Hooray! A Scottish Labour leadership contest

Anas Sarwar, the leader of Scottish Labour, is stepping down as an MSP in order to take up a ministerial post in Andy Burnham’s new government, which comes with a seat in the House of Lords.

If you’re the kind of person who obsesses about the Lords and its unelected nature, this will no doubt enrage you. Most people, I think, have better things to do with their time. Personally, I don’t begrudge Anas this promotion – and oh, yes, it is certainly a promotion from what he’s currently doing – and I certainly don’t blame him for accepting the prime minister’s offer. Whether this is all part of a grand conspiracy – Anas was the first senior Labour figure to call for Keir Starmer’s resignation earlier this year and this feels like a quid pro quo from Andy – I am not qualified to say. I just know Anas will be happier doing an actual, responsible job with budgets and executive authority and the chance to actually achieve something rather than wrestle with Malcolm Offord every Thursday for the chance to ask the first question for John Swinney to ignore at First Minister’s Questions.

More important is the future of the party he is leaving behind and the prospect of a leadership contest. Rarely has the phrase about “two bald men fighting over a comb” been used more appropriately, especially given the follicly-challenged nature of at least one of the likely candidates. The more serious point is that leader of Scottish Labour is largely irrelevant these days, especially given the party’s woeful result in the latest Holyrood elections – which is one of the reasons why there is some grumpiness at Sarwar’s perceived “failing upwards”. I’m familiar with the kind of person who feels somehow cheated (as if it’s anything whatever to do with them) when a politician loses an election and then confounds his or her critics’ expectations by going on to pursue an alternative, successful career. I know of at least a few such people who were visibly disappointed that not only did I not have to sell the family home and seek employment as a pizza delivery man after I lost my seat in 2015, but that I instead had (and have) a successful career in journalism and public affairs.

Scottish Labour will need a new leader and, despite its irrelevance to the Scottish political scene for now, the question as to whether it can steer a path back to relevance and even some degree of electoral success will depend largely on who the party chooses to lead it. I won’t go into personalities (I may do so at a future point once we know exactly how the contest is shaping up) but the ideas that certain candidates will espouse and encourage the wider party to adopt are reasonably clear already.

There is already – let’s face it, there has always been – a great deal of chat among the usual suspects in the media class about the constitution. Wishing to talk about the relatively easy subject of independence v devolution rather than the rather more mundane, important and difficult (and boring) subjects of education, health and transport has always been a weakness of the Scottish media. What is Scotland’s democratic path to independence if the UK government refuse to devolve powers to hold a rerun of the 2014 vote? Should Scottish Labour be a genuinely independent party, separate from its UK party, rather than just a “branch office”?