Looking for Political Dynamism in the UK and Scotland
Early August may not be the best time to search for political dynamism in Scotland or the rest of the UK. But as the riots in England and Northern Ireland, for now, seem to have ebbed, real dynamism has been on display with the anti-racist protests across English towns and cities held yesterday evening. That was substantive, vital leadership from the ground. And there will be more anti-racism rallies, including in Scotland, this weekend.
Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper have overseen and backed rapid charging of far-right rioters, a violent, vicious mob. And they’ve acknowledged these riots are driven by unacceptable racism. But there are wider questions about the language of politics and media around immigration and race, and the social media and political underpinnings of the far right. And there are questions about the quality of UK politics and policies given the absence of leadership on issues from immigration and asylum-seekers to Brexit and UK-EU relations.
One of today’s more surprising sights was tabloids including the Daily Mail actually backing the anti-racism, anti-fascist protests against the far right mob. That neither takes away their contribution to conspiracy theories, xenophobia and anti-immigration hostility. Nor does it mean there will be any change in such tabloid behaviour in future. Nor has the far right in the UK and elsewhere suddenly disappeared.
But today, there is a more positive mood after the week of horrifying violence in England and Northern Ireland. And there is a need for reflection not only on policies, politics and language around immigration and asylum-seekers but also more generally in our politics.
We need a more honest UK politics, one that doesn’t shrink from leadership on controversial or divisive or neuralgic issues.
And, that Scotland has not seen riots this week does not mean the country is impervious to the far right, even if Reform’s 7% in July’s general election looks much less concerning than its 15% in England.
Where next for UK Politics?
Keir Starmer, in his first speech in Downing street after the election, said he wanted to rebuild trust and hope in politics. He asked everyone to buy into a national mission of renewal. There was a flurry of policy announcements from house-building targets to cancelling the ban on onshore windfarms.
But that was followed by lots of pronouncements on how broken everything was from the NHS to prisons to the £22 billion black hole and Rachel Reeves cutting of the winter fuel payment in England and Wales and refusal to act, at least before the end October budget, on the poverty-creating two child cap.
Fair enough to underline the disastrous legacy of the Tories. Yet, surely, a new government needs to major on creating a sense of dynamism and rebuilding, not of more cuts and excessive fiscal rectitude. It’s early days. But it’s also notable that Reeves’ first budget is well after what will be Starmer’s first 100 days in office. She is expected to find some ways to borrow more and tax more. But how much and where it will be spent, we will see.
Keir Starmer is keen on national unity, ending division. And in the face of last week’s riots, that’s a message that clearly has its time and place. But much of Labour’s general election messaging was targeted at Tory voters, at right-wing English voters. Starmer’s new border security unit is playing with the same language and in the same area as ‘stop the boats’.
True, Labour is aiming to process asylum-seekers and end the inhuman and costly backlog of cases created by the Tories. But real leadership means making a positive case for why we have a moral and political responsibility to take in asylum-seekers, to explain the contribution they can bring (and make it easier for them work too, to make that contribution). The same is true on immigration. Bringing in better policies, up to a point, but not changing the substantive language and political communication is not a good enough or honest enough politics.
This relates, too, to UK-EU relations and the continuing negative impacts of Brexit. Keir Starmer wants to treat Brexit as past, accepting Boris Johnson’s hard Brexit but ameliorating it at the margins. Starmer has insisted he will not take the UK back to the EU’s single market, customs union or to free movement.
We will see how far the Labour government now takes its plans on easing border checks through a veterinary agreement, a wide-ranging EU-UK security pact (but not a treaty), and so on. But, again, there is a broad acceptance still of so much of the Tories’ Brexit rhetoric.
There are some positives. Starmer presided over the European Political Community summit at Blenheim a month ago. He made a good start at presenting the UK government as back under grown-up control. But the contradiction between proclaiming his government’s main mission as growth while attempting to treat Brexit, and its continuing negative impacts on growth, as being in the past, will continue to haunt Starmer’s European rhetoric. A more honest acknowledgement of the damage of hard Brexit, as the start of a UK-wide conversation on where next, would be a much more serious politics.
Where now in Scottish politics?
Scottish politics has been rather quiet since the general election. And, yes, it’s recess and school holidays. While the SNP has to come to terms with its general election defeat, there’s no real sense, so far, of some new positive political dynamic around the fact Scotland now has 37 Labour MPs and only 9 SNP MPs.
It’s under two years to the Holyrood election in May 2026. It’s going to be a long campaign, in effect from now. But it’s not an obvious shoo-in yet for a Labour-LibDem coalition as the outcome. The SNP’s 30% vote share to Labour’s 35% suggests a more open politics than that.
How the UK government acts over the next two years will impact crucially on that 2026 election. But Starmer’s first month already tells us there will be both positives and negatives. Fiscal rectitude, refusal so far to remove the two child cap, the £22 billion Tory black hole. None of these are going to impress Scottish voters. Ending the dreadful Rwanda policy, onshore windfarms, and potential taxes on the rich, are more welcome.
But other policies are trickier. Labour slashed their green funding plans. And the flagship GB Energy public company is already coming under serious scrutiny – rightly enough. The key issue here is not where its HQ is located (surely in Aberdeen) but how it operates, who benefits (companies, the UK treasury?), and the sort of infrastructure that renewable energy will need.
And there are always ‘events, dear boy, events’ – as we’ve seen in the last week. So, how the next two years will play to Labour’s and the SNP’s advantage or otherwise, and how politically adept both sides will be at engaging with political developments until 2026 is going to be key.
Can the SNP find a route to dynamism and persuading the Scottish public that it should have yet another period in office from 2026? It’s been mostly very quiet from the SNP since 4th July. John Swinney has sent a survey out to SNP members, election candidates and campaign teams, to learn from the electoral failure, at the SNP’s end August conference in Edinburgh.
There are likely to be few surprises in that feedback. The Scottish government looks tired, it’s had an unstable, messy time from Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation through to Humza Yousaf’s on the heels of the fractious ending of the Bute House agreement. The SNP will consider its election loss, but will it find any new energy or strategy?
And the wider questions and challenges are the same. How to be an effective, positive Scottish government and to make a positive case for independence at the same time. The SNP has been struggling on both of those fronts. And yet the answer is not to abandon one for the other – its raison d’etre demands both. A more honest politics here would also face up more seriously to weaknesses and failures in government, and be more open on the challenges, as well as benefits, of the transition to independence.
While the SNP asks its members what they think it should do next, there’s no wider sense of political revival or dynamism in Scotland. Labour is back but what will the UK government do to boost Scottish Labour’s chances in 2026? It needs to work with the current Scottish government while also working for a Labour victory at Holyrood in May 2026. How the dynamics of this unfolds will be crucial.
Any wider political debate, beyond the confines of the parties, on the future direction for Scotland, including constitutional direction, at a time of big challenges – from poverty, cost of living, to climate and biodiversity crises to wider geopolitical instability – is currently rather absent or at best low key.
The real political question may be where new energy and ideas come from. Are Scottish Labour or the SNP capable of providing that energy? Or will it come from a wider, new and innovative political and social debate across Scotland? If not, the current doldrums may continue and that’s not to the benefit of our politics whoever wins in 2026.