Senior figures in Scottish Labour have said Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation has opened an unexpected opportunity for the party to regain ground north of the border. Party members and advisers said the decision by the first minister to stand down had handed them the perfect opportunity to win an outright majority at the next general election. Labour won just one Scottish seat at the last election, but some members now think the party could take as many as 25 next time – a result that could prove crucial in determining the balance of power in Westminster. Jim Murphy, the former leader of Scottish Labour, said: “There is a real opportunity for the Scottish Labour party here, but they have to be adept enough to take it.
“Anas Sarwar [the Scottish Labour leader] will be in the unusual position at the next election of being both the most well-known leader and being the insurgent.” Blair McDougall, the political strategist who ran the 2014 campaign against independence, said: “This is very good news for Labour. It means the SNP is likely to start looking less relevant, which would change the frame of the next election from ‘What do you think about independence?’ to ‘Who do you want to run the UK government?’” Sturgeon has dominated the Scottish political scene as party leader and first minister, enjoying a historically high approval rating of +50 during the Covid crisis.
Labour strategists believe her own popularity was enough to attract voters who otherwise were unsure about independence and unhappy about the state of Scotland’s public services. “They [the SNP] have been held up by people voting for Nicola personally for a long time,” said one Labour source. “But they don’t have a compelling policy platform, and now they don’t have a compelling leader, so what do they have?” Labour has been climbing steadily in the Scottish polls for the past 18 months, from about 20% for much of 2021 to about 30% now. As a result, the party had been targeting between 12 and 15 seats at the next election, according to party officials. But now Labour’s horizons are expanding. “This puts 14, 15, 16 seats up for grabs,” said one candidate. A Scottish business leader with links to the party was even more bullish. “It should now be 15+, and maybe as high as 25,” they said. Labour is particularly happy that the SNP is heading into a long leadership campaign where party members will want to hear about independence and the constitution. With support for independence dropping among the wider electorate, Labour thinks this will put off many swing voters. Pollsters, however, say Labour’s confidence may be premature. “It might be that the SNP descends into a fractious debate about the independence referendum and as a result voters get turned off,” said John Curtice, the polling expert and professor of politics at Strathclyde University. “But maybe somewhere among that bunch of unknowns there is a leader who can do what Sturgeon said they need to do: stop talking about process and start making a substantive case for independence in a post-Brexit environment. If that happens, it might all come back together for them again.”