Hamilton By-election Could Be Litmus Test for Scotland's Shifting Political Allegiances
The upcoming by-election in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse—where the Scottish National Party (SNP), Labour, and Reform UK are each hoping to boost their standing—is expected to offer a glimpse into voter sentiment ahead of the 2026 Holyrood elections.
The seat, long held by the SNP since its inception in 2011, was vacated following the death of veteran MSP Christina McKelvie.
In the 2021 Holyrood election, McKelvie secured a 4,582-vote lead over Labour, capturing 46.2 percent of the vote. Yet Labour's 4.1-point gain in vote share signalled a modest resurgence and could give Anas Sarwar's party a plausible chance of reclaiming the seat.
While First Minister John Swinney has declared the by-election
Yet it is Reform that could deliver the true upset. Nigel Farage's party is
If Reform were to win the seat, it would be their first MSP and a symbolic breakthrough less than a year ahead of the 2026 Holyrood elections.
The Candidates
As the campaign enters its final stretch, all candidates have focused on issues familiar to many across Scotland: NHS waiting lists, declining town centres, cuts to pensioner benefits, and the spiralling cost of living.
Related Stories
2/3/2025
2/1/2025
The SNP's candidate, South Lanarkshire Councillor Katy Loudon, has pledged to defend public services and oppose what she describes as Westminster-imposed austerity.
'Take the issue of rising energy bills: under Labour, pensioners are being hit hard with cuts to winter fuel payments. The SNP is committed to bringing these payments back, to help those most in need,' she said.
Loudon has previously contested the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election in 2023 and the Rutherglen seat in the 2024 general election, both times unsuccessfully.
Labour's candidate, Davy Russell, is a businessman and political newcomer who has drawn
Despite the controversy, Russell has stressed his local roots—he was born in Quarter and attended school in Hamilton—and pledged to put
Reform candidate in the Hamilton, Larkhall, and Stonehouse by-election Ross Lambie and Councillor Thomas Kerr attend a party event in Hamilton, Scotland, on May 31, 2025.
JeffReform's Ross Lambie, a former Conservative councillor from a South Lanarkshire mining village, is campaigning as a voice for voters disillusioned with both Holyrood and Westminster.
'We don't need to spend years of debate and millions of taxpayers' cash on court cases to establish what a woman is. No we don't,' he said.
He has also criticised energy imports as driving up bills and called illegal immigration 'obvious' misuse of the system.
Blame, Brexit, and Backlash
The
However, voter dissatisfaction with devolved SNP governance remains in key areas like health, education, and transport—areas where the party has full responsibility.
Reform, for its part, has focused on what it calls systemic mismanagement by the political establishment.
Farage, speaking to reporters in Aberdeen on Monday,
He pointed to Reform's performance in the May local elections as proof of what the party can accomplish in Labour-leaning areas in Scotland.
The campaign has not been without controversy. Reform came under fire for a party advertisement suggesting Labour leader Anas Sarwar would 'prioritise the Pakistani community' in Scotland.
In response, Farage
The dispute comes shortly after Swinney hosted a
Reform supporters condemned their exclusion, calling it 'unjustified.'
With days to go before ballots are cast, Hamilton, Larkhall, and Stonehouse has become more than a local race, it is a litmus test for shifting loyalties, voter frustration, and the future direction of Scottish politics.
