They are still “far, far too high,” Martin McCluskey, a Scottish Labour MP and the minister tasked with bringing them down, acknowledged in an interview with POLITICO last month.
“I understand why people feel frustrated, and I also understand why they look at energy bills as, I’d probably say, a totemic issue for the effectiveness of government,” he said.
It is a level of voter frustration Labour in Scotland can ill afford.
Even before the Mandelson revelations, a YouGov poll put the party on just 15 percent, down 20 percentage points compared with its performance in Scotland at the 2024 general election, and now trailing both the Scottish National Party and Reform UK.
Cost of living issues will “undoubtedly” play a role in the May elections, said Stephen Boyd, director of the left-leaning think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research Scotland. While Labour inherited difficult fiscal circumstances in 2024, Boyd argued, the party will “suffer because concerns about [the] cost of living haven’t really been mitigated over the period that Labour’s been in power [in Westminster].”
Scotland is also the chunk of the U.K. where a cost-of-living crisis driven by rocketing energy bills bites hardest.