Sarwar as Necromancer: Manchester, the Wake and the Autopsy
Responses to the Greens’ historic victory in Manchester have been varied, and wild.
The Autopsy
Sir Keir Starmer wrote a letter to everyone saying it was all George Galloway’s fault [Read Keir Starmer’s letter to Labour MPs in full after Gorton and Denton by-election defeat]
George Foulkes said he’d seen it all before and it was probably nothing to worry about.
Others were more apocalyptic. The poor columnists at the Telegraph reckoned the elevation of Hannah the Plumber had us staring into the Abyss.
The losing candidate, Matt Goodwin, and others stumbled onto a plotline that was both delusional and rancid. As James Butler writes [Just Voting]:
“Having been beaten by a progressive candidate, Goodwin, once a political scientist, claimed: ‘I don’t think the progressives beat us.’ He said ‘the progressives were told how to vote’ and blamed a ‘coalition of Islamists and woke progressives’ for his loss. As part of the reactionary international, he displays an obvious dislike of a universal and equal franchise. In the days before the election, Reform had raised the spectre of ‘sectarian’ or ‘religious’ voting. It’s fatuous to claim that a Muslim voting for a feminist plumber standing for a party that’s vocal on trans rights and headed by a gay Jew is somehow making a religious vote, but the claim persists.”
Over on Substack Iain Macwhirter uttered the following gibberish:
“The Gorton and Denton by-election was won by the Greens, not on climate change or the environment, but largely by appealing to the prejudices and preoccupations of the Muslim community in Manchester. It won its first by-election victory by campaigning in minority languages, waving Palestinian and Pakistani flags, and condemning Zionism and “genocide in Gaza”.
“Greta Thunberg was nowhere to be seen.”
Macwhirter was at pains to put his own wisdom into context. He writes:
“From the other end of the ideological spectrum, Paul Mason, the former BBC Newsnight editor turned left-wing influencer [Wait what? – Ed], accused the Greens of resorting to “blatant sectarian imagery”.
“What tipped the balance in Gorton and Denton,” Mason told X, “was the swing by Muslim voters to the Greens”, and he went on, “It should be no surprise to see this rising within the Green tradition – elsewhere in Europe there’s a long history of mixing ‘nature politics’ with far-right tropes.”
This is wild nonsense from both of them.
The Labour deputy leader, Lucy Powell, explained confusingly: “What I take from it, is that people want to see the Labour party, the Labour government, shouting more loudly about our values, about our story.”
The Wake
Just SHOUTING your story might be good, but Douglas Alexander and Anas Sarwar had other ideas.
Gathering the faithful in Paisley today, the day after the Manchester Massacre might not have been their brightest and best. If politics are about the ‘vibes’ these days, something was amiss. It had all of the energy of a Morrissey-Marr reunion gig, or a poorly attended wake.
After Manchester, Scottish Labour are like a Dead Man Walking, with the party faithful searching for new ideas ongoing, like latter-day alchemists. Desperately trying to conjure gold from base metals, Scottish Labour stumbles on.
Having tried suggesting that Scotland hosts the NFL and changing Labour’s font to the same as Mamdani, it was time for something else altogether. Today, Sarwar stood up and pleaded with independence supporters to “hold your nose” and vote Labour …
️ Back Labour even “if you do it holding your nose”.
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar delivers a speech in Scotland, ahead of the May elections for Holyrood, pitching that the SNP are bad, and Labour are the least worst alternative.
https://t.co/lppRDbszSG pic.twitter.com/z2gYDhTUz6
— Sky News (@SkyNews) February 27, 2026
It’s a sort of desultory take, but it sort of makes sense in the Sarwar Universe, where incantations have replaced political thinking.
“Vote for me, my party leader is terrible, and should be gone…”
“If you believe in independence, vote for me, and I’ll make sure it never happens…”
It’s like he’s fallen through some portal into another realm.
