The SNP's supposed vice of absenteeism has simply been franchised out to the new administration.

Wes Streeting’s July 2025 diagnosis of Scottish politics was delivered with the pious solemnity of a rural dean at a poorly attended funeral. The SNP, he thundered, had effectively clocked off, leaving the health service to decay while their politicians were entirely absent from the field of duty. Labour, he implied, were the serious adults who would stay and do the gruelling, unglamorous graft north of the border.

Twelve short months later, and behold Labour’s iron commitment to Holyrood. Anas Sarwar is reportedly sprinting for the border. Rather than stay to fight the good fight in Edinburgh, the Scottish Labour leader is packing his bags, measuring his neck for ermine, and taking a peerage to sit in Andy Burnham’s shiny new London cabinet.

It is a spectacular repetition of the exact political crime Streeting identified: treating Scottish governance as a dismal waiting room to be escaped at the earliest opportunity. The SNP's supposed vice of absenteeism has simply been franchised out to the new administration. One assumes Streeting—who suddenly has plenty of free time after Burnham’s brutal factional purge—will shortly deliver a similarly blistering sermon on his own party’s vanishing act.

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