Labour crushes SNP in ‘seismic’ Rutherglen by-election win

Keir Starmer goes into Labour conference this weekend on a high after his party turned Rutherglen and Hamilton West red in a decisive victory against the SNP. Yesterday’s by-election saw a 20.4 percentage point swing to Labour from the SNP. The Labour candidate, Michael Shanks, won 17,845 votes to the SNP’s 8,399 – a majority of 9,446. In the 2019 general election, the SNP won the seat with a majority of 5,230.

If the Labour swing was repeated at a general election, Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, said the party would win 42 seats in Scotland. This would leave the SNP with a mere six. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has said the result showed that Scottish Labour ‘could lead the way in delivering a UK Labour government’. In Starmer’s office, a resurgence in Scotland has been viewed as key to winning power. Starmer himself has been quick to call it a ‘seismic result’.

As for the losers, it wasn't just the SNP who had a bad night. The Scottish Conservatives won only 3.9 per cent of the vote, short of the 5 per cent required to keep their £500 deposit.

But what does this all mean for next year’s general election? While I previously predicted that this by-election would be the one that worries ministers most, it's worth pointing out that by-elections often make for problematic predictors of what exactly will happen in a national vote thanks to the fact they tend to have low turnout (on this occasion less than 40 per cent) and they are often used as a protest vote against the governing party. On this occasion, the reason the by-election took place was that a disgraced former SNP MP – Margaret Ferrier faced a recall petition for breaching Covid rules. It means the SNP will try to argue it's a normal mid term result for a party in government.

Had Scottish Labour failed to take the seat, it would have cast serious doubt on polling suggesting they could be the largest party in Scotland after the election. It meant Sarwar was under pressure to deliver. The scale of his party's victory, larger than many had predicted, will now fuel the idea that, after years out in the cold, a serious Scottish Labour recovery is under way – one that could put Keir Starmer in No. 10.