Having failed in the political realm, he seems to have fallen into another world altogether. The Labour leader seems to be dabbling in Gnosticism, or stumbled into Necromancy trying to conjure the dead to life. ‘Scottish Labour’ are now like a lost tribe, or the remnants of a once great religion, now reduced by endless schisms and having long ago forgotten what the origin of the dispute was.
People held up signs saying things like ‘Anas Sarwar for First Minister’ but they are dead in the eyes and have no idea what the words might mean anymore.
‘The Leader’ still makes speeches from a lectern covered in a Thistle, and his followers firmly believe that the bigger the ‘Saltire’ is, the more good luck it brings them.
The last days of Sarwar’s rule are like the Peoples Temple without the Kool-Aid. But underneath it, there is a strange logic.
In 2024, Labour voters were encouraged to Vote Labour to Get Rid of the Tories. As it turns out, they didn’t know why they should do this or what would come of it. In the same thinking, Scottish Labour are asking voters to Vote Labour to Get Rid of the SNP.
They don’t know why they should do this but are compelled to act. If UK Labour are now little more than a Wraith, Scottish Labour is the Revenant.
More like Rentaghost. Without the London money there would be nothing there at all.
Anas through the looking glass…
I’m still wondering why the current Scottish Labour visual backdrop is like one of those Christmas quiz ‘guess the phrase’ puzzles. In this case, the projected answer is of course ‘Scotland has little choice’. We’re doomed, apparently.
The observations about alchemy (essentially privatised, maniacally avaricious, pathologically secretive and largely delusional chemistry) highlight the problem with these political parties that serve private interests (typically their own hierarchy, patrons and funders). Sarwar’s Scottish Labour looks increasingly like a management buyout gone horribly wrong, but still managing to seem slightly less worse than the parent company.
I was reading Andy Beckett’s opinion piece in the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/26/taboo-voters-responsible-frayed-britain-populists-enemies
I think this statement is worth reflecting on:
“Democracy always involves voters avoiding responsibility for their decisions, to some extent.”
But while this practical abdication of responsibility is evidently true, there is a counterweight force of sunk costs. If you’ve publicly identified with a party and are faced with negative consequences of its time in office that other predicted and you denied, you might be tempted to double down on your choice. Treble down, even. A bit like when Athenian citizens voted to send that second expedition to Sicily to bail out the first (despite their general-in-the-field having opposed the venture from the start… not listening to experts has a long history). I’m not as familiar as Marina Hyde with Operation Bagration.
As I was reflecting on the by-election this morning I was thinking of the parallels with the victory of the SNP in the Scottish Parliament elections of 2007. Then it was Iraq which was the toxic issue for Labour, coupled with a sense that New Labour had not delivered for traditional Labour voters in Scotland. With Iraq, as with Gaza, it was not only bad political decisions with calamitous consequences, it was the lying that was necessary to defend bad decisions creating a tangible feeling of dishonesty.
Labour in Scotland did not learn that they needed to be “braver” in making change as Angela Rayner has put it. They lost every Scottish election for 17 years. Labour in Scotland’s response was to exhibit a sense of hurt entitlement, argue only they could defeat the Tories, fight negative campaigns about how much they hated the SNP, offer no radical prospectus to change peoples’ lives for the better.
The Greens’ by-election victory does not yet make them the existential threat to Labour in England that the SNP have been to Labour in Scotland. But the response of Keir Starmer labelling the Greens extremist and still tonally deaf on Gaza is still charging down a McSweeney cul-de-sac.
So the question must surely be can Labour learn? Reflecting on what they got wrong in Scotland after 2007 might help them. I am not holding out much hope but actually it would be better for Scotland if they did…
Iraq, should remain to this day and going forward a toxic issue for Labour! A disaster labour have never owned up to which continues to result in mass denial by Labour at every level. Some in labour’s top team of that time, should be doing time!
How many ex uk military wake up without an arm, a leg or damaged lungs? How many Iraqis are still traumatised? The wider aspects of labour’s folly that set the Middle East on fire and brought carnage to England’s streets.
