I have a great friend – we go back nearly four decades – who is in the unusual position of being a Scotsman who has lived in England for the last 30 years; making a living writing almost entirely about English football.
As an avid football fan living in Scotland and completely immersed in the game here, I wanted to know how often the subject of Scottish football came up in conversation with his journalist colleagues and the wider England football community.
“Hardly ever,” he said, “in truth, it’s not even on their radar.”
Precedence in football as in politics
I thought about that wee exchange yesterday when watching Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the continuing fall-out of the Mandelson/Epstein scandal.
Actually, let’s take a step back. There is no ‘Scottish Labour’. Not really. Labour in Scotland, like any unionist party with representation in this country, is ultimately controlled by London. The words of outgoing Labour leader Johann Lamont in the aftermath of the 2014 referendum – she described Scottish Labour as a “branch office” – are as true now as they were then. Indeed, in an age of a more assertive, muscular unionism when their desire to roll back devolution has become an open secret, maybe even more so.
Are we even on the radar?
To go back to my football journalist friend, are we even on their radar? A tweet from Bella Caledonia yesterday teatime neatly answered that question.
“It’s not yet five o’ clock”, they wrote, “and you can already feel the brief interest in Scottish politics from the London media fading”.
I suspect Sarwar knows this. Successive opposition leaders in Holyrood, from Ruth Davidson to Douglas Ross and now Sarwar – have always come up against this glass ceiling. Policy – or at least the important stuff – being ultimately decided by ‘head office’ is the structural problem that has always held back any party leader in Scotland that isn’t the SNP boss – and even they ultimately don’t control policy areas like immigration European membership that could ultimately prove transformative.
No free pass
But that doesn’t give Scotland’s Labour leader a free pass. As a journalist perceptively pointed out yesterday, Sarwar’s gamble can only pay off if there’s an obvious replacement for Starmer, and if the prime minister is actually listening to his branch manager. There isn’t, and he never has. Once we understand this, we can’t help but see Sarwar’s demands as performative. By calling for something that probably isn’t going to happen – at least until Labour get horsed in the council elections in May – and Labour politicians need Starmer still in office so that they can blame him for the inevitable calamity. Sarwar looked desperate yesterday, and by saying what he did, he underlined his own irrelevance.
So why do it now?
There’s no doubt that his party and campaign is suffering collateral damage in the ongoing Starmer/Mandelson/McSweeny clusterbouroch, but the Holyrood campaign was going badly even before the scandal. It may be that this was less to do with Starmer and more to do with reframing his party, rather than the SNP, as the ‘real’ party of Scotland. He used the phrase “My country, Scotland” several times yesterday and the presence of the saltire was clearly deliberate.
But, boy, did it backfire! Social media has been awash with Labour MPs tweeting their support for Starmer. It looks very much like the cabinet is united too. Whether they believe it or not is another question, but they see no value in a rammy – at least, not now.
Who goes first?
And I suppose there’s an irony here. Starmer rightly stands accused of a dreadful lack of judgement when appointing a twice sacked Labour politician to the biggest diplomatic position in the western world in the knowledge that he had been close friends with a convicted paedophile and sex trafficker. Yet, yesterday, Holyrood’s Labour leader called for his boss’s head without any idea if he had the support of a single one of his colleagues and seemingly without any plan for who or what comes next. And, by the way, vote for me as Scotland’s First Minister
Starmer is toast – probably in May and the reasons for this likelihood don’t include an Anas Sarwar press conference. But the true irony is, that Anas Sarwar’s ‘Hail Mary’ of a gamble probably means that he, not his boss, will walk first.
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