Sarwar’s Dodgy Deal
By our Political Correspondent.
The Scottish Leaders’ Debate on April 14, 2026, was no theatre of ideas. It was a political necropsy performed in real-time under the cold glare of the studio lights. Amidst the usual tawdry point-scoring and the SNP’s increasingly desperate defensive crouch, a single, radioactive allegation from Malcolm Offord has left the Scottish Labour project looking like a hollowed-out vessel.
Offord, the former Tory peer now leading the charge for the neo-fascist dregs of Scottish Reform, dropped a bombshell that should turn the stomach of any self-respecting trade unionist. He claimed that Anas Sarwar, the man who presents himself as the champion of the common weal, approached him in the shadows to coordinate a joint assault on the SNP.
If this claim holds water, it is more than a tactical blunder; it is a class betrayal of the highest order. Until this moment, Scottish Reform was a spent force, a party of far-right agitators slowly being dismantled by their own irrelevance as the campaign moved forward. By allegedly reaching out for a handshake in the dark, Sarwar has breathed life into the very monster he publicly decries. He has gifted legitimacy to a movement that stands against everything the Labour movement was built to protect.
This is not an isolated lapse in judgment but rather the latest chapter in the long, sorry saga of the Sarwar script. We have seen this performance before, where the rhetoric of the left is used to mask the instincts of the elite.
Think back to 2017, when Sarwar was caught in the glare of his own hypocrisy. While he stood on platforms demanding a ten-pound living wage, his own family business, United Wholesale, was paying its workers a pittance. The defence that he had no “active role” despite his multimillion-pound stake was the quintessential mark of the champagne socialist: a man who wants the optics of the struggle without the personal cost.
Then there is the persistent, nagging wound of his children’s education. To lead a party that claims to believe in the state sector while paying for the privilege of St Aloysius’ College is a slap in the face to every parent in a crumbling Glasgow comprehensive. Add to that his recent, dizzying U-turn on Keir Starmer’s leadership. One week he was calling for Starmer’s head over the Mandelson-Epstein vetting scandal, and the next he was playing the loyal lieutenant on the stump in Govan. It is the politics of the weather vane, spinning frantically in search of a breeze.
History is littered with the wreckage of these “red-brown” flirtations. Whenever the moderate left tries to ride the tiger of right-wing nationalism to defeat a common foe, the results are catastrophic. Whether it was the Liberal Unionists of the nineteenth century being swallowed by the Tory machine, or more modern European examples of socialists cozying up to populists, the outcome is always the same. The left loses its soul, the right gains the keys to the front door, and the working class is left to pick up the tab.
By seeking a pact with Offord, Sarwar hasn’t just handed a lifeline to the far-right; he has signalled that for Scottish Labour, the defeat of a rival takes precedence over the principles of the movement. It is a marriage of convenience that will end in a bitter, inevitable divorce, with the electorate left wondering if there is any authentic voice left in the room. You cannot mix the red of Labour with the murky brown of Reform and expect anything but political mud.
