The Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election will be taking place on 5 October. Although the seat is held by the SNP, it is a by-election which only Labour can lose.
The seat, and its pre-boundary-change predecessors, was a safe Labour seat from the 1960s onwards. Then, in the post-referendum Labour collapse of 2015, it went SNP. Won back by Labour in 2017, it went SNP again in 2019.
The by-election has been triggered by a constituents’ recall petition, after the 2019 victor (Margaret Ferrier) was suspended from Parliament for 30 days. A court had found her guilty of culpable and reckless conduct.
Ferrier had travelled from London to Glasgow by train after testing positive for Covid. Ferrier then dug a hole for herself by trying to cling on to her job.
The by-election comes at a bad time for the SNP.
Sturgeon has gone. Peter Murrell, its former CEO, has gone. Earlier this year, police raided the SNP headquarters and the Sturgeon-Murrell home. A smell of financial scandal hangs over the party. According to opinion polls, there has been a slump in support for the SNP. Its new leader, Humza Yousaf, is not even lacklustre.
The SNP’s record on the health service, on education, on homelessness, on drug-related deaths, on alcohol-related deaths, on ferry services, on the environment, on the administration of the benefits system, and on just about everything else is pitiable.
And the time when it could get away by blaming everything on the Tories and Westminster passed a long time ago (even though it still attempts to do so).
The fact that the SNP could muster little more than 5,000 for its pro-independence demonstration in Edinburgh in early September is a measure of the demoralisation among its troops.
But if the SNP loses the by-election, it has a ready-made excuse: Going through a bad time, a backlash against Ferrier, vote held up well under the circumstances, will win seat back at the next general election.
Scottish Labour, on the other hand, has no such excuse if it fails to win the seat.
In fact, given the importance it has attached to the by-election - the e-mail inboxes of Scottish Labour members are cluttered up virtually every day of the week with e-mails about the by-election - it would be a disaster
If it fails to win the seat at a time when support for the SNP is nosediving in the polls, Scottish Labour’s prospects for winning more seats in the general election – it has currently just one seat in Scotland – take a battering.
A defeat for Scottish Labour would also cast a pall of gloom over the national Labour Party conference which opens in Liverpool just two days after the by-election. It would puncture the synthetic euphoria about a supposedly inevitable Labour landslide in the next general election.
Winning the by-election on the basis of Tory switchers and tactical voters would not be enough. Even if that were to work in this seat, electoral arithmetic means that it would not work in most other seats. Scottish Labour needs to win over SNP voters.
But the right wing which is now firmly back in control of the party in Scotland has some very odd ideas about how to do so.
The Labour candidate, Michael Shanks, resigned from Labour in 2019 over its position on Brexit. He rejoined Labour after the Shadow Brexit Secretary who oversaw the debacle became Party Leader.
Shanks was effectively imposed on the local Constituency Labour Party (CLP) as the candidate. Equally competent - in fact, rather more competent – candidates were kept off the shortlist by the Scottish Labour selection panel.
The CLP passed a motion of no confidence in the selection process and sent a letter to Scottish Labour’s head office. The office did not even bother to reply.
Video clips confirm that Shanks can actually speak. But, to be on the safe side, he is guarded by his minders from having to answer searching questions from journalists, such as ones about his politics.
Given the lack of support for Shanks in the local CLP, Scottish Labour has drafted in Labour "celebrities" who, it thinks, will pull the voters - such as Wes Streeting MP and, even more incredibly, Peter Mandelson.
But the right wing, it has to be said, is smart enough to realise what an electoral liability Keir Starmer is. The first thing that Shanks did on being selected was to pledge that he would oppose Starmer’s policies on the two-child benefits cap, the bedroom tax, and gender reform legislation.
Scottish Labour’s entirely justified fear is that the SNP will outflank Labour to the left, which is not a difficult thing to do. As a Scottish Labour spokesperson put it, in article published in the Guardian shortly before the election was called:
“The avenue of attack is that Labour is not progressive enough. There’s a lot of apathy out there. They’re saying there’s no real difference between [Labour and the Tories]. If the SNP were suddenly to get their act together, it might be quite difficult.”
Alba is not standing a candidate in the by-election. Its proposal for a single pro-independence candidate (i.e. Alex Salmond) was given short shrift by the SNP. The Greens, however, are standing a candidate for the first time.
The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (i.e. the Socialist Party) is standing a candidate, as too is the Scottish Socialist Party – Bill Bonnar, a lifelong Stalinist and now a Putin-apologist for the war in Ukraine.
Whether or not to campaign for a vote for Labour is a no-brainer. This is a by-election. But it also has major implications for the general election.
Shanks is certainly an uninspiring candidate whose selection was engineered by the right-wing.
But to argue for abstention on the basis of those criteria would mean that Labour voters should abstain from voting in a swathe of constituencies in the general election, thereby increasing the chances of another Tory government.
And sitting out the by-election on the basis of sniffy abstention cuts across the basic task of using the by-election to help rebuild the Labour left, and on a much healthier political basis than that which existed under Corbyn.