A number of peculiar developments have taken place in Scotland since the Holyrood election in May. These have been disguised by the anti-SNP media feeding frenzy which took place after the conviction of Peter Murrell for the crime of embezzlement, a crime whose victim was the SNP, despite the efforts of the British media in Scotland to paint the SNP as the perpetrator.
Perhaps the most peculiar has been the media silence about the futures of Labour and Conservative parties in Scotland, both of which went down to their worst defeats in the history of the Holyrood parliament. In an election which the Labour party in Scotland was confidently expecting to win, or at least make significant gains in seats, the party actually lost 5 of the 22 seats it won at the 2021 Holyrood election plus the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse seat which it won in the by-election on 5 June 2025, a loss of 26% of the 23 seats Labour held going into the election. This was a disaster of a result. Although there is no official opposition in Holyrood, Labour was left with 17 seats, the same as Reform with which it now shares second place in the Scottish parliament. It was the sixth consecutive election in which Labour’s tally of Holyrood seats had decreased. Labour in Scotland has failed to reverse its historic decline and with every passing election its chances of forming the Scottish Government grow ever more remote.
Labour’s blushes were spared only by a Tory result which was, by any definition, catastrophic. The Conservatives lost 19 of the 31 seats they’d won in 2021, almost two thirds, 61.3%, to be exact, of their seats. The Tories plunged to just 12 seats, behind the Scottish Greens.
Yet despite the electoral disasters for Labour and the Conservatives, very little media attention has been paid to the failures of the leaderships of these parties, to their policies, or to what if anything they can do to improve their fortunes. Both Anas Sarwar and Russell Findlay continue to be as arrogant and overbearing as they were before the election, and both act as though they had not in fact presided over humiliation for their parties, humiliation for which they bear considerable personal responsibility. All are acting as though nothing of any great importance just happened, a casual insouciance in the face of disaster which is facilitated by the almost complete absence of any attention being paid to them by the British media in Scotland.
The utter lack of self-reflection or humility from Sarwar and Findlay in the face of such rejection by the electorate, and the lack of any significant media scrutiny of what went so badly wrong for Labour and the Tories is in itself highly revealing. Genuine political parties and genuine party leaders don’t vanish from the news cycle after such a complete electoral collapse. They become the subject of debate over strategy and leadership. Alternative contenders for the leadership emerge and their policies and personalities are put under the media magnifying glass. The fate of the defeated parties and their leaders is news. The Tories are pretty much an electoral irrelevance in Scotland now, their recent Aberdeen by election win notwithstanding.
It’s the absence of any great attention being paid to Anas Sarwar and the Labour party in Scotland which is particularly instructive. Labour retains pretensions to power in Scotland and its strategy in the recent election was not about mitigating its losses, it was a strategy which aimed for power. This strategy was enthusiastically backed by the anti-independence media in Scotland which eagerly anticipated the defeat of the SNP after a decade and a half. When it became obvious that the SNP was going to win, and another pro-independence Holyrood majority was highly likely, the media narrative shifted to telling us that this was an election no one was interested in.
What all this tells us is that Labour and the Conservatives in Scotland are not real political parties, so their defeat is not that important. The true purpose of these organisations is not to formulate Scottish policies and seek political power, although that may have been true once upon a time. In Scotland in 2026, Labour and the Conservatives in Scotland primarily exist in order to further the interests of their Westminster bosses and to generate a steady stream of anti-SNP and anti-independence headlines for their allies in Scotland’s overwhelmingly anti-independence media. They can continue in this role irrespective of the devastating electoral defeats they have just suffered.
Their own leadership is not very important since that leadership is merely a proxy for the UK leaderships of these parties. That’s very clear in the case of Sarwar, whose replacement of Richard Leonard was a Labour HQ putsch. Hence the lack of media interest in exploring the reasons for their defeats or in scrutinising attempts to give these branch offices a new direction. Anti-SNP/anti-independence headline generators don’t need a new political direction or leadership no matter how poorly they performed at the ballot box. They’ll get their policies imposed on Scotland anyway thanks to their Westminster head offices. The overwhelmingly anti-independence media in Scotland has no interest in attacking or scrutinising Sarwar or Findlay as they are essentially media assets who primarily exist to feed BBC Scotland, The Record, The Scotsman et al with a constant supply of negative stories about the SNP, the Scottish Government, and now with the increasing political heft of the Scottish Greens, the Scottish Greens too.
This unhealthy client and patron relationship permits Sarwar to do things like calling on Starmer to resign just days after giving him his full support and instead of being questioned about his U-turn and inherent unreliability he was hailed by the media in Scotland as having pulled off a political masterstroke. This allowed the media in Scotland to avoid holding Sarwar to account for Labour’s lies and U-turns on GB Energy, Grangemouth, Waspi women and all the rest. The abject failure of that supposed masterstroke to save Labour in Scotland from a humiliating political defeat has predictably not attracted much media attention. The media is not going to bite the hand that feeds it its fix of SNP bad ferry stories. Junkies don’t attack their dealers.
After wrestling for hours with PayPal, I have finally compiled a list of the emails of almost everyone who makes a regular monthly donation to the blog and will soon launch the weekly bonus premium email article for those who make a monthly contribution to the blog. I had hoped to launch this in June but unfortunately it will be delayed for a while. There are a number of people whose emails I am unable to find. Some people donate monthly by Ko-Fi, one makes a monthly donation to last year’s GoFundMe fundraiser, a few people make monthly payments directly by bank transfer. I cannot access the email addresses of any of these people and so cannot add them to the new mailing list. If you are one of these folk, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com and I’ll add you to the mailing list.
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