PA Media contributed to this report.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Washington Post
2 hours ago
- Washington Post
MAGA and the single girl
GRAPEVINE, Tex. — 'We are witnessing a cultural revolution.' Alex Clark stood center stage in a hotel ballroom on Friday evening, all business in her tweed minidress, pearls and beehive bun. The influencer and podcast host was addressing the hundreds of attendees who had gathered for the Young Women's Leadership Summit, an annual conference hosted by MAGA youth group Turning Point USA. Perched on a pair of periwinkle platform heels, Clark laid out the tenets of that cultural revolution, one alliterative prescription at a time. 'Less Prozac, more protein!' she said. 'Less burnout, more babies! Less feminism, more femininity!' Clark, whose 'Culture Apothecary' podcast for Turning Point vaulted her to the forefront of the 'Make America Healthy Again' movement, was articulating her vision for a new conservative womanhood — one that fused its traditional pillars of faith and family with wellness culture. 'This is Whole Foods meets The West Wing,' she said. 'It's collagen, calluses, and conviction. It's castor oil, Christ, and a well-stocked pantry.' The right has 'the girls who lift weights, eat clean, have their hormones balanced, have their lives together,' Clark said. The left, meanwhile, has 'TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks and a ring light.' All this amounted, by her calculation, to the notion that conservatives are now 'the cool kids' and 'mainstream.' 'We're not running from culture anymore,' she continued. 'We're running it.' Are they? President Donald Trump's most enthusiastic supporters like to imagine that his narrow victory in the 2024 popular vote signals a wholesale rejection of liberal cultural values and institutions. Turning Point leader Charlie Kirk has suggested that liberal ideas prevailed in the past because media and tech leaders had stacked the deck, and that was changing. 'We are the zeitgeist now,' Caroline Downey, the editor in chief of a conservative lifestyle magazine, recently told attendees of a party in Washington. Trump's gains among younger voters, including young women — Kamala Harris still won these groups, but by relatively small margins — have been particularly exciting to the soothsayers of the MAGA cultural revolution. Sure, maybe it was concerns about the economy and the job market, but hear them out: Maybe it was also a backlash against toxic feminism, trans people and the woke police. And what, exactly, is the conservative culture in the age of Trump's second coming? What does it think conservative women should want? These were the questions facing the roughly 3,000 young women, mostly ages 16 to 26, as they flitted around the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center in a smear of pastels and florals — ruffles on their dresses, cowboy boots on their feet, bows on their curls. The aesthetic could be summed up as Laura Ingalls Wilder-core, like if the little house on the prairie had been down the street from a Sephora. The conference's Pinterest board of fashion inspiration featured prairie skirts and Kate Middleton-esque silhouettes; its playlist claimed Taylor Swift, Harry Styles and Dua Lipa. There were booths selling toothpaste with 'zero ingredients discovered by NASA' and athletic gear from a company 'unapologetic' in its mission to keep transgender women out of women's sports. There were T-shirts instructing you to 'Call Her Crunchy' and tote bags declaring that 'Motherhood is my resistance.' There were the sounds of babies — crying, cooing, nursing — in the background, clutched to the breasts of young mothers who bounced and rocked them in the back of the ballroom. Some of the women wore 'Make America Great Again' hats, but only a few. Trump didn't come up much. The focus was on culture, not politics. After Clark delivered her manifesto on Friday evening, Charlie Kirk's wife, Erika, took the stage to warn against prioritizing work over family. 'You will always be able to create your own company, but children, family, your husband, marriages — that is not a renewable resource,' she said. Of course, many of them wanted careers, she added, acknowledging she herself had an online ministry and a line of biblical streetwear ('They said Noah was a conspiracy then it rained,' reads an $88 hoodie). 'I don't want you to be chasing a paycheck and a title and a corner office,' Erika told the women, only to 'sacrifice such a short window that you have in this time period.' Later, Charlie joined her onstage to take relationship questions from the audience. Erika advised the women to make themselves 'godly' and 'attract the man He made for you.' Specifically: dress modestly, save yourself for marriage, don't curse and gossip. Charlie — who, at an event later in the weekend, would tell the women that college is a 'scam' but a good place to pursue the proverbial 'Mrs.' degree — admonished that if they're not married with kids by age 30, the chances of either happening for them will drop precipitously. 'To the women who are getting married after 30, that's okay,' Erika added, softening the blow. 