As the mostly scathing assessments of Keir Starmer’s first year of government roll in, the UK’s Labour government looks wobbly and lacking direction. After his disastrous, deeply inept week on disability benefits reform, perhaps the most common question remains, what does Starmer actually believe in?
Starmer, in remarkably Soviet style, seems above all to believe – in some rather vague way – in the workers which may partly explain his gung ho lack of concern about pensioners’ winter fuel payments and disability benefits. Pushed by the BBC’s Nick Robinson on the question of what’s the strategy, or at least the story, Starmer replied: “It’s about a passion, if that’s the right word…but certainly a determination to change the lives of millions of working people and, in particular, to tackle this question of fairness.”
He went on: “It’s almost like a social contract, that people are getting back what they’re putting in, that there is a fairer environment for them that supports them and respects them.”
With his focus on ‘the worker’, not every citizen in work or out of work, young or old, Starmer betrays not only his inability to talk to the wider public as a whole (his call for national renewal a year ago missing in action), but also perhaps his focus on competing with Reform in English and Welsh constituencies (and voicing the right wing ‘blue Labour’ ideas that appear to influence him).
Fairness is a great idea but a slippery one. Starmer appears unable to spell out substantially or strategically what he is genuinely for – a prime minister without a mission.
Starmer’s stasis
Starmer’s government is now in a mess with several reports talking of infighting in Downing Street and general fury at the so-called ‘rebel’ MPs on the vicious disability poilicy reform (rebels who are now to be blamed when the government also fails to end the Dickensian two child benefit cap). This doesn’t betoken a rapid, positive rethink.
And Starmer has proved incoherent or worse in taking responsibility for the furore (including his belated defence of Rachel Reeves). His suggestion that he was too busy at the NATO summit to focus properly on the rebels’ demands was a particularly disastrous statement – prime ministers are meant to be able to keep abreast of domestic and international politics at the same time.
And Starmer’s refusal to face up to the genocide in Gaza will perhaps remain, long after all the other issues, his biggest political and moral failure – however much he apparently enjoys the international meet-ups.
The government did hope the media would focus on the big NHS reform plans announced this week, though at first glance a digital app and community centres intended to lead to fewer staff in ten years’ time sounds more worrying than welcome. But these are plans for England, not Scotland or Wales.
And you wouldn’t know it from the reviews of Starmer’s first year, which are mainly England-focused (even if the authors think they’re writing about the UK), but there are elections in under a year for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments both of which Labour currently looks set to lose.
Where now for Scotland?
In Scotland, Labour won 37 seats last year, leaving the SNP with just 9. These 37 MPs have been rather invisible in the last year (and less than a third seem to have been part of the large rebel group on the disability benefits bill). Labour would get many fewer MPs in Scotland if an election were held today.
An in-depth poll this week from Ipsos/STV now puts the SNP on 31%, in a general election vote, to Labour’s 22% – with Reform in third place at 16% (about half the level of UK wide polls but, like England, with men almost twice as likely to support Reform as women).
For the Holyrood election, with its mix of constituency and list votes, the SNP leads too – 34% on the constituency vote to 23% for Labour, and a smaller 4 percentage point gap between them for the list vote (Reform coming third on each).
The Scottish Government looks, at best, tired after 18 years in power and after the particularly difficult two years since Nicola Sturgeon resigned. But John Swinney’s low key, no dynamism approach, is serving the SNP better in the polls than might have happened if Labour at Westminster had been more strategic and more ‘Labour’ – rather than the mix of U-turns, talk about their bad inheritance (even Starmer admitted recently it had squeezed out hope), a focus on deregulation and the supplying of arms to Israel.
Independence and the EU?
The Scottish government has been remarkably quiet about independence under John Swinney. But that will not hold as the Holyrood election approaches – something will have to be said and written in the manifesto.
Here the IPSOs/STV poll makes interesting reading for Starmer and Anas Sarwar, as much as for Swinney. The headline figure of 52% yes to 48% no on independence rather obscures the much higher figures for those from age 16-54 years old. This, broadly speaking, is the working generation – Starmer should, surely, be paying attention with his intense focus on ‘the worker’.
For 16-34 year olds, 72% support independence and, for 35-54 year olds, 57% support independence. These figures are quite remarkable (even though not new in terms of the older demographic having long been the most unionist). Scotland is remaining part of the UK principally through the support of its older generation.
Labour will point to the fact that independence is not a priority for voters now. True, in the IPSOS poll, independence comes seventeenth in a list of priorities – the NHS first. But for 16-34 year olds, independence comes in tenth (with 33% seeing it as a priority) and the EU comes just above that at 34%. Younger voters also rank climate change as a much higher priority (in sixth place, at 37%, compared to fifteenth for those polled overall). And young people are not worried about tackling migration, according to this data set – with only 12% putting it as a priority (to 28% for the overall poll).
Younger voters are most concerned about inflation, then the NHS, poverty, the economy and housing. Only 11% of 16-34 year olds would vote Reform, compared to 22% of 55 year olds and older.
Scotland’s younger generation looks rather strong and progressive on these figures. Remarkably, they also have somewhat lower lack of faith in politics (at 34%) as a priority issue (to 41% for the polling sample as a whole). There are some reasons for optimism in much of this data.
Holyrood elections
Scotland’s Holyrood election will be fought on both devolved issues and, inevitably too, the bigger picture of the UK government’s performance overall. In the IPSOS poll, the SNP comes out ahead of Labour on trust to manage the NHS, economy and education – albeit the SNP only hits 24%.
Scottish voters are not much impressed with their politicians any more than in England. All the party leaders – in Scotland and for the UK – come in with negative net satisfaction figures (in the IPSOS) poll, but Kemi Badenoch, Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage have much larger negative figures than the various Scottish leaders (with Tory leader Russell Findlay on minus 28% almost matching Farage’s minus 30%, and Badenoch on minus 42% just ahead of Starmer on minus 41%. Swinney on minus 17% and Sarwar on minus 18% are more or less level pegging).
At some point, Keir Starmer’s attention will presumably swing to Scotland at least a little. But after his unnecessarily difficult first year, for which he indeed does have to take responsibility, the UK government is, for now, likely to carry on focusing on England. There have been suggestions that, looking forward, Starmer’s government will try to talk to English voters currently defecting to the Greens and LibDems and not only to north of England Reform voters. Whether this will transpire – and can be managed in any serious, successful or strategic way – looks at the very best like an open question. And whether it will impact on Scotland in a positive way for Labour, for now, looks highly unlikely.
It’s a long way until next May for both UK and Scottish politics – and on the global stage – but at the moment, the SNP is set to come first in the Holyrood elections (though what sort of minority government might emerge is currently unclear).
Labour’s hopes, when it won the general election, to be in government in England, Wales and Scotland by 2026 currently look off the agenda, not to say absurd. A fractured Labour government and parliamentary party is not well positioned to think about the fractured union that it claims to govern. And a UK government focused on England looks set to continue doing so.
First published on the author’s Europe & Scotland newsletter on Substack
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