With just 15 months to go until crucial devolved elections in Scotland, 2025 will be a momentous year in Scottish politics. Few leaders understand this better than Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, who hopes he will be the man to end two decades of SNP dominance come May 2026.
Yet Scottish Labour has fallen down in the polls in recent months and Sarwar needs to figure out how to make his party stand out. It was therefore little surprise that he began 2025 by pledging to use the year to set out how he and his party would chart a ‘new direction’ for Scotland. ‘In each area of responsibility for the Scottish government,’ Sarwar told a gathering of supporters on 6 January, ‘we will demonstrate the consequences of [the SNP’s] incompetence and set out what a Scottish Labour government would do differently’.
Just five weeks on from that pledge, however, and Sarwar is already proving it is easier said than done. Far from offering a ‘new direction’, on Monday Sarwar instead committed his party to entrenching all of Scotland’s existing universal benefits – including government-funded university tuition for Scottish students and government-funded prescriptions. Other apparently untouchable measures include the so-called baby box – a circa £160 giveaway to new parents – and government-funded bus passes for pensioners and young people. These ‘real successes of devolution’, as Sarwar termed them, ‘are important policies that an incoming Scottish Labour government will maintain’.
Sarwar’s supporters justify this apparent volte face by arguing that it removes a crucial SNP attack line, allowing Scottish Labour instead to focus on the nationalists’ poor record in government. At the same time, they argue that by firmly clarifying the party’s stance on these totemic ‘entitlements’ now, it will allow Sarwar and other frontbenchers to articulate the case for public sector reform from a position of strength, with announcements in this area expected at the party’s annual conference in Glasgow next week.
Yet the issues with this support for the status quo are manifest. Most obviously, it undermines Sarwar’s pledge to set a ‘new direction’, instead suggesting Scotland will be taken to the same destination, albeit by a more amiable driver. Certainly, Sarwar’s announcement is all the more surprising given he and his top team had previously shown appetite to grasp the thistle of universal benefit reform. Speaking as he set his ‘new direction’ for Scotland in January, Sarwar himself indicated he believed that more public spending alone would not help tackle child poverty, while Scottish Labour’s finance spokesperson Michael Marra previously suggested his party would offer a ‘new formula’ on higher education funding.
That one-time appetite for change is spurred by the very real issue of affordability of existing policies. Much of Scotland’s more extravagant state subsidy is funded by the Barnett Formula, but even this generous arrangement is straining under the spending demands of the Scottish government. Scotland’s universities – a significant asset that relies on government grants in lieu of tuition fees from Scottish students – have been hollowed out under a funding settlement that has not meaningfully increased since 2013. Devolved public services such as the NHS are also struggling with overgenerous pay settlements from the SNP, which have eaten up much of the £5 billion windfall the Scottish government received after the October budget.
Most fundamentally, committing to maintain the status quo makes Sarwar and Scottish Labour an ideological enigma.
This unsustainable situation is likely to get worse not better. The SNP recently pledged to mitigate the two-child benefit cap by 2026, an uncosted commitment that could run into the hundreds of millions of pounds and is supported by Scottish Labour. Sarwar has prudently said his party will not further the divergence in income tax rates between Scotland and the rest of the UK, but it is difficult to marry that promise with his support for the status quo.
Finances aside, there is also a very real question about whether such universal benefits are effective. Between 2021/22 and 2022/23, the number of Scottish students studying at Scottish universities plummeted by almost 10,000 as institutions turned to higher-paying applicants from the rest of the UK and abroad to fill financial blackholes. Meanwhile, despite generous state-funded benefits, there has been slow progress on tackling systemic issues such as child poverty throughout the devolution era, with rates actually increasing since 2013.
Perhaps most fundamentally, committing to maintain the status quo makes Sarwar and Scottish Labour an ideological enigma. After all, it makes sense for a Scottish nationalist party to take money from middle-class taxpayers in England and use it to subsidise middle-class taxpayers in Scotland. But backing a policy of redistribution based on nationality rather than need is a curious position for a social democrat to find themselves in.
Of course, with 15 months to go until the devolved election, there is plenty of time for Sarwar to better articulate what will be new about the direction he wants to take Scotland. But at least for now it seems clear that certain policies are untouchable in Scotland, regardless of who is in charge.
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