What does today’s SNP leadership election mean for Scottish Labour?

Unionist politicians are warming up for what they hope will be one of the biggest opportunities of the past two decades to undermine the independence cause. Whoever wins the SNP leadership contest today is taking over a party that doesn’t know its own kind any more – and a government that’s struggling to blame its record entirely on Westminster. 

That’s one of the reasons Anas Sarwar has called for a snap Holyrood election. The Scottish Labour leader today argued that the new First Minister would have to seek their own mandate, saying:

This is an SNP that screams about mandates: let’s be honest, the next SNP First Minister will not have the mandate. They’ll have Nicola Sturgeon’s record; they won’t have Nicola Sturgeon’s mandate – a mandate given to her in a pandemic election when she asked people to support her for five years to get her through the pandemic and lead us to a national recovery.

Sarwar pointed out that Sturgeon herself had made a great deal of fuss about other leaders, including Rishi Sunak, taking over governments without their own election mandate. Why is this attitude not applied to the SNP? 

It might be easier for Humza Yousaf – the continuity candidate in this battle – to argue that he is following what the Scottish people voted for in the May 2021 elections. Kate Forbes less so, given she has made clear in this contest not only that she would dispense with a number of key policies, but also that she doesn’t think her party has performed very well in government. She is also manifestly of a different political tradition to Yousaf. 

But the discomfort that questions about mandates cause the SNP isn’t the only reason Sarwar is raising the question of a new election. It is also to signal where Scottish Labour is now. He argued today that ‘we used to fear elections, and now we relish elections’. Sarwar took over a Scottish Labour party that was demoralised and confused. Now it is keen not just to be the second biggest party in Scotland, but a potential government.

When I interviewed Sarwar during the last Holyrood elections, he said his plan for the party was ‘survival, relevance, credible opposition, credible alternative’ and that he planned to use the next five years to realise that fourth stage in the mission. Will Sturgeon’s resignation help speed up this process?

And the leader of the Scottish Labour party has been working much more closely with Sir Keir Starmer as they plan to revive the Scottish party’s fortunes in its Westminster seats. Key to that campaign will be turning back the soft unionist voters who have spent the past decade seeing the SNP as a ‘stronger voice for Scotland’ in Westminster. It won’t be enough to simply frighten them about the prospect of the SNP going for another independence referendum. Painting the party as being in a huge internal, anti-democratic mess is Sarwar’s attempt to peel those voters off – and he clearly believes his own party has got into sufficient political fitness to appeal again.