Sir Keir Starmer faced fury from Scottish Labour yesterday as its vote collapsed – but Anas Sarwar insisted he does not intend to quit. The Scottish Labour leader stood by his call earlier this year for the Prime Minister to resign and said his party was unable to overcome a ‘national wave’.
Labour's Worst Ever Holyrood Result
Labour suffered a long line of humiliating results across the country as it headed for its worst ever Holyrood election result. Mr Sarwar conceded defeat early in the afternoon by declaring it a ‘disappointing result’ for his party. Labour finished a distant second to the SNP (58) on 17 seats – tied with Reform, who made their electoral breakthrough in Scotland. The Scottish Greens won a record 15 seats – including their first ever constituency victories. The Conservatives lost their position as the parliament's largest opposition party, suffering their worst-ever Holyrood election result to finish with 12 seats. The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, returned 10 MSPs.
Internal Fury and Calls for Starmer to Resign
Some within Scottish Labour were much more scathing of the Prime Minister, with one of his close aides saying: ‘Anas is being diplomatic but Starmer has tanked the party.’ Scottish Labour’s previous worst result was when it won 22 seats at the last Holyrood election in 2021. Arriving at the Glasgow count yesterday, Mr Sarwar said: ‘This is clearly a disappointing result for us as a Scottish Labour Party. We argued the case for change, made the argument for change, but ultimately it is an argument we lost.’
Sarwar Defends His Position
Asked if the Prime Minister was to blame, Mr Sarwar said: ‘Throughout this campaign I have tried to make this about Scotland, I’m not going to change that today. Is there a national wave though that we tried to overcome but failed to do so? Yes.’ On whether Sir Keir should now take responsibility and resign, he said: ‘I said what I said back in February and I stand by that. But I am going to focus on what this means for my party here in Scotland, and my party is hurting today and it is my job to hold it together.’
Mr Sarwar indicated that he will seek to remain in post, saying: ‘My party is hurting, we are disappointed, we advocated for change, we didn’t win that argument. But it’s my job to hold this together and that’s a job I intend to do, and we will continue to fight for the change we believe Scotland so desperately needs.’ He added: ‘I don’t believe this election was about independence, I think this election, to be honest, was about a general dissatisfaction with politics. Sadly there was a national wave in terms of that disappointment and that’s a national wave we failed to overcome.’
Labour Candidate Calls for Starmer to Quit
After he convincingly lost the Glasgow Easterhouse and Springburn seat to the SNP’s Ivan McKee, Labour’s Paul Sweeney said Sir Keir should quit. ‘He has clearly lost the confidence of the country at large and I think the reflection of the result isn’t on the work that the candidates here and the canvassers have done and our party has tried to do for the people of Scotland,’ he added. Asked if Mr Sarwar should now also resign, Mr Sweeney said: ‘I think that we need to wait and see what happens in the next few hours. I don’t think this is on Anas at all, he has done a lot of work, he has done a power of work to try and win back the confidence of the people of Scotland. We had a powerful result in 2024. I think what I’ve heard on the doors is it was the Prime Minister who was the driver of the campaign.’
Sarwar's Failed Attempts to Distance from Starmer
Mr Sarwar tried repeatedly through the campaign to distance himself from Sir Keir, insisting a vote for Scottish Labour was not an ‘endorsement’ of the PM. The election was ‘not about protest’, he said last month. Their relationship strained to breaking point, and Sir Keir avoided meeting the Scottish leader on a fleeting trip to Faslane during the election. But Mr Sarwar could not overcome the association. His party also failed to inspire voters with a manifesto that lacked memorable ideas.
Paul Sinclair, a former Scottish Labour spin doctor who had long warned that Mr Sarwar had frittered away the last five years and failed to connect with voters, was scathing. He said Scottish Labour failed to do the intellectual ‘heavy lifting’ in the campaign and instead tried personality politics with ‘Anas flirting with the country hoping that we’d fall in love with him’.
