Scotland — Anas Sarwar may be moving on from Holyrood and Scottish Labour’s top job, but his record still hangs over the contest to replace him.
The race between Michael Marra and Joe Fagan is officially about the party’s future, but both candidates have been forced to address the same question first: what went wrong for Labour in May?
Continuity concerns for both candidates
The difficulty for the next leader is that they face many of the same problems Sarwar faced, and the fixes are not obvious.
In public, both men have praised Sarwar, while also trying hard not to be seen as the continuity candidate.
For Marra, that is a tough line to hold given his central role in shaping the Sarwar project’s strategy and policy over the last five years, and how close the two men were until very recently.
For Fagan, distance is harder to claim because he is surrounded by some of Sarwar’s closest allies. Oliver Milne, who served as Labour’s head of communications under Sarwar, and Fraser Jackson, the former leader’s senior parliamentary assistant, are key figures in his campaign team.
What the rivals are saying
Asked on the BBC’s Scotcast podcast what went wrong for Labour in May, Marra said the party “became far too narrow in our leadership and the circle of influence around the leader”.
“Anas is a hugely talented individual, very intelligent man, a great communicator and a really good strategist but we ended up looking to break through into the public consciousness focusing on just a person but frankly also we lost definition as to who we are as a party.”
In the STV debate, asked point blank whether responsibility for May’s defeat lay with Sir Keir Starmer or Sarwar, Fagan said there was “a shared responsibility”.
“Never before in recorded polling history has a new government seen its popularity collapse in such a short space of time. But that doesn’t get us off the hook in Scotland.
“We still have to ask those searching questions about the kind of campaign we fought. I’ve said before, I thought we fought the wrong kind of campaign. I think it should have been a more combative campaign, and I think the manifesto offer should have been more of a provocation to the Scottish people.”
One of the authors of the manifesto is, of course, Marra.
“The leader gets in the end the manifesto that they want,” Marra rebutted. “There’s a process that we go through in the party, and then the leader puts their stamp on it.”
The wider challenge for Scottish Labour
The basic problem for both men is that Scottish Labour’s route back to relevance still runs through the same voters Sarwar was trying to reach.
That means, in effect, both candidates may end up backing some version of the strategy he pursued. But they are also likely to run into the same barriers that dogged Sarwar and several of his predecessors.
Dr Fraser McMillan of the Scottish Election Study told the Herald on Sunday: “I doubt many ordinary Scots are paying attention to the Scottish Labour leadership race. So the optics as such don’t really matter. The new Labour Prime Minister is far more important to Scottish Labour’s electoral prospects at this point in time.”
“Labour’s only recent electoral success in Scotland came in 2024 when they were perceived as the acceptable alternative to two unpopular incumbent governments,” he added.
“Of course, they are the unpopular incumbent government down south now, give or take any modest Burnham bounce, and that’s why they lost again in May.
“Scottish Labour cannot control these structural factors, but they can put themselves in a position to capitalise if and when the SNP slide further in public esteem, and having a leader who can appeal to the vaguely left-of-centre, indy-sympathetic ‘middle Scotland’ voters they’d need to prise from the SNP is a necessary but not sufficient condition for that.”
Constitutional questions and timing
Beyond the structural issues is the constitutional one. Some in Labour believe it does not matter much who leads the party because a solid bloc of independence-supporting voters will keep backing the SNP, regardless of how they feel about the Scottish Government or public services.
Dr McMillan said that view was only partly right.
“That despondency is partly warranted, partly not,” he said. “Of course, indy diehards are highly unlikely to vote for one of the pro-union parties. But only half of people who identify as ‘being on the Yes side’ do so ‘very strongly’. It’s similar on the No side.
“Weaker pro-indy voters are more likely to give Labour a chance, as indeed some of them did in 2024. The SNP lost approximately 10% vote share between 2021 and 2026 — they are clearly not invincible — and the slide in approval of the Scottish Government over that period came from inside the Yes camp.
“I mentioned ‘structural factors’ and that’s what Scottish Labour are at the mercy of. Not just the popularity of the Scottish Government and the UK-wide Labour party in isolation, but how these things interact.
“The SNP did not win earlier this year thanks to a huge wave of enthusiasm, but because keeping them in government seemed like the ‘least worst’ option to those moderate pro-indy voters who strongly prefer Labour to Conservative governments at Westminster yet felt let down by Starmer.
“I don’t think, especially at this early stage in the parliamentary session, that the person in charge of Scottish Labour can move the needle one way or the other. But they can build a public profile, hope that Burnham succeeds while the SNP lose further ground, and put themselves in the position to be the obvious alternative First Minister to Gilruth/Flynn/McAllan/whoever by 2031.”
Dr McMillan said the only path to doing so would resemble 2024’s general election, which meant consolidating support among anti-independence voters while also peeling away some pro-independence voters.
“But having a mainstream leader who can hitch his wagon to a more popular UK Labour government as the constitutional issue continues to fade in relevance is probably the most likely way to do it,” he added.
Even then, time may be short. With speculation continuing about whether Andy Burnham could call an early general election, Scottish Labour’s new leader could be forced into a UK campaign within months of taking office, with little opportunity to set out how they would differ from Sarwar.