Scotland will be the “beating heart” of a Labour Government. That was Keir Starmer’s promise to Scots during the general election campaign.

On the surface, Labour’s commitment resonated with voters across the country who rewarded the party with 36 new seats, reduced the SNP to a rump and appeared to set Anas Sarwar on course to enter Bute House in 2026.

The Glasgow MSP was sure to be “the next king of Scotland”, predicted POLITICO.

Three months later, however, Scottish Labour’s polling has slumped and Sarwar’s ascendence has been thrown into doubt.

Seen as lacking a distinct identity or policy agenda and tagged by the UK Government’s faltering efforts to ‘fix broken Britain’, the Scottish Labour Party has proved incapable of capitalising on the Scottish Government’s stasis. The biggest obstacle to a Labour-led Holyrood is not John Swinney – it’s Keir Starmer and Scottish Labour’s refusal to reckon with this reality.

Since he was elected Scottish Labour leader in February 2021, Anas Sarwar has carefully managed his party’s relationship with London, identifying key junctures to adopt positions distinct from, and in contradiction to, the UK leadership.

When Keir Starmer imposed his infamous ‘picket line ban’, Sarwar quickly offered his support to striking workers. When UK Labour’s commitment to retain the 2-child benefit cap caused consternation among the party membership, Sarwar broke with Starmer once again to call for the Osborne-era policy to be scrapped. Last year, as Starmer vacillated over his support for an end to Israel’s war on Gaza, Sarwar broke ranks to call for a ceasefire alongside Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham.

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Before July’s general election, these rare but newsworthy interventions served to disguise London’s tightening grip over the Scottish party.

Consequently, perceived as standing somewhere to Starmer’s left, away from the spotlight, Anas Sarwar and his allies were free to centralise power, restrict internal democracy and marginalise the Labour Party’s left flank.

The Starmerite think tank Labour Together – which Sarwar had previously dismissed as ‘fringe’ – bankrolled 17 of Scottish Labour’s 37 MPs to the tune of £100,000 during the general election campaign.

Those few occasions on which Sarwar correctly identified the prevailing political wind to be blowing against the UK leadership – and acted accordingly – should be understood as exceptions to a rule that has seen Scottish Labour adopt the central tenets of Starmer’s leadership. From fiscal conservatism to ill-defined policy alternatives, like his colleagues south of the border, Anas Sarwar promises not to change Scotland but to better manage the country, steadying the ship rather than changing course.

This guarantee combined with a firm opposition to unpopular incumbent governments in both Edinburgh and London served as Scottish Labour’s central offer to the electorate earlier this year.

“We can’t just send a message in this election, we must send a government,” said Sarwar as he launched the campaign and sought to court disaffected SNP supporters. The electorate responded in kind.

The primary motivation supporters offered pollsters for backing Scottish Labour was not their ‘like’ for the party, but their belief that a vote for Labour was the best way to remove the Conservatives from office. This was enough for Labour to score a significant, but shallow, victory in Scotland. Just 5% of the vote separated Scottish Labour from an SNP rocked by scandal.

That John Swinney’s party retained as much as 30% of the vote given these circumstances should alarm Scottish Labour, whose primary electoral opponents have shed the trappings of scrappy insurgency and now possess the residual vote of a well-established party.

However, these new and returning voters remain very much on loan to Labour.

Maintaining their support will depend on overcoming Scottish Labour’s present intellectual fragility. In July, Scottish Labour’s gains came without a substantial constitutional offer.

There was no promise of further devolution let alone details of the circumstances in which a second independence referendum would be granted. Gordon Brown’s much-lauded ‘Commission on the UK’s Future’, which included abolishing the House of Lords, was shelved in favour of empty platitudes. Even a commitment to devolve employment law to the Scottish Parliament, long a key demand of Scotland’s trade unions, was absent from the party’s manifesto. Fig leaves, like the fact GB Energy would be headquartered in Scotland, filled the space instead.

