WHEN Scottish Labour MSPs head back to work next week in Edinburgh, they might be forgiven for having a spring in their step, despite the best efforts of atrocious summer weather to put a damper on everything.

An opinion poll by Norstat for the Sunday Times on August 24 suggests that come the Scottish Parliament elections in 2026, it will be Labour and not the SNP that Scotland’s first minister will come from. 

There now follows a flock of caveats. It is a long way to 2026, and the impact of both Westminster and Holyrood announcing a new age of austerity is as yet unclear. Furthermore, the Norstat polling numbers were very close. 

The Scottish Parliament, remember, has two different forms of voting. There is a first-past-the-post vote that is modified by a second, more proportional, regional list system.

The Nortstat poll found that 33 per cent of the electorate plan to vote SNP in the first-past-the-post section compared with 30 per cent for Labour. In the more proportional regional list, the SNP and Labour were neck and neck on 28 per cent. While every other party was more or less an also-ran, there were nevertheless serious warnings about the rise of Reform, which deserves separate consideration.

According to polling expert Professor John Curtice, on these figures, the SNP would win the Holyrood election in 2026 with 41 seats, one more than Labour, but even with the support of other pro-independence parties — 10 Greens and four Alba members, according to the poll, the SNP would be 10 seats short of a majority and in all likelihood Anas Sarwar, Scottish Labour leader, would displace John Swinney as first minister.

It is all knife-edge stuff, so I wonder what Sarwar thought when this good news was preceded by the Labour-supporting newspaper, the Daily Record’s, exclusive a few days before, announcing that Labour at Westminster planned to legislate on devolution. Not to enhance it. To dilute it. 

The Daily Record reported that Labour intends to change the law to allow Scottish Secretary of State Ian Murray to bypass the Scottish Parliament and directly fund “anti-poverty schemes” around the time of Keir Starmer’s austerity Budget on October 30. 

There is a reason for my quotation marks. The sum of money reported to be at Murray’s disposal is a £150 million which would be allocated through projects with local authorities. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s 2023 report, “Over one million people still live in poverty in Scotland, with nearly half of those (490,000) living in very deep poverty.” Put crudely, Westminster’s beneficence would be around £150 a head for those living in poverty.

Of course, as the Daily Record faithfully relayed to its readers, the money is not only for “cutting poverty rates” but “creating jobs and stimulating economic growth.”

The problem is, unless they are high-quality, high-paying jobs, this kind of intervention is futile as a way of tackling poverty. As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation notes in its report: “… far too many people, principally women, are trapped in low pay and the accompanying poverty — for them, work is not a route out of poverty, it is a roundabout with few exits.” 

And besides, as Scottish Labour has known for at least as long as its own Commission on Health Inequalities Report of 2015, only a holistic approach including health, housing, education and economic development is going to have any serious effect on endemic poverty in Scotland.

But actually, it is the political significance of this assault on devolution, not the efficacy of the measures which it may or may not engender, that could well provoke an unwelcome crisis for the Scottish Labour leadership.  

Only two years ago Starmer asked Gordon Brown to produce a report that would “settle the future of the union” and devolve “power, wealth and opportunity” throughout the nation. Although the subsequent commission and the report that emanated from it made only modest proposals to enhance Scottish devolution, nevertheless it argued for a reformed second chamber to have the power to stop the UK Parliament from legislating in devolved areas without the consent of the devolved administrations.   

How ironic that Labour is now about to legislate in precisely the opposite direction, presumably by amending the 1998 Scotland Act which devolves local government to the Scottish Parliament. 

Perhaps we should not be surprised, given that Brown’s proposal, in his report for replacing the House of Lords with a second chamber of the nations and regions, has been ditched. 

House of Lords reform now consists of nothing more than getting rid of hereditary peers. The bishops representing the Church of England and the hundreds of other unelected lawmakers representing, with a few honourable exceptions, no-one but themselves and commonly ruling-class interests, can continue to sleep soundly on the red benches during the long and often fatuous debates. 

It is no doubt the ever-deepening crisis of the SNP which has encouraged this move by Labour. In June it was revealed that the SNP government has to return £450 million of European structural and investment funding that it had received in the past six years because it failed to allocate the money. 

European structural and investment funding would typically support schemes that boost employment, education, training and social inclusion. The scheme was replaced by the UK shared prosperity fund after Brexit, but money could still be allocated under the old scheme until June of 2024. It is the new fund that Ian Murray plans to use to spread his “largesse” across Scotland’s deprived communities. 

Sarwar may have a different perspective from Westminster Labour on this issue because, despite the crisis of the SNP, support for independence in poll after poll remains close to 50 per cent. Add to that those who are either happy with the existing settlement or want more powers for the Scottish Parliament, and you have an absolute majority against the dilution of devolution in Scotland. 

Whether Scottish Labour is prepared to say No to this power grab probably depends on those who do not believe that the current constitutional settlement gives Scotland the powers it needs and are prepared to mobilise to stop this regressive legislation. 

The affiliated unions and socialist membership of the Scottish Labour Party have a special responsibility here. It is time for them to build a radical alliance with all those who want to challenge austerity, demand democratic control of our economy and transform the quality of our public services and the pay and conditions of those who staff them.