'I'm trying to bridge the gap here, because it is okay. It's not ideal — it's not probably the best statistical-odd position for you, but God is good, and — ' 'There's nothing wrong with it — ' Kirk interjected. 'Right,' Erika said, cutting him off. The audience laughed. "It's just, I find... ' Her husband shook his head and threw his hands up in spousal surrender. 'If you just want happy talk, then that's fine.' The next day, the line to meet Erika was at least 300 women long, snaking past the booths with the 'Raw Milk Revival' posters and the 'Dump Your Socialist Boyfriend' stickers. For some, the Kirks' advice about how and when to think of marriage had been clarifying. 'If you have any confusion about the steps of womanhood, they are covering all of that, which has been super helpful and insightful,' Lauren Thacker, a 19-year-old from Fort Worth, told The Washington Post the morning after Erika and Charlie's Q&A. For others, it was anxiety-provoking. 'I thought about that laying in bed last night!' said Wren Gordon, 32, a single woman from the Dallas area. 'I thought I would be done having children at this point in my life, not still waiting to get married,' she said. 'So, yeah, that really does freak me out. I have to rely on God and His timing. He's never late for anything.' Later that day, Nicole Hadar, a high-schooler from Massachusetts, approached the microphone in a smocked blue dress to press Charlie Kirk on what, exactly, he thought women should be aspiring to. 'I was wondering if you could clarify what the mission of this summit is, because it's a Young Women's Leadership Summit, and all of the women that spoke on that stage today and yesterday were there because they pursued a career.' As far as Hadar could tell, the takeaway from the conference 'was that I should, quote, get married and have babies.' Murmurs and some giggles rippled across the room. 'That's interesting,' Kirk replied from the stage. His face scrunched into a thoughtful grimace. 'I wouldn't say all of them are there because they pursued a career — maybe I'd have to think about the entire career.' He stammered a bit before continuing. 'I could flip it on you,' he told the high-schooler. 'The people that pursued a career are telling you to pursue kids. Maybe they know something you don't know.' Hadar asked for the microphone back. 'But don't you think that they, like, had children and got married to their wonderful husbands because of their career?' she said. 'Like, if they didn't pursue that career, that wouldn't have happened? I thought that one of the speakers today was really cool about this, and she talked a bit about how you can have a child and a family while also pursuing your career.' An unscheduled panel discussion seemed to be taking shape. 'Again, that's for every one person to decide,' Kirk countered. The mission of the summit, he ultimately concluded, 'is whatever takeaway you want to have' — a renewed sense of patriotism, of 'traditional norms and roles,' of 'true femininity — not this toxic type.' 'But I'll also tell you this,' Kirk added. 'I hope that some of you ... walk away with a warning that a career-driven life is very empty.' You notice how everyone's dressed and how I'm dressed? I'm dressed like a New Yorker.' Arynne Wexler, in a black tube top and a long white skirt, stood out against the sea of nursery tones and florals. Not that she minds. 'Maybe a liberal would come here and be afraid of floral dresses, but I'm not afraid of the milkmaid dress,' she says. 'I just don't dress like that.' She was hanging out in the convention center lobby on Saturday afternoon ahead of her Sunday morning panel on 'Next Gen Female Voices: Media, Culture & Impact.' Wexler grew up in Westchester County, New York, and graduated from Wharton. She runs a popular Instagram account where she mocks Gen Z college degrees as 'pescatarian arts with a concentration on hating white people' and calls the WNBA 'welfare for tall lesbians' — but she'd delete her account tomorrow if she could trade it in for a husband and kids. She is Jewish, and religious. She eats healthy, but when it comes to the most recent iteration of the cultural right, Wexler has her limits. 'RFK can take that diet Dr Pepper out of my cold, dead, aspartame-filled fingers — he's not f---ing going near that,' she says. Also: 'I'm not gonna use your f---ing pronouns.' she says. (Wexler apparently missed Erika Kirk's advice to 'harness your tongue in a way that's biblical.') She believes there are plenty of people like her out there — those with 'common sense, patriotic values' — who feel culturally out of place among conservatives. The 2024 election cycle had been an 'ascendant time' for the right, she said, but that was partly because people were sick of the excesses of the left — the people Wexler would describe at her panel as 'androgynous pixie haircut unbathed Marxist freaks in polycules.' But a backlash against liberal ways of life isn't the same as an endorsement of the opposite. 'I do not see the popular vote as supporting conservative culture,' Wexler said. 