Earlier, Scotland’s First Minister and SNP leader John Swinney wished Sarwar well in his “exciting new job” but he was critical of Burnham’s decision.<\/p>\n
Swinney said that giving Sarwar “a job for life in the House of Lords and a job in the UK government is in my view a very, very strange way of trying to rebuild the confidence of the public in politics”.<\/p>\n
Scottish Green Party co-leader Gillian Mackay called Sarwar a “chancer”, adding: “He has gone from promising to scrap the House of Lords to taking a seat in it.<\/p>\n
“He has spent years attacking the very institution he is now preparing to join. The hypocrisy is breath-taking.”<\/p>\n
Scottish Conservative deputy leader Rachael Hamilton said: “Anas Sarwar repeatedly told Scots his only focus was serving Scotland and becoming first minister.<\/p>\n
“Given he was one of the loudest voices calling for Keir Starmer to go, people will inevitably ask whether he always had one eye on a role at Westminster.<\/p>\n
“Scottish voters will rightly feel they’ve been let down by yet another Labour broken promise.”<\/p>\n
Meanwhile Scottish Lib Dem leader Alex Cole-Hamilton said he had “tremendous respect” for Sarwar’s “contribution to Scottish public life”.<\/p>\n
He added: “Being a party leader can be hard. It takes its toll on individuals and on family life, but I am glad that he is still going to be playing a role in the life of our country.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier, Scotland’s First Minister and SNP leader John Swinney wished Sarwar well in his “exciting new job” but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":706198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-706197","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\/706197","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=706197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}