Douglas Alexander: “We must be a remedy for Reform, not a replica”

The Scotland Secretary on his political comeback, taking on the SNP, and the crisis in Labour

Douglas Alexander, photographed for The New Statesman By Robert Ormerod

Like Daniel Day-Lewis, moustaches and Oasis, Douglas Alexander is back. The one-time New Labour princeling, who famously lost his seat to a 20-year-old first-time SNP candidate in 2015, spent ten years outside politics and 15 outside government. Now he has returned to the Cabinet.

And not just to the Cabinet, but to his old job as Secretary of State for Scotland. When we meet in his office at Queen Elizabeth House, Edinburgh home of the UK government, I suggest his return feels almost Victorian. There can’t be many politicians who’ve held the same Cabinet role twice.

He smiles in acknowledgement of his unusual feat. “A friend sent me an answer from ChatGPT about which politicians in the last 100 years were elected to one seat, appointed to the Cabinet, lost, were elected to another seat and appointed to the Cabinet again. Apparently I’m in the good company of myself and Winston Churchill.”

I recently saw Alexander described as a “veteran”. It seems strikingly at odds with a physical presence which remains boyish, almost elfin. The hair may be tinged with grey, and there’s a touch of middle-aged spread, but he is only a relatively sprightly 57.

“It’s good to be back,” he told me, though he didn’t miss “Hogwarts by the Thames”. “For most of the ten years I was out of politics I didn’t think it was very likely I would come back. I thoroughly enjoyed those ten years. It was a good chance to learn a lot away from politics and at times away from Scotland, so I hope I’m able to come back and offer something different.”

Alexander used his break from public life to spread his wings (lecturing at Harvard and advising Bono on international development, among other postings). I wonder, given his experience at the heart of two very distinct political periods, what differences he has noted.

“The world’s changed a lot,” he said. “When I was last Secretary of State for Scotland the eurozone was about the same size as the US economy – the US economy’s now double the size of the eurozone. We’ve seen China’s rise, Russia’s return, so we’re in a very different international situation. Domestically, in the UK, the inheritance now is a whole lot harder than it was in 1997. You normally come to office either with an economy on its knees or public services on their knees and we got both this time round. So, objectively, the challenges are tough. The iPhone hadn’t been released and social media wasn’t a thing, so politics and the character of politics has changed a lot.”

He first noticed the latter shift during the 2014 independence referendum. “I knew at the time that it was different from any politics that I had encountered before. I didn’t realise that it was, if you like, a leading indicator of how politics was going to change… the role of social media, the sense that it affirms rather than informs the echo chambers it creates and the polarisation it contributes to.”

During his time away, Scotland’s political debate continued to be dominated by independence. “In many ways I think the decade from 2014/15 to today has been profoundly damaging, not just to people’s confidence in politics but also we’ve lost a lot of opportunities in Scotland as a consequence. We’ve been talking about independence for 20 years and we don’t have anything to show for it. If you look objectively at state education, the health service and the economy in Scotland in 2006/2007, we’ve gone backwards on every measure. Part of the reason I chose to make what on the face of it might seem an irrational decision to step back into Scottish public life was a sense that as a nation we could do better and we should do better. It’s with that sense of possibility that I’ve come back into this role.”

With the 2026 Holyrood election approaching, Alexander has a dual role, as both Scotland Secretary and co-chair of Scottish Labour’s campaign. Alongside Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, he is probably the most important figure in his party’s efforts to wrest Bute House away from the SNP after 20 years.

It’s clear that he intends to use aggressively the powers now available to him to advance Labour’s prospects. Shortly after our interview he announced a direct UK government investment of £280m into 14 Scottish local authority areas, targeted at the most challenged communities. This is unlikely to be the only time in the coming months that the might of the unionist purse is deployed north of the border. “We will continue to make the kind of announcements we are making today as a UK government,” he said, which will make SNP ears prick up.

Alexander sees the role of the Scotland Office under his leadership as mainly being that of an economic actor. “One of the disappointments many commentators have felt about the Scottish Parliament over the past 25 years is that it’s too often been a social policy parliament rather than an economic policy parliament and I think we’ve got a huge responsibility as the UK government to try and drive economic growth in the coming years.” He mentioned a recently announced £340m investment in the Rosyth dockyard, and the £10bn deal with Norway to build frigates on the Clyde.

“Investments don’t happen by chance, they happen by choice,” he said. “If we hadn’t as a government – and I know this from having been trade minister [his pre-reshuffle post] – worked relentlessly with the Norwegian government, we would have lost those orders to our three main competitors – the Americans, the Germans or the French. You need a government that recognises the importance of diplomatic relations with European countries, that understands the significance of the strategic relationship with Norway, and that is able to work effectively with private partners like BAE Systems. All of those building blocks had to be in place for that £10bn order to be committed. That’s what delivers 2,000 jobs on the Clyde for the next 15 years.”

