Why Scottish Labour turned against Keir Starmer

LONDON — Three months out from crunch elections, the Scottish Labour Party has given up on Keir Starmer. 

“The distraction needs to end. And the leadership in Downing Street needs to change,” Anas Sarwar, the party’s leader in Scotland, told a press conference Monday. 

The tipping point was the Peter Mandelson affair, and questions over Starmer’s judgment appointing Mandelson as U.S. ambassador following revelations about his links to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. 

But the separation has been a long time coming.

Frustration has been growing for months among Labour figures north of the border. Much of that focuses on a separate concern ahead of May’s elections, when voters will choose who will lead Scotland’s devolved parliament at Holyrood: the failure, by Starmer and his team, to get a grip on mounting energy bills and the cost of living crisis. 

Starmer, with his global focus on the U.S. and Ukraine, “seems to have taken his eye off the ball in regard to domestic issues,” groused Brian Leishman, a Scottish Labour MP and serial Labour rebel, who was speaking, like the other MPs quoted in this piece, before Sarwar’s intervention. 

Frustration

Labour, which won the 2024 general election on a promise to cut household energy bills by £300, has asked voters to judge the party by that promise.  

2026 will be the year voters “begin to feel positive change” in their bills, Starmer promised on New Year’s Day. 

But energy bills have so far risen, not fallen.

They are still “far, far too high,” Martin McCluskey, a Scottish Labour MP and the minister tasked with bringing them down, acknowledged in an interview with POLITICO last month.  

Starmer “seems to have taken his eye off the ball in regard to domestic issues,” said Brian Leishman, a Scottish Labour MP. | Peter Nicholls/Getty Images

“I understand why people feel frustrated, and I also understand why they look at energy bills as, I’d probably say, a totemic issue for the effectiveness of government,” he said. 

It is a level of voter frustration Labour in Scotland can ill afford.  

Even before the Mandelson revelations, a YouGov poll put the party on just 15 percent, down 20 percentage points compared with its performance in Scotland at the 2024 general election, and now trailing both the Scottish National Party and Reform UK. 

Cost of living issues will “undoubtedly” play a role in the May elections, said Stephen Boyd, director of the left-leaning think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research Scotland. While Labour inherited difficult fiscal circumstances in 2024, Boyd argued, the party will “suffer because concerns about [the] cost of living haven’t really been mitigated over the period that Labour’s been in power [in Westminster].” 

Scotland is also the chunk of the U.K. where a cost-of-living crisis driven by rocketing energy bills bites hardest. 

Research produced by the U.K. parliament shows that a higher proportion of Scots are considered to live in fuel poverty than in England, Wales or Northern Ireland.  At the same time, Scots also have less trust in politicians to help them when the cost of living spirals out of control (93 percent cast doubt on the government’s ability in Scotland compared with 87 percent in the U.K. as a whole, according to polling from YouGov and comms agency iNHouse.) 

Getting to grips

Ministers in Westminster have introduced a suite of reforms and new policies to try and pull down bills for disillusioned voters. 

They agreed to lift the two-child benefit cap after a slew of pressure from backbenchers — a move which Whitehall reckons will lift 95,000 Scottish children out of fuel poverty. Fuel bills are set to fall by £150 from April after stripping so-called “green levies” from electricity bills — a reduction that will kick in just one month ahead of the Holyrood elections.  

Meanwhile, tweaks to an energy bill rebate scheme will help more Scottish homes qualify automatically, the government said.  

But none of those promises have been enough to shift the dial for Starmer, whose own Scottish backbenchers have been losing patience. 

Some changes to energy policy could be “transformational,” said one Scottish Labour MP, like others granted anonymity to speak candidly about government policy. 

“The problem is, they are, like, the least politically sexy things you’ve ever heard of,” this MP added. “The paradox here is the political cut through for doing the vastly transformative stuff isn’t there.” 

Stuff like raising the national minimum wage “takes time for people to feel … in their day-to-day lives,” said a second Scottish Labour MP. These reforms are just “steps on the road,” said a third.  

Others reckon Starmer has been too slow to speak to voters about the cost of living from the very start. 

“I would describe Keir Starmer now talking about cost of living as being his kind of defining mission … Well, yeah, I could have told him that on the fifth of July, the day after we got elected,” said Leishman.

Leishman was stripped of the whip in July for voting against his own government before being allowed back into the parliamentary party. He has called for Starmer to resign amid the controversy over Mandelson’s appointment.  

Gameplan: Pin it on the SNP 

Labour is pinning its hopes on attacking the SNP’s record in government.  

People should look at Labour’s 19 months in power in Westminster “versus the records of the SNP government [in Holyrood] over the last 19 years,” said McCluskey, the energy minister. He pointed to the SNP’s own struggles with energy policy, including its decision to ditch a “flagship” bill which would have bulked up homes with cleaner heat tech. 

“The SNP have been very lucky in that our travails in government and the rise of Reform seem to be working [for] them from the polls,” said the first Scottish Labour MP. “However, there is very little love for them and a complete understanding of their failures as a government.” 

But the SNP have a ready-made attack line based on Labour’s own bills pledge. 

“Energy bills are £200 up on the Labour government’s watch despite their promise to cut them by £300,” said Graham Leadbitter, a Scottish MP and the SNP’s energy spokesperson in Westminster.

Pollsters reckon Labour is likely to be judged harshly come May. 

“The SNP have been given a get out of jail card free because of the problems of the Labour Party,” said John Curtice, a polling guru and professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde.  “And those problems essentially stem from people’s perceptions of the U.K. government.” 

It is a perception that Labour’s own leader in Scotland this week came to share.