Perhaps Anas Sarwar should face an Andy Burnham-style challenge - Vladimir McTavish
All week, following UK Labour’s “wipe out” in the English elections, MPs have been lining up to demand that Keir Starmer has to go. The media have undoubtedly fuelled this story as it fills air time and column inches.
Admittedly their vote imploded across the UK, but in England it did so in unimportant mid-term local council elections. Unlike Scotland and Wales, where their annihilation took place in a proper vote for the national parliament. An event that matters.
Labour didn’t do anything like as badly in councils down south as they did in the Scottish and Welsh elections. In Wales, party leader Elunid Morgan, who had lost her seat in the Senedd, has done the decent thing and resigned.
And while Starmer should probably go too, why have there been so few calls for the party’s Scottish leader Anas Sarwar to quit? Aside from the obvious answer that not enough people give a toss. But it is amazing that he can lose two national elections on the trot and still expect to stay in the job.
He cites his commitment to the NHS as a strength. And as a qualified dentist, he had extensive experience in the health service. Even the name Anas Sarwar sounds like some Latin medical term for a painful condition affecting the posterior.
The man once nicknamed “The Empty Suit” has always claimed defeat to be somebody else’s fault. In 2021, Jeremy Corbyn and Richard Leonard were supposedly to blame for the party’s poor showing. This time around, it’s all Keir Starmer’s fault. When will he realise it’s him who actually lost?
What could save his skin is the paucity of other options. Down south Starmer faces potential challenges from Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham and health secretary Wes Streeting has already come out flighting.
While Streeting would be more suited to leading the Tory party, these three are all serious big hitters. Although any time anyone uses to word “hitter” to describe Wes Streeting they’ve been talking in Cockney rhyming slang.
Google Labour MSPs up here and you’ll find such household names as Donald McKinnon, Katherine Sangster and Dame Jackie Baillie.
God help us all if she ended up leader. The last thing we need is to give her any reason to be more smug. She was self-satisfied before the damehood. Party leadership would make her want to eat herself.
Does Sarwar really think he can save Scottish Labour? Or should they opt for the pantomime dame? In England, they could even follow the Greens by choosing co-leaders. Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting in a pantomime horse. With two rear ends.
Seriously, though, Scotland will not benefit from an opposition dominated by Malcolm Offord and Reform UK’s politics of hate. The new SNP government needs to be kept honest by voices of decent Scottish values.
There are a plethora of these among the Greens, the Lib Dems and even the odd Conservative. Admittedly, a very odd Tory indeed. In Labour’s ranks such people as Michael Marra, Monica Lennon and Pauline McNeil represent those values.
Hopefully one of them can step up to the plate and lead the opposition, rather than leaving the floor to Offord and his vile crew of pantomime villains.