The contrast he is drawing with the SNP – which still struggles with its approach to matters of British defence and is still attempting to repair its relationship with Scotland’s private sector after years of neglect – is obvious. And with an election in the offing, Alexander isn’t pulling his punches. “My sense is that Scotland’s been let down by a government that’s not been as good as its people in recent years. The great tragedy of the Salmond and Sturgeon eras is that these were very talented politicians who chose to use their considerable political skills to keep Scotland divided rather than to bring us together.”

He has a considered critique of nationalism more generally, arguing that its proponents see “the primary relationship as being between the individual and the nation”. This is one reason for the many centralisations of power that the SNP government has instituted. This “misses out the critical sense of affinities that many of us feel, whether that’s to be a Glaswegian, to feel a Highlander, a Dundonian. I think that sense of civic pride and identity is woven into the very fabric of Scottish life and it’s a layered identity that I’m very comfortable with. I’ve always felt that there was a fundamentally reductionist quality to the nationalist view that we had to be hammered down into having a one-dimensional identity. Scotland has always been for me a mosaic and a tapestry of local identities.”

That’s as may be, but opinion polls suggest the SNP will emerge from May’s election as the largest party, giving it an astonishing third decade in power. It’s not hard to find senior figures in Scottish Labour who will blame the troubles of Keir Starmer and the government of which Alexander is a part for this state of affairs. “We inherited a badly damaged economy and we’ve begun the long, hard road to recovery,” he said. “Are we where we want to be today? No, obviously not. Is the Prime Minister or are the government satisfied? No. But that helps explain the numbers in relation to the UK government – we’re only just getting started on that journey of recovery.”

The SNP has a “high floor” of support, which is a key reason for its continued buoyancy. “There is still a base for whom independence has been the definition of their politics for a long time. For those voters, politics is often an expression of identity rather than delivery. A conventional feedback loop of democratic politics – which is that you elect somebody on a series of manifesto commitments, if they do those manifesto commitments well and you agree with them you duly re-elect them, and if they don’t do those well you throw them out – doesn’t really apply in a frame of identity not delivery. But there is a huge pool of voters who are deeply, deeply disillusioned by the failure of the SNP government over the last 20 years, and we have shown ourselves capable as Scottish Labour, time and time again in recent years, to stitch together that coalition.”

Reform are also doing well in the polls, leading psephologists and commentators to suggest Scottish Labour could end up in a two-way struggle with Nigel Farage’s party for second place. Farage, said Alexander, “could not find Scotland on a map – he’d have to plug it into his satnav. The right response to Reform, not just here in Scotland but across the UK, is to be a remedy for Reform not a replica of Reform. Reform strike me as a really bad answer to some very good questions about when change is going to come in the country.”

Ultimately, he has faith in Sarwar’s ability to build a winning coalition in Scotland next May. Sarwar “keeps defying the odds and defeating the polls” and is a “genuinely outstanding generational talent as a leader. I think he would grace Bute House as a first minister with not just the intellect and the determination but the character to bring us together after two decades when, too often, talented politicians have pulled Scotland apart.”

This leads us to what UK Labour can do for their Scottish counterparts. Sarwar delivered 37 Scottish seats in the 2024 general election, helping Starmer across the finish line. The deal was that Starmer would return the favour in 2026. Given the PM’s troubles, that doesn’t look like a deal that’s currently being kept. With Andy Burnham on manoeuvres, restive backbenchers, and suggestions that failure in Scotland, Wales and the English local elections next year could do for Starmer, UK Labour is currently more hindrance than help.

“Listen, what people want from Labour Cabinet ministers is not us turning inwards and having a conversation with ourselves but instead turning outwards and delivering the policies that people want, and engaging in the political argument that we need to be having with our opponents,” Alexander said. “I’d much rather focus on talking to the country than talking internally to the Labour Party. Our responsibility as a government is to demonstrate by our words and deeds that we are up to the challenges that the country faces. Because were this government to falter and fail, the alternative I would argue for the country is very bleak.

“Take the issue of immigration: if a centre-left party is not deemed to be able to deal with the issue, people tend not to choose a more left alternative but to choose an authoritarian right alternative. If we were to prove ourselves unable to meet the fiscal and economic challenges that the country undoubtedly faces, then it’s working people who suffer. So for me, Labour values are the foundation. We can and we must engage our colleagues in Parliament… and I regard this intake as the most talented I’ve seen. These are good people wanting to deliver for their communities and looking for evidence in the Budget that we are making Labour choices in admittedly very tough times.”

Alexander has nine months to help deliver victory in Scotland while remaining part of a fractious and unpopular UK government. It’s not just Anas Sarwar’s prospects that rely on him succeeding, but potentially those of Keir Starmer too. He may yet be given cause to regret coming back.

[Further reading: Labour vs the left]