Will Labour make the same mistake over Iran, the comments of Healey and Starmer, don’t look hopeful.
Labour have reached the stage where they can’t do anything right and have an unnerving propensity to do everything wrong.
Labour rule is a hazard continually resulting in huge problems, no exaggeration, even worse than the tories!
I like your analogy of falling into a portal of another realm…
Falling into a wormhole perhaps, or disappearing up their own anas!
Labour in UK are in a mess because:
1)They have made far too many policy errors and had to u U-turn on so many of them.
2)They are primarily chasing voters who left Labour for Reform which, not unnaturally pisses off potential supporters who do not like these policies.
3)Starmer appointed Mandelson, a known close friend of Epstein even after his conviction, who is known as the Prince of Darkness and had been sacked on several occasions for dodgy financial affairs as US ambassador to keep in with Trump.
4)Starmer blocked Andy Burnham from standing probably the only candidate who could have won the by election.
5)Labour’s backstop strategy was to be the only party to beat Reform. Yesterday’s result where Green Party beat both Reform and Labour to blow that strategy out of the water.
The consequences of the above mistakes are that Starmer’s popularity is lower than the Labour Party so Starmer is now not only a lame duck leader but he is also an albatross around the parties neck. He will survive for near to medium future only because there is no obvious replacement. With Mandelson documents to be published (so we are told) anyone with any proven contact with Mandelson will be untouchable. Who knows who this will leave left to takeover although it appears that Starmer has blocked the only individual (Burnham) who is more popular with public than Labour Party.
Scottish Labour is part of this mess and is now running around like a headless chickens squawking how much they hate their own party too to convince voters to vote for them. Well guys you told us how great Starmer was until last few weeks and now you want us to believe your dislike of Westminster Labour. Even more difficult to pull off when you have more Westminster MP’s than Holyrood MSP’s?
“It’s fatuous to claim that a Muslim voting for a feminist plumber standing for a party that’s vocal on trans rights and headed by a gay Jew is somehow making a religious vote, but the claim persists.”
The claim is more that they vote as a block to advance their ethnic-religious interests. The sudden appearance of the Gaza independents at the last general election suggests this, as does the occasional victory of George Galloway’s Respect party in past by-elections, as do the observations of the Democracy Volunteers in this one. Those who voted for Reform acted on the same principle.
The constituency was about 30% Muslim, many of whom were probably below voting age. They voted perhaps around 80% as a block. The remaining 70% white population voted around half as an ethnic block for Reform and the rest on personal issues. These are estimates based on opinion polls and the constituency profile.
Under multiculturalism, elections are primarily ethnic headcounts, not debates or decisions based on left-right issues. We should be aware of this from the precedent of Northern Ireland.
You have no basis for making the claims you are making.
The factual basis for my claim of differential voting by ethnicity is the Opinium Research poll of the constituency conducted from 16-24 February 2026. You can download the data file on Excel, look at tab V003 and scroll along to columns V and W, which break down voting intention by ethnicity.
The sample size is small (339), but the differences are so large as to be statistically significant.
You are drawing incorrect inferences from these data. True, there are differences in voting patterns between ethnic groups. This is not new: there always have been. But you are quite wrong to conclude that any group ‘voted as block’. In the tables you mention, there was a weighted sample size of 236 who identified as ‘White’, 82 of whom said they would vote Reform. And a weighted sample size of 141 who identified as ‘Ethnic Minority’ (itself a very broad category), of whom 51 said they would vote Green (and 50 Labour, by the way). These are not ‘block votes’ by any stretch of the imagination.
Stephen – this is racist nonsense perpetrated by bad losers.
Luke Tryl of the polling organisation More In Common said on Newsnight that the two main reasons given by all voters who voted Green, regardless of ethnicity, was the cost of living and the Greens had a good candidate.