Keir Starmer’s muscular unionism was symbolised by the countless union jacks that formed the backdrop to every speech he made. If that wasn’t enough, the party’s Scottish general election candidates included a former CEO of the Unionist think-tank Scotland in Union and the director of the Better Together campaign. Scottish Labour might have made rhetorical appeals to independence supporters but their retail offer amounted to little.

And yet More in Common record that support for the SNP among those who voted Yes in the 2014 independence referendum dropped from 78% to 60% on 4th July. Without giving an inch on the national question, Scottish Labour romped to victory – outlasting the period for which the SNP’s disparate electoral coalition could remain united.

Keir Starmer and Anas SarwarKeir Starmer and Anas Sarwar

Labour’s success, however, relied just as much on establishing Scottish Labour as the primary party of the Union as it did on winning disaffected SNP votes. Such dependence on otherwise Conservative voters is what prevents Anas Sarwar’s party from putting ‘clear red water’ between themselves and UK Labour.

Successfully deployed in Wales, this strategy saw Welsh Labour devolve the national party’s rule book and sign a co-operation agreement with Plaid Cymru. Faced with this electoral contradiction, the Scottish Labour leadership would rather pledge loyalty to an unpopular UK Government than make meaningful overtures to the 50% of the Scottish population who do not share their constitutional stance.

Already, Labour’s 36 new Scottish MPs have been offered ample opportunity to “stand up to Starmer” – a promise Anas Sarwar made on the front page of the Daily Record during the general election campaign. Instead, they have almost unanimously fallen into line.

The group voted to retain the two-child cap despite Sarwar’s apparent opposition to this “heinous” policy. They also voted to means-test the Winter Fuel Payment just as Scottish Labour slammed the SNP for cutting the benefit north of the border – only to later blame the UK Government’s decision, and by extension their own MPs’ vote, for defeat in two critical local by-elections.

To the delight of his opponents, the incoherence of these positions has revealed the limits of Sarwar's influence on Downing Street. Rather than leveraging the Westminster group to illustrate Scottish Labour’s independence, Scotland’s Labour MPs have done the opposite, adding renewed impetus to the SNP’s ‘branch office’ allegations. Scottish Labour’s proximity to the national party has come to substitute for a coherent policy platform in Holyrood. The party’s positions are defined less by the issues facing households across Scotland than by the UK Government’s message calendar.

More often than not, Scottish Labour’s critique of the SNP is not political, but managerial. Sarwar, for example, has promised not to raise taxes if elected in 2026, arguing that if only the Scottish Government had better managed the public finances, spending cuts would be unnecessary. Earlier this year, the Scottish Labour leader backed the SNP’s council tax freeze on the proviso that it was ‘fully funded’ but offered nothing as to how this might be achieved.

On a whole host of questions, what Scottish Labour would do differently to the incumbent administration is anyone’s guess. For as long as this remains the case, Scottish Labour’s fortunes will rise and fall with Keir Starmer’s – a brave strategy given the Prime Minister’s net favourability in Scotland dropped to -23 in late September.

What’s more, several of the UK Government's decisions have hamstrung Scottish Labour’s ability to legitimately hold the SNP to account.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Grangemouth. Having shown limited interest in the future of Scotland’s only oil refinery for years, the Scottish Government have treated Petroineos’ decision to close the site with the same apathy. The seat consequently saw by far the largest swing in Scotland on election night – a 26% shift from the SNP to Labour. However, the new UK Government’s failure to stump up the cash to save Grangemouth’s refinery – and the more than 2,000 jobs that depend on it – has already seen Unite’s General Secretary blast the Labour Party for overseeing an act of “industrial vandalism”.

By the time Scotland next heads to the polls, Keir Starmer will have been in office for almost two years. If the Labour government squanders its opportunity to transform Britain – as Starmer’s first few months suggest – the mid-term blues will be the least of Anas Sarwar’s worries as he sets out his stall in 2026. By that point, it will be too late for Scottish Labour to carve out an agenda distinct from the national party. If Sarwar is to correct Scottish Labour’s faltering trajectory, he must urgently confront the necessity of breaking, at least in part, from UK Labour.

Coll McCail is a freelance writer based in Glasgow and former member of Scottish Labour’s Executive Committee.