In her Scotsman column this week, Christine Jardine has a stark message for Labour: get your backsides into gear and do more for Scotland or you are toast at the Holyrood elections in 2026. The last thing Scotland needs is another 5 years of the SNP, so we’d better hope they take heed.

Ahead of the General election last July, it looked like Labour were on course to form a Scottish Government too.

Unfortunately, with cuts to Winter Fuel Payment, the National Insurance rise and threatened benefit cuts, they have blown the goodwill that propelled them to 37 Scottish seats at Westminster.

Christine outlines what they have done wrong:

They have to start communicating exactly what it is they believe they are doing to make our lives better in Scotland. Don’t get me wrong, I am not about to have some frightening Damascene conversion to nationalism. Far from it.

It’s just that Labour claims to be the best hope we have, and they are blowing it. We all know that the funding settlement to the Scottish Government is the biggest in Holyrood’s quarter of a century, but just about every other statement made since the July election seems to undermine what had been a monumental shift towards Labour in the polls.

And last week’s growth statement was “Scotland lite”

Now, here was a major announcement – made first to business rather than parliament – outlining investment in areas like AI research and development, vital to the scientific and space sectors in which Edinburgh University is a world leader and in which our Scottish economy is increasingly involved. And yet no suggestion of anything for the capital.

Not a word of reassurance that this investment in growth will include, at some point, the reinstatement of the ‘exascale’ computer for Edinburgh University. I have asked, more than once, but still no answer. Such investment would put us in the driving seat of UK supercomputing, but alas still no public announcement.

There may be a bit of a silver lining for us, though. If Labour continue to muck it up, where are their voters going to go? It’s all for the taking, folks.

If Labour continue to make the public feel the same way they did when the Conservatives were playing fast and loose with their Prime Ministers and Chancellors, why wouldn’t they look elsewhere? And I don’t mean Reform.

Politicians need to look outwards, stop talking to ourselves and remember our job is to deliver hope as well as stability. We all need to remember that.

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