The sectarianism slur is at best an excuse from bad losers and at worse the demonisation of a section of British society.
100% John.
This is racist Stephen.
“The claim is more that they vote as a block to advance their ethnic-religious interests.”
Who is ‘they’ in this sentence? Ethnic or religious groups are not homogenous and contain individuals.
As per our Comments Policy, see here: https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/our-comments-policy/
“Racism, xenophobia, or misogyny won’t be tolerated.”
Clearly groups contain individuals, but it still makes sense to talk about groups as a whole.
I was referring to the same group you were referring to, namely the group who the Greens targeted with their video in Urdu (a language of Pakistan) that featured the picture of Kier Starmer and Mohindra Modi and who tend to be Muslims living in Gorton. I made similar remarks about the whites in the east who voted Reform, and Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics. All of these people are Caucasian by race.
That said, I could probably have considered my remarks more carefully. There are dissenters, mixed loyalties, internal debates and so on.
Oh no – a political party tried to communicate in another language other than English. Labour and other parties have done this in various languages in the past in electoral contests including Hindu and you have obviously have never lived in Wales.
Stephen the facts are that the Greens beat Labour and Reform fair and square and you are just parroting racially motivated excuses.
Nigel Farage and Mat Goodwin are using Trumpian tactics to try and discredit their opponents. They are not discrediting the Green Party in doing this they are only discrediting themselves. Reform- always cheated never defeated – are bad losers and you should be ashamed of yourself spreading their poisonous, racially divisive excuses for defeat. There is a stone somewhere waiting for you to crawl under and join your miserable pals Nigel & Mat. Go crawl under it!
Struggling to understand why Bella is so excited about a by-election in England…
What I want is the restotation of a fully sovereign national parliament in Scotland, and I say that without the slightest rider, doubt or quibble…
But like so many people, I see no reason to believe the SNP has a clue how to deliver this…
Their whole culture policy for example, the utter subservience to England, everything, everywhere all at once, makes me sick to the heart…
Let me give just one nugget of info on Scottish culture in a country which seems obsessed with erasing its own cultural past…
Allan Ramsay the portrait painter was the son of Allan Ramsay the poet. The latter is important because almost single handedly, he kickstarted the cultural reaction agsinst the Union of 1707 with his poetry. Ramsay father was a fierce Presbetyrian and an equally fierce Jacobite…
Allan Ransay, son, the painter, was a Unionist who went to Rome for a year or two, to study the Italian masters. There, at that time, before the 45, the entire Jacobite court was in exile but still, he and his colleague mingled with them…
Apart from painting technique, Ramsay brought back to barren Scotland the idea of the Academy of experts, a French idea present also in Italy and Spain…
But Scotland didnt have a government anymore to appoint an Academy….so what Ramsay and his pals David Hume and Adam Smith did was set up an unofficial Academy, a social club, which they called the Select Society…
The Select Society led to contributions from Scots of all walks of life and led to, st least in part, what we now call the Scottish Enlightenment…
Ramsay father set up a theatre, which was closed down by the Kirk = Angus Roberston on film, going bankrupt as a resulrt while Ramsay son went on to become the greatest portrait painter in Britain…
Ramsay, father and son, give you a flavour of what Scotland must have bern like in the decades after the Union…
The father agin the Union, a Jacobite but also a Presbetyrian, the son an urbane Euro Scot who wanted to emulate the French and the Italians and pals with Smith and Hume….
A reasonably educated Spaniard knows who Goya and Velazquez are, or Cervantes and Lope de Vega, but the Scots dont know their own cultural history…
And that is because it is supressed, elided or ignored by this shamefully ignorant SNP government…
Ramsay, father, when his theatre was closed down, wrote a poem of protest. It could equally be used to criticize the SNP’s truly disastrous film policy today;
Shall London have its houses twa
And we br doom’d to nane awa?
Is our metropolus, anes the place
Where lang syne dwelt the royal race
Of Fergus, this gate dwindled down
To a level with ilk clachan town,
Why thus she suffers by subversion
Of her most rational diversion?
