How Keir Starmer’s biggest mistakes have revived the SNP from the dead

The problem with replacing the struggling Keir Starmer as Labour leader is that the alternatives are the ones who keep sending him hospital passes

It was thanks to Sir Keir Starmer’s general election victory in July 2024 that the SNP became a zombie party in Scotland, falling from 45 to only nine MPs. Now, after a desperately poor performance in his first year of government, Keir Starmer has brought the walking dead nationalists back to life.

Within another year, we shall know the result of the Scottish Parliament elections (and for the Welsh Senedd too). The SNP will still decline but Starmer remains the political defibrillator that keeps their hopes alive.

Rather than help achieve a stunning win for Anas Sarwar as the largest party in parliament, as things stand the best Labour can hope for is being the largest UK-supporting party in parliament. If Starmer has another year like his first, even that is not even assured.

READ MORE: Starmer’s incoherent policies are a sign of his desperation to survive

Keir Starmer's U-turns over benefits reform have created multi-billion-pound holes in the government's budget for Chancellor Rachel Reeves to fill (Picture: Oli Scarff) | AFP via Getty Images

The Hamilton by-election was a face-saving and morale boosting fillip to Scottish Labour, but as the Westminster rebellion of his own backbenchers shows, there is still a great deal of anger at the choices Starmer and his lieutenants keep making. The truth for Labour is his sidekicks are no better, for it is the likes of Rachel Reeves, Ed Miliband, Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting and David Lammy who have sold him hospital pass policies.

With lengthy A&E waiting times still a problem don’t expect a political recovery in time to save Sarwar. For every U-turn Starmer orders, his Chancellor has to find the cost of that policy change. Back in October when Reeves cut the winter fuel allowance (and introduced other very unpopular policies), she claimed it was vital to save the public finances. It was meant to save £1.3 billion this past winter and £1.5bn every year thereafter, but that saving has now been reduced to an estimate of only £450 million a year.

The same goes for the planned cuts in disability benefits; originally expected to save £5bn a year – again vital to shoring up public finances – Starmer’s latest U-turn reduces the saving to only £2bn – so where will the other £3bn be found?

“Tax the rich” I hear someone shout… would that be the 10,800 millionaires that left the UK last year or the 16,500 expected to leave this year? Then there are the 12 billionaires that left last year, equivalent to another 12,000 millionaires. No, what Starmer’s reversals mean is there will be real increases for ordinary taxpayers, pushing up the cost of living for those who can least afford it.

READ MORE: Why targeting wealthy non-doms means we'll all pay higher taxes

By the time the next budget comes (expected in October), tax revenues will have underperformed so much I expect tax rises will simply not raise enough to balance the Treasury’s books. That means there will be more borrowing, either disguised in some way (such as through new forms of private-finance initiatives already being used by the EU) or by changing Reeves’s fiscal rules designed to buttress market confidence in the government.

Long-suffering and previously patient, analysts’ confidence in public finances is gossamer thin. By failing to bring about any significant welfare reform, Starmer’s Labour is signalling that even with a huge majority it cannot keep to its targets. Labour is about to cannibalise itself unless it presses the reboot button and changes direction – but will that reassure markets any better? A general election could yet come long before 2029.

Add to that the continued adoration of net-zero policies from Miliband that forces up both industrial and domestic energy prices – pricing whole sectors, such as our once world-leading chemical manufacturers, out of business – and now Rayner is looking to adopt French-style net-stupid regulations on house building that will literally send the costs through the roof.

Still, Streeting proceeds with his Tobacco and Vape Bill that will introduce a ridiculous escalating minimum age-ban on smoking tobacco – and now he’s proposing to ban alcohol advertising. It won’t be too long before we have plain-packaging rules for bottles and cans so they only show post-mortem photos of livers pickled by excessive alcohol intake.

The Tobacco Bill will undoubtedly be subject to a legal challenge as legal opinion by former Lord Chancellor Robert Buckland KC suggests it’s in conflict with both the Windsor Framework and Belfast Good Friday Agreement. Yet politically deaf Streeting still presses ahead.

The Labour puritans will not save lives but they will lose their party votes as others, especially Reform UK, appeal for the bully state to get off our backs.

We can console ourselves with the unchallengeable fact the UK is still world class for diplomatic ineptitude. What other country that had previously paid £148m to remove any future claims on its territory would then pay an unreliable neighbour an estimated £30bn over 99 years to keep a military airbase run by the US?

Even more absurd is the agreement stipulates the UK or US will be obliged under the deal to give notice if there are plans to launch an attack from the Diego Garcia military base, despite critics raising security concerns over the close ties between Mauritius, China and Russia. The Chagos islanders evacuated to London in the 1960s were not even consulted.

Does that approach not suggest to nationalists there’s a bargaining price to be put on the UK keeping Faslane were there to be Scottish independence? Would the UK have to tell an independent Scotland about its subs movements in Faslane? Lammy’s concession removes a significant argument from pro-UK supporters and provides a bounty that would help finance independence – a more ridiculous policy cannot be conceived.

So it is in the light of all these (and many more policy failures) that Starmer has seen his satisfaction ratings plummet and those of the SNP revive. Starmer really needs to up his game, but the alternatives don’t look any better.

Brian Monteith is a former member of the Scottish and European parliaments and senior advisor to the Tax Reform Council