UK Politics Teetering on the Brink as Scottish and Welsh Elections Beckon
It’s just over six months to Scotland’s Holyrood elections. On cue, Keir Starmer told Scottish journalists on Monday (20th October) that John Swinney was “insulting the intelligence of the Scottish people” with his plans to link the election to independence.
The Scottish government has been rather quiet about independence in the last couple of years. But in the run up to SNP conference and, more crucially, May’s elections, independence was and is unsurprisingly back on the political agenda. The SNP may look rather weary, but UK Labour is doing a lot of the SNP’s work for it, pushing their support back up.
Labour struggling across Britain
Scotland: Labour are lagging so far behind in the Scottish polls, that they are competing with Reform for second place rather than anywhere close to the SNP for first place. In September’s Norstat poll, Labour were at half the SNP’s level of support – at 17% to 34% for the SNP and with Reform on 20%.
And Labour, clearly, have no plan how to deal with the fact that half of Scotland’s voters support independence, and that roughly two-thirds of those between 16-54 years old support independence (see this June IPSOS poll for instance). What if all these voters think Starmer is insulting their intelligence by being so dismissive?
Starmer and Scottish Labour are struggling not only with their large drop in the polls since June 2024’s general election but also with the UK’s government continuing ineptitude and loss of popularity across Britain. In YouGov’s 13th October tracker only 14% of British voters polled approved of the government’s record to date, with 69% disapproving.
English Greens: Meanwhile, England and Wales’ Green party is moving up the polls ever closer to Labour under its new leader, Zack Polanski. We learnt, yesterday, that Keir Starmer will go to the vital COP climate summit in Brazil in early November – after allowing doubts over that to linger for weeks while advisers argued over whether it was desirable or not (Polanski’s recent success perhaps tipping the balance on what should have been an obvious decision from the start). But Labour’s backtracking on climate and biodiversity crises (from airports to sneering at protections for wildlife in the face of housing projects) will not attract many back from the Greens.
Wales: In Wales, Reform and Plaid Cymru are fighting it out for the Caerphilly by-election on Thursday. A Survation poll has Reform on 40%, Plaid Cymru on 38% and Labour on 12%. Labour is set to lose its majority in the Senedd, having now lost its footing in its once stronghold of Wales. It’s a pretty awful scene-setter for Labour for next May’s elections.
And it doesn’t look like Labour has any upbeat new communications and policy strategy to change the mood and create some political and economic dynamism to drag them out of the mire.
Business and Brexit: Today (21st October), Rachel Reeves told an investment summit in Birmingham that things like austerity and Brexit (no longer a taboo word for Labour) meant things had to be done differently: “That’s why we are deregulating. It’s why we’re overturning the planning system.” This deeply Tory language is not going to appeal to many in Scotland, certainly not those who having voted Labour in 2024’s election are likely now to vote SNP again.
What does the UK plan to do about Brexit harm? We have the EU-UK May reset. The small but welcome reductions, agreed in principle, in some food health and safety barriers to trade are still being negotiated, likewise a youth mobility agreement. And that’s it on Brexit. None of this faces up in any serious way either to Brexit damage or to the UK’s economic problems.
Trailers from Rachel Reeves ahead of the budget next month suggest both the wealthy and those on benefits may take a hit. That sounds like a lose-lose strategy in terms of popularity and communication strategy. Starmer’s blue-Labourish approach of focusing on a subset of mainly Reform voters gets ever narrower and more peculiar.
Meanwhile, in the last day, Starmer’s government has been extricated from its bizarre conflation of antisemitism and a police decision on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans by an opportunistic-looking decision by Maccabi Tel Aviv not to take up any tickets for its fans.
This is not a UK government that is back on the front foot or communicating any better or more strategically since its conference last month, the cabinet reshuffle and the changing cast of characters around the PM in no ten.
Even Neil Kinnock told the BBC on Sunday that Starmer only had months to turn things around, with semi-veiled criticism of the over-influential chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney.
Where next for UK and Scottish Politics?
The UK’s government and its wider politics is in a deeply unstable state at a time of global change, conflict and instability. The Gaza ceasefire stumbles uncertainly on – the UK still complicit in the genocide with its arms supplies. President Trump swings back into Putinesque rhetoric on Ukraine after one phone conversation with Putin. France’s political system looks fractured beyond repair.
It’s perhaps easy, despite that wider context, six months ahead of Scottish elections, to analyse the political dynamics in terms of a fairly typical fight between Labour and SNP or unionists and independence. But the UK government is doing so badly, its political support haemorrhaging, that scenarios of Starmer being pushed out even before next May’s elections may start looking relevant too. And if England’s Greens surge past Labour but with Reform still in the lead, if Reform and Plaid Cymru are ahead of Labour heading into next May’s Welsh elections, all of this will impact on Scotland and its politics too.
The somewhat tired discussion of whether a majority of seats should mean another independence referendum – at a moment when the debate seems tepid indeed – may switch into much bigger changes in opinion, new dynamism on independence but also more vocal, Reform-style opposition (saltire battles over lamp-posts just the beginning).
Our politics doesn’t yet seem remotely ready for any of this. If the UK starts to fracture more quickly, changing political dynamics not only in Wales and Scotland but Northern Ireland too – and in England as its progressive and reactionary forces face a deeper stand-off – then old debates about independence may look rather polite and straight-forward.
A fracturing, destabilised UK will not, in this environment, become a polite, cooperative confederation. Nor will a UK government losing its legitimacy mean early UK elections nor an easier route to independence, if support for separation did go up and stay up in Scotland.
We’re heading into a more turbulent politics. It will need far-sighted and rapid political thinking and action from the grassroots and from politicians. We’re still, for now, in a rather low key, business-as-usual politics. But events may not let that stumble on much longer.
Starmer's quietly reinforced powers of patronage will see him through personally and the Reform freakshow might just provide Labour with enough apparent reason to exist to get them through the 2129 GE.
Those with an interest in Scottish politics need to make London's masquerade of economic control more and more embarrassing to see. That means staying politically focused on it at all times. UK failure is systemically locked into ever-decreasing spirals and it is certainly taking Scotland down with it.
It's not just in the quotidian evidence of the price of gilts, the failures on inflation, the wage stagnation, the desperation about inward investment, the chronic inequality, the bullshit about growth, the weird little moves on deregulation, or the mumblings about about raising taxes. The point is, it is systemic, It can't be reversed. All that's left is the masquerade.
The economy is still London's whip hand over the Scottish cringe but that apparent strength is easily turned against it, and should be.
An acute discussion. You have to wonder who is advising Starmer on Scotland. Douglas Alexander? If so, he has scarcely been active in Scottish affairs in recent years. Starmer clearly knows little about Scotland and cares less. Gordon Brown's commission made some sensible suggestions - which Starmer immediately kicked into touch. Wherever you stand on independence, it must be apparent that the status quo is no longer functioning effectively.