ON SATURDAY November 22 the Scottish Labour Party (SLP) is holding a conference in Edinburgh to officially endorse the policy document that will form the basis of the Scottish Labour Party’s manifesto for the May 2026 Scottish Parliament election.

Unofficially it will be a rally, rather than a democratic debate, designed to jump-start the campaign for the May elections. “Jump-start” is about right because at the moment the SLP is in need of the political equivalent of a defibrillator.

On Monday November 17 YouGov issued its “Scottish Political Snapshot.” I hope Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour Party leader, had a paramedic holding his hand and keeping him calm before he read it. Because, while 56 per cent of Scottish people disapprove of the Scottish SNP government, surely good news for the SLP, 75 per cent disapproved of the UK Labour government.

Indeed, despite the SNP’s miserable result, based on a miserable performance, 37 per cent of Scots would consider voting SNP in a future election, more than for any other party. By contrast only half of 2024 Scottish Labour voters said they would consider voting for Labour again.

What makes this situation even more difficult for Scottish Labour is the likely disparate destinations of Labour deserters. Thirty-five per cent would consider the Lib Dems, 28 per cent are open to supporting the SNP, while 15-23 per cent are giving the Greens, Reform UK, the Conservatives and Your Party positive consideration.

Ironically, then, some 62 per cent of them are looking to the “centre left,” the Lib Dems and SNP, the “safe” political space that Keir Starmer was supposed to be taking Labour to, not away from.

In many ways this makes Saturday’s conference all the more important, because if Scottish Labour could emerge as a party that had distinctive Scottish Labour answers to the critical issues affecting Scotland’s working class, they might be able to distance themselves from Starmer’s failed UK project and win back voters who are deserting because they feel Labour is shifting right.  

On the issue-by-issue analysis the poll undertook based on the question: “Which political party do you think would handle the following issues best,” Scottish Labour did badly in every category.

It did best on housing, with 10 per cent against the SNP’s 14 per cent. However, on the NHS where the SNP has suffered endless criticism, they managed only 11 per cent, with SNP on a clear lead of 17 per cent. Even on poverty, an area strewn with SNP failures in meeting child poverty targets, they scored 10 per cent against the SNP’s 16 per cent.

On the area which arguably underpins it all, the economy, the SNP scored 15 per cent against Scottish Labour’s 8 per cent. That both the SNP and Labour scored anything at all, can only be explained by an assumption that the continuing crisis of Scotland’s productive economy is not the responsibility of elected politicians. If not, the loss of the Grangemouth oil refinery and more recently the Mossmorran ethylene plant are the acts of a vindictive god and not the pandering of both Westminster and Holyrood to the demands of global capitalism in their never-ending search for cheaper production and higher profits.

Surely this is a golden opportunity for Scottish Labour to break free of the limitations imposed on them by their link to Starmer’s capitulation to Britain’s corporate masters. It might be, but is not an opportunity Scottish Labour is likely to take up.

For while the Scottish Labour Policy document to be endorsed on November 22 promises a new industrial strategy and that: “Scottish Labour’s new strategic approach to the economy will seek to grow the economy in all parts of the country, anchoring wealth in communities at a local or regional level to help create jobs, increase community ownership and invest in communities…” it does so on the basis that: “Scottish Labour recognises that ownership within the economy matters…” To do something that would actually change the Scottish economy and empower the thousands of workers it comprises, that sentence would have to have read “Scottish Labour recognises that ownership of the economy matters…”

The reality is that ownership of the Scottish economy has been externalised. In an article that will appear In the ROSE (Radical Options for Scotland Europe) magazine early next year, Richard Leonard MSP points out that not only is much of Scotland’s productive economy now in private ownership, but that ownership is now based overseas: “Astonishingly this is a trend courted, incentivised and boasted of, by the Scottish National Party whose leading economic tool remains an addiction to foreign direct investment.

“Scotland has been turned into a branch plant economy as a matter of official government policy. The result is that by 2023 employment in private companies employing 250 or more employees in Scotland was 37 per cent Scottish owned, 34 per cent owned abroad, 29 per cent owned in the rest of the UK. In the manufacturing sector the equivalent numbers were 31 per cent Scottish, 17 per cent rest of UK, 52 per cent owned abroad.”

Unfortunately, there is no reference to what we might term corporate colonisation in Scottish Labour’s document nor, consequently, any suggestion as to how we might reverse it.

In other words, Scottish Labour’s economic strategy does not seek to bring wealth and wealth production under democratic control.

Without that, there is little chance that Scotland under Labour, or any other party, will be able to fund the kind of public services we want, build the thousands of houses we need or attack the inequality that divides Scottish society opening the door to the far right. It is not too late for Scottish Labour, but without some attempt to revive the beating heart of socialism, its survival as a serious electoral force is in question.