I’m interested in a byelection in England because – whether we like it or not – we are deeply influenced by UK politics, and we are also seeing the dramatic realignment of British party politics. This has both the dramatic rise of a populist Left-Green party, and the rise of a neo-fascist party and movement.
We are also seeing the collapse of the two-party duopoly and the decline of the Labour party in Scotland and the UK. This is a situation of both jeopardy and opportunity for Scotland and well worth analysing.
Maybe it is worth analyzing, but it is everywhere in the press..
Even someone like Steve Bannon understands that politics is a downsteam of culture..
Unlock Scottish culture to the Scottish people and independence will automatically follow… Scotland is amazing culturally, but hardly known by most Scots, certainly in my own case until I was almost 40 and decided I wanted to find out more about it…
The Glasgow Film Festival kicked off this week – by far the best we’ve got – but no one seems to care in the press…
As for Ramsay In Rome, we can add that to the list of great Scottish films never made… Ramsay is studying painting by day and taking his cups at night with the Jacobites… a great wee film there, albeit tough to write, not least because we dont know how these people actually spoke…
Our country is treated like no more than a location for films, an admission of how culturally impoverished we are I’m afraid…
But it can be changed, eh?
The thing is, Mike, if you went to Screen Scotland with Ramsay in Rome, or Stevenson in France, they would tell you these films werent for the market, and dismiss you…
It’s a terible siuation if you’re into film in Scotland. The same – dreadful, simply awfy – film exec – who was in post back in 2005 when I last presented a project is still there…
These people dont even know who Ramsay was….
The thing is, Mike, I happen to have been a very lucky person, because after the Tories got back in in 92, I was so gutted I left the country, and I went to Spain cause I thought Felipe. Gonzalez was a Socialist, which is a line / joke which still gets me a beer in many a bar. ..
But I happened to end up working for Andres Vicente Gomez for 5 years, the Oscar winning film producer…
We made 8 pictures a year from Madrid and Lola Films was a place where the internationsl film community was coming thru the door all the time… it was mental…
I wanted to bring it all back – the contacts, the know how, the aesthetics – but Screen Scotland, or Scottish S as it was, treated me like I was a beginner…
Nothing has changed. They are awful, ignorant ass licking pricks…
“The Glasgow Film Festival kicked off this week – by far the best we’ve got – but no one seems to care in the press…”
==========
Starting around 7:15 on 1 March, Radio 4’s ‘Sunday’ programme (broadcasting to largely an English audience) featured an item on Gaelic Psalms, based on a film by Rob Macneacail coming up at GFF.
If you missed it, you can catch it on the BBC Sounds app.
Thanks, Cynicus, for the heads up…
You can become a cinephile at any age.. there’s no snobbery in film… none of us have seen everything… we’re like collecionists, we have to be there, but we understand if you cant…it happens to us all the tine…
Everytying is Cinema!!! as J L Godard once said…
It truly is if you take strength from the great ditectors…
Film completely transfotmed my life. With no teachers really. I learned about everything: art direction, acting, writing, directing, sound, production…
If you get the chance to work on a film from beginning to end, it’s just a magical experience to see it on the big screen… there is nothing like it..
That’s what I want for young Scots, that it’s their right to make films…
In other news from Spain, the legendary singer Robe (Roberto) Iniesta died, suddenly, leaving the nation of Spain in shock and sorrow…distraught..
And indeed, I seriously cant think of a song as brilliant ever except maybe Heroes by Bowie…
Si Te Vas (if you go)…
https://youtu.be/9Ab2KsmV-KA?si=lR9VLuM_xqFfLxHk
What a song!!!!
Si te vas!!
Desperate stuff, from a desperate man leading a desperate party!
What are Labour for?
That question alone kills them stone dead!
Labour stand for SFA, what’s even more condemning of the branch office in Scotland, each and everyone of them knows this!