To Liverpool, where politicians and delegates are gathering for Labour’s annual party conference. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has just finished his speech on the main stage, where he lead out his vision for his party with just eight months to go until next year’s Holyrood elections. But it was a non-Labour politician that dominated Sarwar’s discussion today, as Reform UK support in Scotland continues to surge. Slamming Nigel Farage as a ‘pathetic and poisonous little man’, the Scottish Labour leader fumed:
You are a pathetic and poisonous little man that doesn’t care about Scotland, doesn’t understand Scotland, and that’s why Scotland will utterly reject you. All Reform can do is create noise that risks keeping the failing SNP in power.
Nodding to the recent Hamilton by-election in which Labour scraped a victory, Sarwar went on:
It was a good preview of the election. The gutter politics and bile of Reform; the cheap and cynical politics of the SNP. While we as Scottish Labour were relentlessly focused on the issues that matter. In Hamilton, Reform attempted to set community against community, and even cast doubt on my identity. The truth is Farage didn’t even know where Hamilton was – he probably thought it was a stage show in the West End.
The gloves are coming off!
But while Sarwar has decided to talk a tough game, no amount of potshots will distract from some particularly glib polling that suggests that his party could take as little as 17 per cent of the constituency vote in next year’s Scottish parliament elections – which would be less than Reform UK. The Norstat poll for the Sunday Times also suggests that Reform and Labour would be tied at 18 per cent on the regional list vote. More than that, the survey found that almost four in ten Scots strongly support mass detention and deportations of those who arrive in the UK illegally, while just over a third believe immigration to Scotland is currently ‘much too high’. The findings don’t give much weighting to Sarwar’s conclusion that Scotland will, er, ‘reject’ Farage next year. How very interesting…
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