In percentage terms, Scottish Labour romped home to victory in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election on 5 October 2023.
Labour won the seat with nearly 60% of the vote (compared with 34% of the vote in the 2019 general election). The SNP’s share of the vote slumped from 44% in 2019 to 28%. The overall swing from SNP to Labour was just over 20%.
If the result were repeated across Scotland in a general election – although it certainly will not be – Labour would win 42 seats and the SNP would hold on to just six seats.
Even so, the result strengthens the more realistic prospect of Labour winning over 20 Scottish seats in the general election.
National and Scottish Labour leaders Keir Starmer and Anas Sarwar both used the expression “seismic” to describe the election result, an echo of former SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon’s description of the 2015 general election result as “a shift in the tectonic plates of Scottish politics”.
But in 2015 the SNP won 56 out of 59 constituencies, leaving Labour, the Tories and the Lib-Dems with just one seat each. Last Thursday’s by-election, on the other hand, resulted in no more than Scottish Labour doubling its number of Westminster MPs – from one to two.
The headline percentage figures also mask a more complicated and less encouraging picture for Labour.
Rutherglen and Hamilton West is not a safe, or even relatively safe, SNP seat. It had ‘changed hands’ in each of the three previous general elections. The by-election itself was triggered by a recall petition after the previous SNP MP had been suspended from Parliament for travelling by train after testing positive for Covid.
Average turnout in a by-election is 50%. Last Thursday’s turnout was 37%. Only a small proportion of that well-below-average turnout can be explained by the weather and by voters being turned away at polling stations because they had no ID.
Doorstep conversations and the election results confirm that SNP voters were disillusioned. The SNP vote slumped from 24,000 in 2019 to 8,500 last Thursday. But only a small proportion of SNP voters were actually won over to voting Labour.
In fact, Labour picked up less votes when it won last Thursday (18,000) than it did when it lost in 2019 (18,500).
An unknown but not insignificant share of last Thursday’s Labour votes were Tory and Lib-Dem tactical votes. The Tory vote went down from 8,000 in 2019 to 1,200 last Thursday, while the Lib-Dem vote went down from 2,800 to 900.
But on the doorsteps Tory tactical voters frequently made it clear that while they would vote Labour in the by-election to beat the SNP, they would not vote Labour in a general election: “How can anyone have any respect for Starmer? He changes his politics every day.”
The low turnout and the failure to win more SNP voters over to a Labour vote occurred in the context of Labour mobilising canvassers and party full-timers from anywhere and everywhere between London and Inverness.
Even before the mass turnout on election day itself, there could be 20 or more canvas teams out at any one time. In terms of human resources, Labour was able to simply swamp the SNP’s lacklustre campaign.
That cannot be repeated in a general election. All those MPs, councillors and party activists will be campaigning in their own constituencies, and party staff will be scattered across the country. Canvassing in the general election will need to be done by members of the not overly active local Constituency Labour Party (CLP).
The by-election occurred at what might prove to be ‘peak time’ for Labour nationally and in Scotland.
The cost-of-living crisis continues. The Tories are seen as incompetent and out-of-touch. The fake glamour of the SNP is tarnished. It too is seen as incompetent. And toxic divisions have opened up in the previously monolithic party.
It is entirely possible that by the time of the general elections all such factors are no longer in play to anywhere near the same extent. And Starmer’s tactic of continually shifting to the right to pick up Tory votes will only play into the SNP’s hands.
All this underlines the importance of the left, backed up by trade union delegates, organising at grassroots level in the local CLP – to turn it outwards to local community campaigns, industrial disputes and discriminated minorities.
And also to hold the constituency’s new Labour MP, Michael Shanks, to account: In his election campaign he pledged to oppose Starmer’s surrender to the Tories’ bedroom tax, two-child benefits cap and rape clause.
But, having sat out the election campaign because of the bureaucratic machinations which ensured Shanks’ selection, some on the CLP left have a lot of catching-up to do.
One wonders what the response will be at the first post-by-election CLP meeting, when they argue that it was wrong to campaign for a Labour vote in a particularly crucial by-election, and that Labour’s decisive victory is a disaster for the working class!
Elsewhere on the fringes of the by-election the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), which still enjoys a minor residual base in Rutherglen, polled 271 votes. Its candidate is a lifelong Stalinist and Putin-apologist for the war in Ukraine. So, that counts as 271 votes for genocide.
The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (which, in reality, consists only of the Socialist Party plus a handful of fellow travellers) polled 178 votes. According to their election material:
“Shanks left the party in 2019 when it was under the left leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. If elected, Shanks will add to the dominance of the pro-capitalist parliamentary group of Labour MPs who have extinguished the last vestiges of Corbynism from the Labour Party. Ordinary people have no illusions in Labour delivering any change.”
In fact, Shanks resigned from the Labour Party over Brexit, on which he has had a better position than the Socialist Party (and Corbyn) – he was fully against it. And last Thursday’s result means that the argument that “ordinary people have no illusions in Labour delivering any change” may need revising.
The SSP and TUSC both lost their deposits and came in behind the Greens, the Scottish Family Party and Reform UK, all of whom likewise lost their deposits. TUSC also came in behind the Independence for Scotland Party.
The level of euphoria being whipped up by the national and Scottish leaderships of the Labour Party is misplaced, but certainly not entirely so. Labour’s decisive victory last Thursday is an unqualified plus.
The question now is whether the local Labour left is up to the challenge of building on that victory.