Herald on Sunday, Sunday National, 9th November 2025.
If the pollsters are to be believed, Scottish Labour finds itself in a difficult spot. The next Holyrood election is rapidly approaching. After almost 20 years of SNP government, the 2026 election is looking increasingly tricky for Anas Sarwar’s party. Instead of the healthy lead you might expect a popular opposition to be building up against the government in advance of a critical election, Labour is currently polling south of 20% in both constituency and regional voting intentions, with the SNP holding steady at around 34% nationally.
When Richard Leonard was forced out as party leader back in January 2021 – allegedly by conspirators determined to get Sarwar the gig – they were polling around the same level Sarwar and Sir Keir has led them to now. Labour by-election successes and the generally depressed state of the SNP vote compared to recent Holyrood elections – the SNP won 46.5% of constituency votes in 2016 and 47.7% in 2021 – are all good reasons not to call anything just yet. You can also counter that the election hasn’t yet seeped into public consciousness, and there is room for considerable volatility and changes in public opinion before Thursday 7th of May next year.
But there can be no doubt that a significant change in political weather will be required to restore Anas Sarwar’s fortunes and his party’s standing. Labour haven’t scored over 20% in a Holyrood poll since February. They haven’t polled over 30% since September last year.
So what exactly is the plan? So far in the second half of this year, the answer seems to be – crime. At First Minister’s questions and in speeches, Anas Sarwar has recently spoken of little else, promising that he will “end the SNP’s soft touch approach to crime.”
In particular, he seems to be suggesting that we should be adding a new wing to Barlinnie for Scotland’s shoplifters. “For too long,” he says, “yobs have been getting away with committing crime in our communities while the SNP turns away. Shoplifting is a crime that makes the whole community feel unsafe and hikes financial pressure on local businesses that are already struggling to get by.” He criticises what he calls the “ineffective fines that are dished out do next to nothing to deter the criminals,” and suggests that if he were First Minister, he’d “end the soft-touch approach of the SNP and stand up for our businesses” by making “sure those guilty of the crime are actually punished.”
In a sense, this isn’t a surprising pivot. Beyond routine Tory mantras about “soft touch Scotland” doing back decades – no mainstream political party has seriously attempted to put public anxiety about crime and justice at the heart of a devolved election campaign since Iain Gray handed the SNP its first and only Holyrood majority. Russell Findlay has attempted to “own” the issue, but with the rise of Reform, the days of the Scottish Tories owning anything looks numbered.
“If you carry a knife, you should go to jail.” It was back in the interregnum between the 2007 and 2011 Holyrood elections when Scottish Labour last tried to portray itself as “tough on crime.” They promised to legislate for mandatory minimum jail terms for anyone caught carrying a blade, suggesting they were listening “to the concerns of knife crime campaigners and the tens of thousands of Scots who want the Government to crack down on knife criminals.”
They pegged this new mandatory minimum term at six months imprisonment. In reality, this “strong action” would have sent thousands of extra people to prison every year – but Labour estimated it would only be “several hundred” and wouldn’t require a multi-million-pound prison building scheme and several years of building to accommodate.
Challenged about the revenue and capital costs of adding 2,000 new prisoners to a Victorian prison estate already creaking at the gunnels, Scottish Labour politicians fell to bits on telly. They hadn’t done their sums, got caught, and lost the election. The collapse of this populist penal message only played a small part in their defeat in 2011 – but it demonstrated a misreading of the political salience of the issue and exposed a slapdash approach to a hugely expensive policy that was anything but fully costed.
Sarwar’s latest announcements this month brought them back to mind. The police recorded 43,556 recorded instances of shoplifting in Scotland last year, with the latest prosecution figures suggesting 16,426 people were reported to the procurator fiscal. Of these, something like 8,600 were prosecuted for crimes of dishonesty. Others will have received out of court disposals like fiscal fines.
He must be right to this extent – the evidence shows shoplifting is expensive for businesses, and getting more so. The British Retail Consortium’s 2024 crime survey estimated that shoplifting now costs retailers almost £1.8 billion – with the majority of the costs being made up, not in pauchled stock, but in additional security measures to detect and deter the aforementioned pauchling. Security on the door, locked liquor cabinets, plastic plating around your supermarket steak – these are all the little local signs of suspicion, surveillance and its impact on your day to day. Honest purchasers also end up subsidising these thefts, as businesses pass the financial burdens onto other consumers.
An increase in shoplifting might represent an upsurge in “yobbery” as Sarwar suggests, but isn’t a more compelling explanation that there is a link between financial hardship and rises in retail theft? At the very least, shouldn’t a Labour politician have the imagination to recognise that deprivation in a cost-of-living crisis might also help explain what’s happening here, rather than caricaturing it simply as a breakdown in social discipline and respect for property rights?
Maybe it’s just me – but I’ll take a degree of convincing that shoplifting is a crime that “makes the whole community feel unsafe.” Indeed, you can knock the observation on its head. That people need to resort to shoplifting for bare necessities in a wealthy country is proof that the community is unsafe. You might argue successive UK governments have effectively shifted some of the economic burdens of poverty onto the private sector.
I’m sure there are other factors at play in the increased shoplifting figures. All the way back to Plato, philosophers have wondered about the depth of mischief human beings are capable of, if they think they can get away with it. Self-service checkouts may have helped turn more Marks and Spencers matrons into opportunistic sneak thieves. Organised crime is always with us. Some people are dishonest and extractive. But nothing in anything the Scottish Labour leader has said about this policy has hinted at any nuance at all.
So far, Sarwar hasn’t pledged his party to automatic prison terms for shoplifters – hoping that the nudge, the wink, and the implication his party would “tackle” offending will do the trick – but you don’t need to be a Paxmanesque interrogator to think up a few pertinent question which the Labour leader will eventually need to answer in this new drive to present himself as tough on crime.
If you think imposing fines on shoplifters fail to deter criminals, what does “actual punishment” mean to you? It sounds quite a lot like “lock ‘em up” to me. Prison is the only kind of punishment in our political culture that is never asked to justify its costs or account for its consequences. According to the latest figures, it costs the Scottish Prison Service £47,140 per prisoner per year. This is roughly £10,000 more than the median salary of a full-time Scottish worker.
To point out the obvious – Scotland’s overstretched and overcrowded prison estate does not have room for thousands of additional inmates. It doesn’t have room for hundreds of additional inmates. It doesn’t have room for the people we already lock up.
How can Scotland have a “soft touch” approach to crime, and the biggest prison population in history, hitting just under 8,400 people last month? You can reasonably regard these prison numbers as a failure – a failure to make community sentences credible, a failure to address the underlying causes of offending, a failure to reduce the number of short term prisoners in our jails, a failure to address the lengthy delays in the criminal justice process, meaning there are around 1,500 people sitting in Scotland’s prisons, waiting for their trials to begin. But none of these are obviously failures born by dint of being “soft touch” on criminal justice.
Andrew Tickell 