It’s only one by-election of course and the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election was a most unusual one. It was caused by the sitting SNP MP, Margaret Ferrier, being ousted from her seat in a recall ballot following her suspension from Westminster for breaching lockdown rules during the pandemic. Of course we were going to lose, say the SNP. Our people stayed at home. Support for independence remains as high as ever.
True. But no amount of spin can counter the scale of this defeat and the crushing blow to Humza Yousaf’s already battered credibility as SNP leader and First Minister. The Rutherglen result confirms the run of opinion polls showing that Labour is back in contention and that the SNP’s decade-long hegemony is over.
Humza Yousaf is living on borrowed time only six months after he took over from Nicola Sturgeon
If the 20 per cent swing in Rutherglen were replicated at next year’s general election, Labour would win back all of the 40 seats it lost to the nationalists in the 2015 post-referendum ‘tsunami’ general election. Keir Starmer would be entering No. 10 with a workable majority.
As the poling guru Professor John Curtice said this morning this is a truly ‘seismic’ result that exceeded Labours best hopes and the SNP’s worst fears. And as a sidebar, it was also a humiliation for the SNP’s coalition partners the Scottish Green party who received only 600 votes in this West of Scotland bellwether seat. Humza Yousaf is living on borrowed time only six months after he took over from Nicola Sturgeon after her dramatic and unforeseen resignation.
All the SNP’s nightmares have come true. Voters are sick of the sleazy circus the party has become, with senior figures from Sturgeon down being arrested and questioned in the ‘cash for camper vans’ scandal. Then there was the chaos of the botched deposit return scheme, the appalling mismanagement of the Ferguson Marine ferries, Humza Yousaf’s obsession with gender ideology, increased taxation and illiberal legislation like the Hate Crime Bill. But there is more to this than disenchantment with a First Minister with a far left ideology who seems to be a serial loser.
Rutherglen marks a subtle but highly significant important ideological repositioning in Scotland. In 2019, when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader, the Scottish party sat significantly to the left of the SNP on tax and seemed to be moving towards support for Indyref2.
But in recent months the Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has outflanked the SNP by moving significantly to the centre right. Indeed on key issues of tax, energy, welfare, gender and the Union Sarwar is in danger of treading on traditional Tory territory.
Scotland already has the highest taxes in the UK with those earning over £50,000 paying around £1,500 more than in England. Humza Yousaf is committed to increasing the burden still further. But Labour’s message to the voters of Rutherglen was that Scots are paying quite enough tax already and getting precious little in return for it. Labour now has a ‘presumption against tax increases’. Nor has Mr Sarwar supported the SNP in its vehement opposition to the UK government’s two child cap on benefits, what some Labour MPs used to call the ‘rape clause’.
On net zero, Scottish Labour has distanced itself from the SNP/Green slogan of keeping Scotland’s oil and gas ‘in the ground’. Sarwar now accepts that development of the controversial Rosebank oil and gas field off Shetland will go ahead and agrees with Rishi Sunak that fossil fuels will still be needed ‘for decades to come’; Labour even opposed the SNP’s low emission zone in Glasgow.
Sarwar has also disowned the Scottish Government’s Gender Reform Recogniton Bill despite Labour having voted for it only last year. Sarwar now says there needs to be greater protections for women against predatory men invading their spaces by self-declaring themselves as female. And of course Labour remains a staunch defender of the Union and resolutely opposed to any repeat referendum on independence.
The SNP woke up to the implications this change during the Rutherglen campaign. Their candidate, former school teacher Katy Loudon, avoided talk of tax hikes and hardly mentioned independence. Instead her top lines were ‘protect your pension’ and ‘tax relief on mortgages’. In other words targeting the older, more ‘small c’ conservative voters.
Labour’s victorious candidate, Michael Shanks – another school teacher – said he would ‘put more money back in your pocket’ as well as ‘fixing the NHS’ and ‘making work pay’. These are not untypical pitches for a by-election campaign but they do indicate the drift of politics in Scotland.
In short, the SNP, hitched to a far left Green party, is finding itself adrift on the outer Green left of politics while Labour in Scotland is tacking to the centre right. Sarwar seems unconcerned about being lambasted by the nationalist left on Twitter/X as ‘Red Tories’. The real Scottish Tories are still be far behind the big two in Scotland. But their embattled leader, Douglas Ross, whose party came nowhere in Rutherglen, might take some quiet satisfaction that their low tax, unionist message is not going entirely unheard.
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