According to his critics, and even some of his supporters, May 7, 2026 will be judgement day for Keir Starmer. It is then that Scottish and Welsh voters elect their new devolved governments, and English voters choose local ones.
Starmer has been put on notice that loss in these contests will lead to extreme pressure for a change in leadership. He will have been PM for just under two years by then – if he hasn’t got things straight by that point, he isn’t going to, and should make way.
Easier said than done, of course, given Labour’s tortuous rules for replacing the top dog. But politics sometimes carries an irresistible momentum, and if the seemingly relentless errors and bad news continue and culminate in electoral disaster across the UK, Starmer may find the tsunami of internal opposition impossible to hold back.
The signs at the moment are far from promising. Labour looks likely to lose Wales after decades of dominance, with Plaid and Reform scrapping it out for first place. Reform will almost certainly continue its successful assault on English councils. And the polls suggest the SNP will cling on in Scotland, taking it into a third consecutive decade in power, with Labour and Reform competing for second. Such a triple whammy wouldn’t just represent defeat, nor could it be written off as standard mid-term blues – it would be abject, largely self-inflicted humiliation.
In this light – panic stations, effectively – the decision to replace Ian Murray as Scottish Secretary with Douglas Alexander is more understandable. Murray deserves all the sympathy he has received over his sacking from the Cabinet – he had fulfilled the role with his customary verve and set in place a series of sensible goals for his tenure. His team improved relations with the SNP administration in Edinburgh after the rocky Conservative years. He was well-liked and was enjoying the job.
But needs must. Alexander is one of the sharpest and most versatile tools in the Labour box – a veteran and scholar of campaign management, a smart shaper of political messaging, and an eloquent frontman for the cause both on the stump and in the media. He was quickly used by the London leadership to defend the government on TV and radio over the Peter Mandelson fallout and its consequences.
Alexander now has two roles that combine neatly, in that he is running the Scotland Office and is also co-chair of Scottish Labour’s Holyrood campaign. He will be wholly focused on matters north of the border, which is what the challenge requires. His previous job as trade minister may have divided his attentions too much.
It’s also believed that Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar wanted Alexander in the job, as he fights to close the gap on John Swinney’s SNP. Labour is, oddly, doing better in Scottish by-elections that it is in the polls, which gives Sarwar confidence that the outcome in May could prove the doubters wrong. But nothing can be taken for granted. For example, it is not yet clear where Reform’s ceiling is, and how much support it might ultimately draw from erstwhile Labour supporters.
You can have all the clever strategy in the world, of course, and still be a victim of events. Much of what will determine the outcome next May is out of Sarwar’s control. Starmer’s cratering personal popularity, and the sense that his government lacks control or any real project, is affecting Scots as much as it is voters throughout the rest of the UK. It undermines confidence that a change in Bute House would necessarily improve matters, regardless of the SNP’s anaemic performance in office.
It is also possible that far-right marches and protests in England, with union and St George’s flags asserting a newly confident and abrasive English identity, could push some Scots back towards the Nats as a statement of national difference.
That is where Swinney is concentrating his efforts, asserting that Scotland is a different type of country, welcoming to immigrants and hostile to right-wing rabble-rousing. The rise of Reform in Scotland acts as a counter to that view, but there may be something in it, at least enough to matter.
Sarwar risks being left looking like part of a UK establishment that is out of sync with the times. He must regularly defend the British government, even as it sinks further below the waterline. He has tied himself closely to Starmer as some sort of cross-border dream team, which suddenly doesn’t look such a clever idea. What, realistically, is the UK government going to deliver within the next nine months that will change the terms of debate and bring voters scurrying back? If a golden bullet exists, it had better be fired soon.
New parties on the right and left seem to have the momentum, energy and profile to disrupt Labour’s plan for a return to power in Scotland. Perhaps there’s a silent majority out there that hasn’t spoken yet, and will adhere to the mainstream when the moment comes; perhaps not. Perhaps, as Sarwar argues, Scottish voters aren’t yet thinking about politics through the prism of a Holyrood election, and when they start doing so will opt to jettison the SNP in favour of Labour. Again, though, perhaps not.
It’s a bad hand, and with Westminster in such turmoil, it increasingly looks like Scottish Labour is on its own. This was not how things were supposed to be.
[See also: Combustible Britain]
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