Starmer says he needs to win in Scotland to become prime minister

Scotland will decide if Labour wins the general election, Sir Keir Starmer has said, adding that his party making a comeback north of the border was “personal”.

Sir Keir said he needed to win in Scotland, where Labour only held one seat in the 2019 general election, if his party was to emerge victorious across the UK on July 4.

But he said “this is also personal” as he wanted to ensure he was a “prime minister for the whole of the United Kingdom”, with a “strong” group of Scottish Labour MPs.

Although he said the “numbers are important”, after Labour’s trouncing in the last election he felt a “deep” and “fundamental” need for his government to include Scotland.

In a speech at the Scottish Labour campaign launch in Glasgow, he said “there is no change without Scotland” and argued voters north of the border faced a stark choice.

Sir Keir said “the height of the SNP ambition” was for voters to elect a Nationalist MP who would “send a message” to Westminster by protesting from the opposition benches.

But he instead urged Scots to “send a government, a Labour government” by backing his party. A series of polls have found that Labour is on course to make an extraordinary comeback north of the border at the expense of the SNP.

One this week showed the SNP could have only 11 MPs left after the election, a dramatic reduction from the 48 they won in 2019.

Labour was predicted to surge from the one seat they won at the last election to 35, in a major boost for Sir Keir’s hopes of becoming prime minister. The Tories would hold their six Scottish seats despite the slump in their UK-wide vote.

A total of 57 seats will be contested in Scotland following boundary changes. Despite Labour’s huge lead over the Tories in UK-wide polls, Sir Keir argued they could be the difference in whether his party emerges victorious.

Asked why he needs Scotland to be prime minister, the Labour leader told reporters: “Yes, it’s about the numbers. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

“We lost very badly in 2019, we’ve got to get every single seat that we can possibly win across the whole of the United Kingdom and every seat we’re capable of winning here in Scotland because the numbers really matter.

“But this is also personal. If I am privileged enough to come in to serve as the UK prime minister, I want to be the UK prime minister for the whole of the United Kingdom and that includes Scotland.

“Over and above the numbers, having strong Labour representation from Scotland sitting on the government benches matters to me in terms of the way in which I want to govern, which is for Scotland and with Scotland.

“Yes, the numbers are important but there’s something very deep about the way I see politics, which is also about the type of government we want to form.”

Speaking the day after Rishi Sunak visited the Highlands, he added: “Whatever anyone says to me about the maths and the opinion polls etc etc, there’s something fundamental to me about the importance of Scotland. There can be no change without Scotland.”

The Labour leader also ruled out any sort of deal with the SNP before or after the election “under any circumstances”.

He said: “That is not just a question of mathematics. That is because there’s no way an incoming Labour government could ever work in any way with the SNP, whose only ambition is to break up the United Kingdom.”

Alison Thewliss, the SNP MP for Glasgow Central, said: “In reality, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party are prioritising no change at all and are offering nothing to the people of Scotland beyond more of the same.

“We have a rotten Tory government that deserves to be booted out of office, but it is clear that Sir Keir Starmer has no vision beyond the status quo.”

Claire Coutinho, the Energy Security Secretary, said: “Sir Keir Starmer stood in Scotland and hailed his cave-in to Angela Rayner and the unions’ 70 new French-style regulations that would ban flexible working, but failed to say anything about the 93,000 jobs in Scotland that would be lost as a result of Labour’s reckless pledge to shut down our oil and gas sector.”