How Scottish Starmerites are wooing urban voters

Will Scotland’s central belt turn red? The last eighteen months of SNP chaos, from police probes to iPad scandals, coupled with an intense distrust of the Westminster government post-pandemic have left many Scottish voters politically homeless. Sir Keir Starmer is predicted a historic win and Labour is hoping Scotland will help the party achieve it.

Yet this general election lacks exciting, eye-catching leaders. And it’s certainly not Starmer’s personality that is compelling Scotland’s voters to switch sides. Spend a day out in Glasgow and the criticism of the party’s leader comes across. From his flip flopping over Gaza to his staid election debate performances, the Labour leader does not cut a popular figure. ‘I’m not absolutely convinced,’ says one sceptical constituent from his doorway.

Instead, it’s his dispatches of youthful, energetic Scottish Starmerites who are impressing on the doorsteps. ‘I don’t expect perfection, I just want improvement,’ one voter told Graeme Downie, Labour’s candidate for Dunfermline and Dollar, when he met him on the election trail. ‘It’s a very simple way to put it,’ Downie told me afterwards, when we spoke about how his campaign was going. ‘Voters just want to know that the government is on their side and can deliver for them. I think that’s what the Labour party is really doing fantastically – and has done under both Keir Starmer and the leadership in Scotland.’

Glasgow is known for being, at almost any given time, the rainiest place in the UK – but the sun was out when I joined Gordon McKee, Labour’s Glasgow South candidate on a walk-about. A political adviser to Ian Murray (Scottish Labour’s only MP until recently), McKee studied at Glasgow University before becoming a software engineer. Involved in the Labour party at the same time, he acknowledged it was a ‘very difficult decade’ for the official opposition. ‘The formative political memory for me was in 2015 when I saw the SNP win all those seats, including Glasgow, with enormous majorities,’ he told me. ‘I thought at that moment it would be kind of unassailable, that it would be a long, long time before we were able to rebuild.’ 

In 2014, 53 per cent of Glasgow voted to become independent. Currently, Glasgow is completely SNP-held – from councillor level to constituency MSP to Westminster MP. As Katy Balls recently wrote in The Spectator, reclaiming Scotland’s largest city is ‘Labour’s biggest test’. But the dream to take back Glasgow is becoming a very real possibility. On Wednesday last week a new Ipsos poll suggested that all six constituencies in Scotland’s largest city could turn red. ‘To be in the position where we’re now just nine years later, where we’ve got a chance of winning back our heartland of Glasgow and Lanarkshire is incredible,’ McKee told me spiritedly. ‘It’s testament to the work that Anas has done and transformed the Scottish Labour party and Keir has done in transforming the UK party.’ 

McKee’s biggest rival is SNP incumbent Stewart McDonald, whose party insists that only the Scottish nationalists have Scotland’s best interests at heart. Does UK Labour really care about life north of the border? ‘I think to be fair to Keir, he deserves a lot of credit,’ McKee said. ‘Right from the beginning, when he took over as leader, he was always clear that the path to Downing Street ran through Scotland.’ Certainly, some in the party view Scotland’s central belt as being the ‘first red wall to fall’ after it turned yellow in 2015. Just last October, the Scottish party’s deputy leader Dame Jackie Baillie was left almost speechless on live TV when she saw the scale of Labour’s victory in the Rutherglen by-election. ‘Seismic,’ she mouthed. ‘Stonking.’

Yet there are nerves. ‘Basically in England, we’re going to win these seats by enormous margins,’ explains McKee, ‘But I think it is still competitive here in Scotland.’ And MRP polls aren’t much use either, having been criticised for inaccurate predictions that have seen the SNP projected to come away with anything between 8 and 37 seats on 5 July. Others have denied the Scottish Conservatives any seats while others suggested Liberal Democrat strongholds could turn yellow. 

In Glasgow South West, Dr Zubir Ahmed is hoping to push out the SNP incumbent, Chris Stephens. Ahmed is a 42-year-old transplant surgeon who also has a PhD and an MBA under his belt. Why does he want to leave the world of medical academia to stand now? ‘It’s just an extension of public service really,’ Ahmed tells me. ‘I thought, with my now 20-year experience of health services, of public services, I would hope to bring a fresh perspective as to how we can make decisions to secure public services for the rest of this century. It’s only the Labour party that I can see is choosing candidates that match that ambition and those missions around healthcare.’ 

Ahmed is clear he doesn’t support independence – but what does he say to pro-indy voters on the doorsteps? ‘The independence question actually is not a difficult one because it hardly ever comes up,’ Ahmed says, echoing a sentiment expressed by many of his Labour colleagues. ‘When it does it’s through the lens of “I’m sick of Westminster”. And I say to them quite simply: I’m sorry you’ve been let down by the Tory government – and I’m even more sorry that for a while you did not have an alternative to vote for in a viable Labour party.’ (None of Starmer’s Scottish bunch have much love for Jeremy Corbyn.) He continues: ‘We were not a government in waiting and I think that’s why people turned to independence as a release mechanism from a Tory party that was looking inward.’ Paul Sweeney, a regional MSP for Glasgow, agrees: ‘People are so exhausted with the status quo – they just want a change. And it’s a bit of a cliche, repeating the mantra, but whilst that might seem a bit superficial, it’s genuinely a vibe on the doors.’ 

Sweeney, who himself was an MP for Glasgow North East from 2017 to 2019, went on: ‘I think politics is local for people and the state of Glasgow is depressing them. They associate that with SNP mismanagement, with arrogance and a kind of complacency.’ In a nod to Scotland’s next big election, only two years away, the Glasgow MSP adds: ‘A lot of people were pro-independence because they felt it was a way to achieve some sort of material improvement in society in the context of austerity at the time. If Labour can demonstrate that we can achieve big improvements in the next couple of years that might change the dynamic of the 2026 election. That’s where we’ve got one eye on – it’s a couple of chess moves for us. This is very much about demonstrating to Scots that Labour can build a UK that we feel a stake in.’ It’s not the only constitutional issue Labour is focused on. The party is still listening to its former leader Gordon Brown, an advocate of electoral reform, with party politicians already considering ‘how we change the electoral system in the House of Commons’. 

And on the subject of ex-prime ministers: while all three candidates count both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as political inspirations, they are hesitant to define their own politics by the philosophies of the former party leaders – praising their character instead. ‘Gordon Brown in particular is someone I admire hugely,’ McKee says. ‘He strikes me as the sort of archetypal, committed, hardworking, decent person that is in politics for all the right reasons. And I know Keir has worked closely with Gordon and Tony to learn why they were successful.’ 

But is Labour’s message – that this is a new party of pragmatism – cutting through? Sweeney says that more voters are ‘SNP out’ than anti-Tory and tactical voting will help central belt candidates representing more affluent areas. ‘If you look at Glasgow’s skyline, how many cranes do you see?’ a constituent said to his candidate. ‘One. Cranes are a sign of a city’s economic growth. There used to be many more, double figures. Not anymore. That’s why I want the SNP gone.’

Scottish Labour is quietly confident about its chances, although the party still publicly heralds Starmer’s anti-complacency message. ‘All I say is that I’m walking ten miles a day, and that has to count for something,’ laughed Downie after we trooped around his eastern constituency with former Labour First Minister Jack McConnell. By chance, and to much amusement from Labour activists, the estate we were in was where the infamous SNP campervan was found. It’s a reminder that, for Scottish Labour’s candidates standing in this election, metaphors of SNP turmoil are never too far away.