenge is to persuade voters that the election is about how Scotland’s potential is realised, rather than a referendum on the Whitehall story so far.”

In this fantasy, both Sarwar’s incoming government and Starmer’s incumbent one are of the Left, despite no visible evidence that this is true and the ascendancy of two new political parties arising out of the fact that it’s not. But if McColm comes over as a bit of a simpleton, Wilson comes across a delusionist. He concludes grandly, but now completely divorced from reality:

“Scottish Labour offers the only realistic prospect of change but has been hobbled by association.”

In the fervid imaginations of Labour’s loyal columnists, the enemy is that damned Starmer (that they all cheered into No 10) and the solution is to oust him and save Sarwar.

The election’s in four months.

The Void

As the media gatekeepers and editors scramble to put together some kind of plan, occasionally they are thrown some meat.

Last month saw a major assault on the Scottish Government’s ways of working with the publication by Professor Jim Gallagher from the think-tank Our Scottish Future of a new report called ‘Fixing-Broken-Government’.

It was a blistering attack on all aspects of Scottish government. In the promo blurb from the think-tank it states:

“A major new report from the think tank Our Scottish Future, Fixing Broken Government, drawing on interviews with senior public servants, says Scotland’s system of government is broken and not delivering for the people of Scotland.”

“Based on extensive, non-attributable interviews with senior public servants working across Scottish Government, multiple local authorities and Scotland’s extensive network of public bodies, the report finds that government is failing at both ministerial and official levels, concluding that politics and presentation have increasingly eclipsed effective policy-making and delivery.”

“It suggests that government in Scotland is characterised by short-termism and excessive central control, with damaging consequences for economic and social wellbeing. The report makes radical recommendations for change so that the post-2026 Scottish Government, of whatever political complexion, can be more effective.”

Read the full report here:  Fixing-Broken-Government

Much of the report will feel familiar to many. There are huge shortcomings and failings in the Scottish Government’s performance, delivery and vision, of that there is no doubt, and some of these are explored here.

The problem, though, is that Our Scottish Future is not an independent think-tank at all, and while the authors plead readers not to perceive the report as “a partisan attack on the SNP Government” it certainly is undermined by the political nature of its solutions and its personnel.

Under ‘Our Recommendations’ the suggestions include “Mayors”, and “Cutting the number of ministers”. The report has a problem in that, although some of its criticisms are entirely valid, the response isn’t really a serious prospect for government; it’s to chop up government altogether. Labour, the party we are constantly being told that created Devolution are quite happy to see it being dismantled.

Why?

Well, partly because there’s no real prospect of a Labour government in Holyrood at all.

As Stephen Daisley writes: “As polls continue to show the SNP on course to win a fifth Scottish Parliament election in a row, my column asks a difficult question: what if Scottish Labour simply can’t win at Holyrood any more?” STEPHEN DAISLEY: Labour, who once held Scotland in an iron grip, must now face a harsh truth: The party may be over for good | Daily Mail Online

We are in a sort of limbo land now, where the principal opponents of the incumbent SNP government have little to contribute to the political debate other than a sort of howling rage and a scorched-earth policy. Incapable of generating fresh political thinking and operating within their own reactionary politics or ideological straightjacket, they operate as a sort of frothing feeding frenzy connecting a bewildering collection of previously progressive characters, now consumed by anger but completely void of ideas.

This results in a disastrous race to the bottom. The SNP are desperate to shore-up their defences against the incoming Reform surge, which results in increasingly confused and reductive thinking. Labour are either dead in the water (as Daisley and McColm suggest), or about to mount a spirited rebellion against the PM (as Brian Wilson and Kenny Farquharson hope):

pic.twitter.com/iuYs0TeW99

— BELLA CALEDONIA (@bellacaledonia) December 8, 2025

We are caught between two conflicting realities in which we are told, simultaneously, that ‘Everything is Awful’ and ‘Everything is Brilliant’. The problem for most Scots is that while almost the entire media class is in lip-synch with the first message, much of the governing class is in lip-synch with the latter.

Most of us just live in a world where, what used to be called the ‘social contract’ has broken down. Housing and affordability are in a chronic state, poverty and social inequality are desperate, and the feeling of stasis and failure are palpable.