Scottish Labour’s genuine recovery this year came from a deliberate strategic bet that voters wanted competence over constitutional debate. The bet paid off, at least this time.
Scottish Labour’s recovery this election cycle, growing from the genuinely marginal Holyrood presence the party has held for most of the past decade into a considerably more competitive position, deserves closer analysis than the relatively brief attention it has received amid all the coverage focused more heavily on the SNP’s fractional majority shortfall and Reform’s unprecedented breakthrough. Anas Sarwar built this entire campaign around a deliberate, explicit strategic bet: refuse to engage directly with the independence question at all, and instead compete almost entirely on public service delivery, NHS waiting times, school standards, the practical, everyday concerns of governance rather than Scotland’s long-running constitutional argument.
That bet, on the available evidence from this election’s results, appears to have paid off genuinely well, at least by the specific measure of Scottish Labour’s own recovery relative to its recent, genuinely dismal Holyrood performances. The party’s recent success in the 2024 Westminster election, winning considerably more Scottish seats than it had managed in any election since the late nineties, gave Sarwar real evidence that this same delivery-focused, constitution-avoiding strategy could translate to Holyrood specifically, and this year’s result, while not restoring Scottish Labour to anything like its historic pre-2015 dominance, represents a genuine, meaningful improvement worth taking seriously as a validated strategic approach rather than simply a one-off fluke.
I want to push, though, on a question I do not think has received quite enough serious attention amid the general framing of Sarwar’s strategy as a straightforward success: whether deliberately refusing to engage with the actual constitutional question, rather than making a positive, affirmative case for the union specifically, represents a genuinely sustainable long-term approach, or simply a useful short-term tactic that works precisely because it avoids litigating a fight Labour currently has little confidence it can actually win outright on its own specific merits.
There is a meaningful difference between winning votes by successfully avoiding a difficult question and winning votes by successfully answering it, and I think Scottish Labour’s current position sits considerably closer to the former than the latter. That distinction matters enormously for how durable this recovery actually proves to be, because a strategy built around simply not discussing independence works only for as long as the broader political environment allows a party to keep avoiding the topic, a luck of timing that cannot realistically hold indefinitely in a political landscape where Swinney has now explicitly signalled his intention to keep pushing the constitutional question directly, regardless of whether his unionist opponents would prefer to change the subject.
I think nationalists, reading this election’s result purely through the lens of the pro-independence bloc’s record parliamentary strength, may be underestimating what Sarwar’s specific strategic success actually represents: genuine evidence that a meaningful, currently growing bloc of Scottish voters can be persuaded to set the constitutional question aside entirely when a competing party offers a genuinely credible alternative focused on practical governance, a persuadable bloc that both sides of the independence debate will presumably keep actively competing for as this parliamentary term unfolds.
Whether Sarwar can actually sustain this specific strategy over a full parliamentary term, especially if Swinney succeeds in making the coming years genuinely, unavoidably dominated by fresh constitutional debate, is, I think, the single most interesting open question hanging over Scottish Labour’s future position. A strategy of studied constitutional avoidance becomes considerably harder to maintain once the opposing side has both the numbers and the explicit intent to force the exact conversation you have spent an entire campaign successfully sidestepping.
I intend to watch closely how Sarwar actually navigates this tension over the coming months, since I suspect his specific answer, or lack of one, will tell us a great deal about whether this year’s recovery represents the genuine beginning of a durable new phase for Scottish Labour, or simply a well-timed tactical success that happened to land in exactly the right electoral moment.
It is also worth noting, briefly, that Sarwar’s strategy carries genuine risk in the opposite direction as well, a risk I have not seen discussed nearly as often as the more obvious question of constitutional sustainability. A Labour party that has spent an entire cycle deliberately avoiding the independence question risks being caught genuinely flat-footed, without a clearly developed, positively affirmative case for the union ready to deploy, if Westminster and Holyrood do end up on the kind of direct constitutional collision course I discussed in an earlier entry this week. Avoidance works as a strategy only until avoidance is no longer actually available as an option.
I think that specific vulnerability, a party whose current success rests partly on a question it has not yet had to properly answer, is worth watching just as closely as the more commonly discussed question of whether Sarwar’s delivery-focused platform can actually produce real, visible improvements on health and housing quickly enough to sustain the goodwill this election’s result has bought him.
I think, on balance, this election has genuinely earned Sarwar and Scottish Labour real credit for a strategy that could easily have failed, and I do not want the caveats raised in this entry to obscure that underlying accomplishment. But real credit for a successful tactic is not the same thing as certainty about that tactic’s long-term durability, and I intend to hold both of those assessments simultaneously as this parliamentary term unfolds.
More from this author at Morag Sinclair, prat.uk.