Let me tell you something that ought to make every Labour MP lose sleep tonight: Anas Sarwar is absolutely not sorry. Not even a little bit. Not even the tiniest, most performative hint of regret that might let Keir Starmer sleep easier. The Scottish Labour leader looked the nation in the eye this weekend and said, in essence, “I’d call for him to resign again tomorrow.” And that, my friends, is a declaration of war.
The Man Who Refuses to Back Down
You have to admire the sheer brass neck of it. Here is Anas Sarwar, leader of Scottish Labour—a party that has been reduced to a laughing stock north of the border, polling worse than the Lib Dems in their own backyard—telling the man who supposedly leads the entire Labour movement that he should step aside. It’s the political equivalent of the auxiliary lighthouse keeper telling the captain of the Titanic that he’s handling things badly.
But here’s what makes this interesting. Sarwar isn’t backing down. Not one inch. In what must have been a delicious interview for anyone who enjoys watching Labour eat itself, he laid out his position with the kind of conviction you normally only see in people who have absolutely nothing left to lose. Scottish Labour is already in the political ICU—canvassing returns suggest support has collapsed to levels that would embarrass a regional political party in a by-election nowhere constituency. So what exactly is Starmer going to do? Deselect him? The man is already leading a party that couldn’t win a raffle.
The timing, of course, is everything. Starmer is already fighting fires on multiple fronts—his response to the Israel-Gaza conflict has alienated vast chunks of the party grassroots, his economic credentials are being shredded by a Chancellor who appears to have discovered fiscal responsibility sometime around the moment voters started paying attention, and now one of his own senior figures is publicly questioning his leadership. This is not a party in crisis. This is a party that has realised it’s already lost the next election and is now fighting over who gets to blame whom.
What Sarwar Gets Right (Unfortunately)
Now, I don’t agree with Sarwar on much—Scottish Labour’s entire political project is essentially based on the premise that devolution was a brilliant idea that somehow didn’t work, and their solution is more of it—but the man has spotted a genuine weakness in Starmer’s armour. The Labour leader has governed from the centre with such aggressive caution that he’s managed to alienate both the left of his party (who see him as a Blairite careerist who only became “progressive” when it became electorally convenient) and the right (who see him as too weak to actually govern).
Starmer’s entire political strategy appears to be based on the assumption that if he just stands still long enough, the Conservatives will somehow trip over their own contradictions and hand him Number 10. It’s the political equivalent of waiting for your opponent to concede. And in the meantime, his own MPs are starting to wonder whether they’d be better off with someone who actually has the stomach for a fight.
The problem for Starmer is that Sarwar’s criticism isn’t coming from some irrelevant fringe figure. He’s the leader of the Scottish branch of the party—the one part ofate that Labour theoretically still “controls” (in the loosest possible sense of the word). When he speaks, he speaks for a section of the party that still remembers what it was like to be in government, however briefly. That gives his criticism weight it might not otherwise have.
The Scottish Context Nobody’s Talking About
Here’s what the London-centric political commentariat keeps missing: Scottish Labour’s collapse isn’t just a regional problem. It’s a symptom of something far more corrosive. The party has lost its entire reason for existing. Scottish voters no longer see Labour as the alternative to the SNP—they see them as a slightly worse version of the SNP with more awkward questions to answer about Iraq.
Sarwar inherited a party that had been reduced to 23% of the Scottish vote. Twenty-three percent. Let that sink in. This is a party that used to run the entire country, that produced Prime Ministers, that defined what it meant to be British in the modern era. Now they can’t even outpoll the Greens in Holyrood projections.
In that context, Sarwar’s call for Starmer to resign makes a twisted kind of sense. If Scottish Labour is going down anyway, why not take the leader of the whole ship down with you? It’s the political equivalent of torching your own house because the neighbours have a bigger garden. Petty? Absolutely. Effective? Debatable. But you can see the logic.
Starmer’s Impossible Position
Let’s be honest about what Starmer faces. He’s caught in a pincer movement from which there is no easy escape. On one side, the left of the party—still seething about the expulsion of Jeremy Corbyn, still angry about the perceived betrayal on Gaza, still convinced that Starmer is fundamentally a Blairite fraud who only embraced “progressive politics” when it became safe to do so—want him to be bolder, more radical, more willing to break from the consensus.
On the other side, the party’s institutional machinery—the people who actually run the operation, who raise the money, who manage the PR, who understand that Labour wins elections by appealing to middle England—want him to stay precisely where he is: safely bland, reassuringly dull, the political equivalent of warm milk.
Into this impossible calculation walks Anas Sarwar, essentially saying: “You’re not bland enough to satisfy the right, and not radical enough to satisfy the left. Why not