Labour's by-election win only highlights SNP's detachment from reality

The Herald Scotland

5 hours ago

Boothman of The Times is also here of course. 'What the hell's going on then, John,' I ask him. 'Some people are telling me the Labour vote has collapsed,' he tells me. To be fair to Boothman though, he's among the first later to suggest that the smiles on the threshing floor where the count will take place are all on the faces of Labour folk. I attempt to mock his initial analysis. 'Didn't you say Labour's vote was collapsing,' I say. 'Aye it's collapsed into the ballot box,' he says. Boothman's an old fox and not easily caught out.
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There's Hutcheon of the Record, scurrying hither and yon, fresh from having chivvied Sir Alex Ferguson and Graeme Souness into backing Davy Russell to take the seat for Labour. If he had lost badly then to Hutcheon would have fallen the task of finding some lipstick for his front page the following day.
The changes that social media have wrought in the newspaper industry are never starker than when applied to an election night. The task now is to transmit your thoughts as they're happening and based on little more than the body language of the participants and the snatched asides of party activists which you must first rinse of its in-built prejudice. Even as you're sending out your 20-word digital despatches you know you risk being confounded at any moment by incoming kites and the excursions and alarums of the counting floor.
My paper is now asking for a selfie of me with Mr Learmonth and Ms McCurdy where the trick once more is to channel an air of authority and confidence that I'm not really feeling. Our editor, Catherine Salmond, kindly calls us her 'top team' in her social media post. On my feed though, a chap is begging to differ. He calls us 'filthy partisan sock puppets for England.' Always mindful of everyone's mental health, I'm glad he's got it off his chest.
McKenna, Learmonth and McCurdy: Salmond's top team (Image: Newsquest) The night then becomes all about juggling narratives. And in the 48 hours since Mr Russell's seemingly unlikely victory it's been about trying to discern the runes of what his win portends.
The most profoundly important consequence of Labour's triumph and Reform's massive electoral breakthrough here is that Scottish independence is off the table for another generation, effectively killed off by the SNP's own folly. The SNP now exists for one purpose only: to try to cling to power in Holyrood by any means necessary. Sir John Curtice has already predicted that Reform, on the basis of their showing on Thursday, could win up to 28 seats in 2026. That alone kills independence until at least 2031 and then only as an unlikely prospect.
What should worry the SNP most is that the Yes vote in 2014 was reinforced by up to 30% of traditional Labour voters who backed independence as a means of decoupling from a UK polity which was being controlled by the hard right Toryism of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Now that the SNP have effectively ditched independence there's no reason for any former Labour voter to stay with them.
During this campaign, the SNP's obsession with gender politics also came home to roost: not so much on the doorsteps, but in the calibre of people they sent out to them. The course of the GRR debate didn't harm them as much as the resignations en masse of hard-working, intelligent and reasonable female activists who had been the backbone of their success between 2007 and 2024. They were missing at the UK election in 2024 and again last week in South Lanarkshire and the results are there for all to see.
The disconnection between professional politics and the everyday people of Scotland has never been more starkly evident than with this party. A slew of poisonous social media attacks in the last 48 hours on the Hamilton, Stonehouse and Larkhall voters by prominent SNP supporters (and at least one Councillor) has been depressing to behold. The clock is now ticking for John Swinney's leadership as the wage thieves on his backbenches begin to tumble to this and what it means for their mortgages and school fees. But time has already been called on Scottish independence.
Counting begins for the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election at the South Lanarkshire Council headquarters in Hamilton. (Image: Jane Barlow/PA Wire)
Meanwhile, Scottish Labour should probably calm down now. To read some analysis of their admittedly adroit campaign in South Lanarkshire you'd have thought it had been run by alchemists who'd found the secret of turning base metal into gold. Behave yourselves. Labour has a longer term problem here and solving it will mean getting real about the challenge of Reform.
In Scotland there has always been a large cohort of aspirational working class: well-informed; skilled and conservative in their community and family values. It was these people who handed the Conservatives the only electoral majority vote percentage in a Scottish election as they did in 1955.
It has been thought that societal changes; the upward progression of the Irish/Catholic community in Scotland and the class malevolence of Thatcherism had killed mass Toryism for good. To admit to voting Tory in some of Scotland's working-class communities was to risk becoming a social and cultural pariah.
But here's the nightmare scenario for Labour in Scotland. What if these voters hadn't merely held their noses and voted reluctantly for Reform as a howl against a supercilious Holyrood elite? What if instead they'd gladly voted for them because it didn't indicate class betrayal and was thus safe to do so?
One senior Labour figure told me yesterday that the Scottish left in general, faced with the challenge of Reform, must re-imagine what it actually stands for. 'The Left in Scotland has been too focused on identity politics and flying flags for issues that aren't of concern to ordinary working people,' he told me.
Scottish Labour's Davy Russell arrives at the count before being declared winner for the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election (Image: Jane Barlow/PA Wire)
'There needs to be some very deep thinking on what we stand for on what it means to be on the Left. And then we must seek to communicate those priorities. You can say what you like about Tony Blair, but he built a broad coalition in a party where John Prescott, Gordon Brown and John Reid thrived.'
It's doubtful if these men would get house-room inside Keir Starmer's Labour Party now. UK Labour is currently speaking to no-one but some of London's salon neighbourhoods around Canary Wharf, Islington and Shoreditch and the café society of the Southside of Glasgow. What Davy Russell represents is more in tune with what their former voters expect of Labour.