{"id":577468,"date":"2026-05-11T04:25:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T04:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/577468\/"},"modified":"2026-05-11T04:25:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T04:25:13","slug":"what-went-wrong-for-scottish-labour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/577468\/","title":{"rendered":"What went wrong for Scottish Labour?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sarwar led the discussion but there were contributions from the two figures who ran the election campaign – Scottish Secretary Douglas Alexander and the deputy leader in Scotland, Dame Jackie Baillie.<\/p>\n

One person present described the mood as “defensive”.<\/p>\n

Earlier in the day, speaking on BBC Scotland’s The Sunday Show<\/a>, Sarwar suggested the party’s strategy wasn’t entirely to blame for the result.<\/p>\n

He put it down to “a big national wave, and a general vibe that we couldn’t change”.<\/p>\n

That’s a polite way of directing at least some of the blame towards Sir Keir Starmer, a man Sarwar maintains should resign from this role.<\/p>\n

But don’t Scottish Labour have to take some of the blame themselves?<\/p>\n

Their approach to the campaign had its roots in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election<\/a> last year.<\/p>\n

Then, the party scored a surprising victory, narrowly defeating both the SNP and Reform UK.<\/p>\n

They hoped to recreate that victory in more than 30 constituencies across the central belt, the sort of seats that were historically Labour but have swung towards the SNP in recent years.<\/p>\n

But that by-election win in 2025 was resource heavy. Activists pounded the streets in huge numbers. Members from across the nations came to knock doors.<\/p>\n

And it appears that the party simply wasn’t able to replicate that effort in dozens of seats simultaneously, especially while Labour fought elections elsewhere in the UK.<\/p>\n

One senior party figure told me it was naively optimistic to think that this could be replicated across so many seats.<\/p>\n

And the same person said Sarwar’s claims that he could become first minister is making it difficult to “style it out” after such bad results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sarwar led the discussion but there were contributions from the two figures who ran the election campaign –…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":577469,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-577468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=577468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577468\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/577469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=577468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=577468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=577468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}