Ian Jack has a dispatch from Glenrothes in today’s Guardian. Here is his main point:
“The conventional wisdom about Glenrothes goes like this. After its victory in Glasgow East, the Scottish National party thought it could wipe out Labour’s 10,000-majority. Then the global crisis erupted. Small-country nationalism no longer looked so clever – Salmond will never praise Iceland again. The UK Treasury bailed out Scotland’s two greatest banks and Brown emerged as the saviour of the world economy. An SNP victory is no longer secure. There’s a new spring in Labour’s step.
All may be broadly true; people will mention it when asked, though usually only as a kind of hearsay opinion. The world beyond might like to see Glenrothes as referendum on 11 years of Labour government, on Brown’s recent heroism, on Salmond’s recent difficulty, but at a hustings meeting in Glenrothes, fuel prices and antisocial behaviour got more attention and the audience was keener to talk about local concerns (the overcrowded A92 north to Dundee) than the future of financial capitalism or of Scotland as an independent state.
Greedy and inept bankers were referred to only in passing. A byelection on the brink of an unquantifiably deep but certain recession is an interesting thing. Nobody was offering to make people richer, rather they were promoting rival stunts and schemes to make some of us a little less poor than most of us will inevitably be.”
The by-election is now only 12 days away and no one seems confident of predicting who will win. I do, though, think that whatever the local factors at play, the result is going to determine how the national press sees politics. A Labour hold and the media will crown Gordon the comeback king. But if the SNP do pull it off, then the air will go out of the Brown balloon.
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