Keir Starmer’s chances of becoming the UK’s next prime minister seem to be improving by the day. From a huge win in the Rutherglen by-election to a ‘buoyant’ atmosphere at Labour’s party conference in Liverpool, the party of the opposition is on the up.
The Tories and the SNP, meanwhile, continue to be distracted by chaotic messaging and party infighting. But could a Labour government pull together the fractured state that is Great Britain in a way the Tories haven’t been able to? Possibly – but it would mean repairing relationships within their own party first.
In the politics of the Union, Welsh and Scottish Labour have been at loggerheads for quite a while – and reports suggest this has Starmer’s office pretty worried. Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford regularly talks of a ‘union of four territories’, the importance of sovereignty and Scotland having the right to decide its own future.
Drakeford is speaking for a wide constituency in Welsh Labour when he speaks in such tones, but it is one which irritates large elements in the Scottish party. One Scottish Labour party insider said:
When Drakeford goes down this line, the Scottish party gets on the phone and complains to Starmer’s office… The Scottish party have much more clout with the British party than Welsh Labour. This is about the electoral importance of Scotland.
It does nothing for the Welsh group’s relations with Scottish Labour (one source said they ‘despair’ at their Scottish counterparts) or Starmer. ‘We are fed up being told off, and being told to cling onto what is in effect a Tory interpretation of the constitution,’ said a Welsh Labour figure, ‘which does not help Labour in Wales, or elsewhere.’
Wales is a sovereign nation. The UK has to be a union of consent, not a union of being told you have to belong to it… Our tanks are firmly parked on the lawn of national identity, culture and autonomy. It is part of who we are, not about who we are against.
Scottish Labour doesn’t see it this way. One senior figure in Scottish Labour says that many in the party believe it has to stop ‘appeasing the SNP’, to avoid the ‘slippery slope’ of giving greater powers to Scottish parliament – which never appears to quite satisfy the nationalists anyway. Scottish Labour has to stop operating ‘on the same ground as the separatists and instead emphasise what unites us in Scotland and the UK’.
Parts of Scottish Labour believe that it simply ‘embraces a hugely unimaginative, conservative take on the UK. The party has to stop looking like it is standing up for Britain in Scotland – and instead stand up for Scotland in Britain.’
Given the deep divisions that conversations about the splitting up of the UK create, the constitution is understandably a sensitive topic for Labour – and the bickering between the Welsh and Scottish parties isn’t making things easier for Starmer. A source close to the UK leader’s office reflected that ‘maybe Scottish and Welsh Labour could stick to what they are meant to do: the politics of devolution’.
An opportunity has opened up for Labour after years of inadequate governing by both the Conservatives in Westminster and the SNP in Holyrood. But seizing that opportunity – holding together that diverse Labour coalition across the different nations of England, Scotland and Wales – is never going to be easy. If Labour wins the 2024 general election, these problems won’t go away. Instead, they will only grow more acute as the party’s warring factions continue to squabble over where their party stands on the constitution.
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