This afternoon, the Scottish Labour press office sent out a news release.
The suggested headline? ACCOUNTS SHOW SCOTS ABANDONING SNP FOR SCOTTISH LABOUR.
Don’t get me wrong. The latest figures published by the Electoral Commission certainly didn’t make for good reading for John Swinney et al. Party membership has gone down to 64,525, a nearly 10,000 drop from the year before. And while a budget surplus of over £600,000 is a positive move, it was thanks to a levy imposed on local SNP branches.
But Scottish Labour’s figures aren’t all too peachy either once you look behind the surface.
While the latest Scottish Labour accounts show a £455,644 surplus in 2023, over half of that – £231,605 – came from UK Labour.
Anas Sarwar suggested the figures showed Scottish Labour was “securing the financial backing of Scots”.
But he neglected to mention that accounts also show membership and subscription fees dropping from £99,381 in 2022 to £72,600 in 2023 – so about 27%.
Does this suggest Scottish Labour have simply decreased fees – or haemorrhaged 27% of its members in one year?
We have had to approach Scottish Labour for comment on this one. They did not respond.
But then. they haven’t released specific membership figures since 2021, when they stood at just 16,467. It does beg the question, why?
If Scottish Labour are following the trend nationally, then it will have certainly decreased since then.
After all, Keir Starmer’s reign has seen Labour drop from a Jeremy Corbyn-era peak in 2019, when membership hit more than 532,000, all the way down to 370,450.
Interestingly, income from the membership has increased in the past year however, despite a 9% drop – up from nearly £16 million to just short of £17m.
A young Scottish Labour member told The National that Labour are losing members because “we no longer have a policy platform which is genuinely inspiring at a mass level”.
“Under Corbyn, people believed we could fundamentally change society to make it work for ordinary people, whereas now we seem to have abandoned all hope of that in exchange for thinking we can maybe improve society slightly,” he said.
The member then added that he came “very close” to leaving. “But for my sins I’m now fully bought into the ‘stay and fight’ idea.”
Asked whether they believe the same trend in Labour is being felt with Scottish Labour when it comes to losing members, they said: “I’d imagine it would be a lower proportion due to Scottish Labour’s response to the genocide in Palestine as I know that was what pushed many over the edge nationally.
“Also the fact that Anas is slightly more radical with his rhetoric (albeit not in his policies) has probably helped keep folk as well.”
On a bit of a side note, The National has noticed that not one but two Labour ministers ducked the media in visits to Scotland yesterday.
In fairness to Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds (above), the PA wire service and broadcasters were allowed at his visit to Glengoyne Distillery in Killearn, north of Glasgow as he toasted Brazil’s decision to grant special protected status to Scotch whisky. But none of the print media were.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, meanwhile, was pictured at an event with Sarwar and creative professional in Edinburgh North and Leith that same day. No media were invited.
Is that a trend I see?
