What went wrong for Labour

Prof Kezia Dugdale

Associate Director of the Centre for Public Policy at the University of Glasgow. Previously she spent five years as the Director of the John Smith Centre and eight years as a Labour MSP for the Lothian Region. She led the Scottish Labour Party through three elections and the EU Referendum. 

Scottish Election 2026

Section 1: Parties and the campaign

  1. How SNP and Swinney stopped the rot (Eddie Barnes)
  2. The Scottish green wave breaks at last (Dr Jonathan Parker)
  3. What went wrong for Labour (Prof Kezia Dugdale)
  4. The Scottish Conservatives (Dr Alan Convery)
  5. Reform’s courting of Scotland’s post-industrial communities (Dr Maike Dinger and Prof Darren Lilleker)
  6. From chatbots to the ballotbox – how voters used AI to learn about the Scottish Parliament election (Dr Louise Luxton, Dr Timea Balogh, Elise Frelin & Prof Zoe Greene)
  7. Online advertising in the Scottish Parliament election (Kate Dimson and Prof Cristian Vaccari)
  8. Boring is not a virtue: Lessons from Scottish parties’ campaigns on TikTok (Prof Ana Ines Langer, Dr Lluis de Nadal)
  9. When parties travel, does negativity follow? Comparing campaigns on X (Dr Aybuke Atalay, Dr Ricardo Ribeiro Ferreira)
  10. Minding the distance: leaders in the election manifestos (Dr Michael Higgins, Prof Angela Smith)
  11. “It’s the Crisis, Stupid!” – Permacrisis and the 2026 Scottish Parliament election (Dr Paul Anderson, Dr Coree Brown Swan, Dr Judith Sijstermans
  12. ‘Whither Scottish national identity? The Reform UK challenge to an inclusive Scotland’ (Dr Murray Leith, Dr Duncan Sim)
  13. Environmental politics: flooded off the agenda? (Dr Kristen Nicolson)
  14. A disappearing crisis? Climate debate in the 2026 Scottish election campaign (Dr William Dinan)
  15. The Curious Case of the Co-operative Party and Lessons for Labour (Katharine McCrossan)

Scottish Labour’s result in the 2026 election was its worst in devolution history but it also sits forlornly in a pattern of serial decline for a party that I dedicated much of my adult life to and once led.

The backdrop of the UK political context has been unhelpful to Scottish Labour in each of the devolved elections for at least two decades. While academic analyses of both the 2007 and 2011 elections foregrounded valence issues and perceptions of the relative competence and performance as explanations for Labour’s defeats to the SNP, a strong part of that explanation concerns voter judgements on the party that best represents Scottish interests. In 2007, anger towards the UK Labour Government for its involvement in the Iraq war was palpable. In 2011, Scots who had voted Labour in the preceding year’s general election, and for a Scottish Labour Prime Minister in the form of Gordon Brown, got David Cameron instead. The message that the SNP were better placed to stand up for Scotland’s interest than a Labour Party licking its wounds helped drive the SNP to a system-defying single-party majority. Five years later, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of UK Labour alienated voters concerned about his commitment to the EU, NATO membership and the future of the Union. In 2021, the backdrop was a global pandemic and Boris Johnson as Prime Minister.

This year, the backdrop was Keir Starmer’s two year old Labour Government which had done so much to alienate its core vote with missteps on winter fuel payments and welfare reform. His personal poll ratings were in the doldrums.

This context matters not because it represents an argument for why it’s always someone other than the Scottish Labour Leader’s fault that the party continues to go backwards, but because it should have been a salutary lesson that Holyrood elections don’t happen in isolation.

The 2026 elections were never going to be fought solely on devolved issues in the round or the SNP’s domestic record in power specifically. This was Scottish Labour’s, under Anas Sarwar’s leadership, first major strategic error in the campaign. In part because no amount of telling the electorate rationally, in a textbook Higher Modern Studies way, what the election was and wasn’t about was going to stop them from voting with their gut. 

Furthermore, refusing to engage in UK policy issues denied the party the opportunity to talk about some of its not insignificant successes in office, such as enhanced workers’ rights, or a series of interest rate cuts which were slowly, yes, but surely reducing mortgage costs.

It also therefore missed the opportunity to talk up how significant extra spending on England’s NHS, breakfast clubs and additional needs support, was bringing substantial additional money to Scotland through Barnett consequentials, which the party of devolution had guaranteed in perpetuity. Likewise, there was an opportunity to argue that global insecurity demanded serious investment in defence which would mean high quality skilled jobs and apprenticeships for Scots in the mould of the Labour Party’s proud industrial past.

Focusing solely on devolved issues allowed voters to conclude that whilst they might be disappointed with the SNP’s record, they were angrier at Labour’s. 

The second major strategic error in the campaign was to focus solely on the constituency vote at the expense of any regional list strategy. 

To become the governing party, Labour calculated that they needed to win the majority of the 73 constituency seats. 38 target constituency seats were identified and supported. This spanned seats Labour would need to defend, like Dumbarton and Edinburgh Southern, through places like Dunfermline and Glasgow Southside, Nicola Sturgeon’s former seat, right up to seats with an opposition majority over 10% such as Almond Valley and Falkirk West. On the 7th of May, the party won just 3 of those 38 target seats, the two it already held plus Na h-Eileanan an Iar. The Greens won Glasgow Southside, Almond Valley is now the second safest SNP seat in the country and Labour came 3rd behind Reform in Falkirk West.

Meanwhile, the failure to make the case for List votes alongside this key seat constituency strategy has cost Labour heavily. Ballot Box Scotland placed Labour 8th, or in the runner-up position, in both the Central and Lothians West and the South of Scotland regions. Had the party done a fraction better on the list vote it would have been a clear second ahead of Reform in seat numbers. Furthermore, for the first time in devolution history Labour has no regional representation in the Highlands and Islands and only one in the North East, who is Dundee based.

So what did Anas Sarwar think he had that his predecessors didn’t? One stand out answer is money. To offer a contrast, in 2016 the Scottish Labour Party raised £100k and spent £200k on the Holyrood campaign. This year, Scottish Labour reported £1million in donations and is widely expected to have spent the full £1.5million campaign limit. That’s staffing, polling and focus group resources most campaigns can only dream of. That its MSP to Pound ratio is so poor begs much deeper and fundamental questions for the party.