'We love being extreme and telling people they have to meet us where we are in culture. I don't agree with that.' The last person to address the young women was conservative commentator Brett Cooper. Cooper is 26, recently married, and pregnant. Her YouTube channel has 1.57 million subscribers, a following she's built with a cheerful delivery and a penchant for pop culture. Onstage, Cooper told the story of her mother, whose career-oriented friends had mocked her when she left academia to raise Cooper and her siblings. Feminists and the left, Cooper said, had made a 'grave error' when they chose to champion the idea that 'a woman's value and happiness existed only in her work.' As a response to that error, the 'tradwife' aesthetic made sense. But perhaps, Cooper ventured, the pendulum had swung too far in some corners of conservatism — which had become as 'polarizing and puritanical as what the left was doing years ago,' she said. 'Some people might think that I'm crazy for getting up here on conservative women's conference and saying all of this,' Cooper said. 'But I think it's important to say this because I know that, personally, I fall somewhere between these two extreme binaries that we have been presented with. I'm sure that many of you do as well.' 'Tell 'em, Brett!' someone shouted from the audience. 'I'm not here to say that you need to chase being a wife and a mother and finding an amazing career and stay healthy and not eat seed oils and be engaged in politics and, and, and,' Cooper continued. 'That is really not reasonable. That's not the point.' (Later, over email, she explained her decision to address this in her speech. 'I believe young women want — and deserve — a nuanced approach to work and family,' she wrote. 'Life is more complicated than an X thread.') Letting go of living up to others' expectations and building a life that works for you. It's a sensible bit of wisdom — and not an especially political one. The young women shuffled out of the ballroom for a final time, still buzzing from Cooper's closer. To Leona Salinas, 20, she'd gotten permission to be whoever she wanted. 'Don't overwhelm yourself with thinking that you aren't good enough, career-wise, just because you want to have children,' she said. 'You can't have it all, literally. You don't have to be a career girl boss, you just have to be ambitious in what you do.' 'And as long as you have that — like, I'm literally getting chills.' Salinas paused and rubbed her forearms. 'As long as you have that, you really will be at your peak happiness. And that is what God wants from all of us.'
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Birmingham council leader insists net zero ambitions are not being ‘sidelined'
The leader of Birmingham City Council has insisted the organisation's net zero ambitions are not being sidelined. The council declared a climate emergency in 2019, saying it would aspire to become net zero carbon by 2030 - or as soon as possible thereafter. The authority said its net zero ambitions were about reducing and removing greenhouse gases to mitigate against increasing climate risk. READ MORE: Watch tense moment Birmingham council leader faces bins strike fury as man asks 'would you' The term specifically means achieving a balance between the greenhouse gas emitted into the atmosphere and the greenhouse gases removed from it. The council's annual net zero report covering 2023 said last year the authority was making 'good progress' in tackling its emissions and had brought together its key teams working on climate change. But during a meeting this week, Green Party councillor Julien Pritchard asked why the annual report for 2024 had not been brought before full council yet - and questioned whether the council's climate work was still a key focus. During the last two years, the net zero reports were published ahead of meetings at the start of the year in either January or February. 'We have a rather crowded agenda of reports that have been coming through city council,' council leader John Cotton told the meeting of the city council yesterday, June 17. 'The intention was to bring the [net zero] report to this meeting - unfortunately, some other issues of business meant that had to be moved back. 'But that will be brought to the next meeting of city council.' Coun Pritchard responded that it was 'a bit disappointing' they would have to wait until July for the report. 'It doesn't fill people with a lot of confidence that the council is living up to its climate change commitments when it can't even report on its progress once a year,' he said. 'Can you reassure us that the council's climate work isn't being sidelined?' READ MORE: Birmingham set to welcome more Afghan refugees amid 'perilous conditions' under Taliban rule Coun Cotton said he was aware 'we live in political times where there's someone to question the whole concept of net zero'. 'That is not a position that this administration of this council will ever take,' the Labour councillor continued. 'The reasons why we've not brought the annual report to council is purely around the pipeline of business that comes before this meeting. 'I can absolutely assure him the work to ensure net zero takes place in this council 365 days a year.' In last year's report, the council said it took numerous important steps on the road to net zero. This included securing funding to improve the energy efficiency of 2,076 council homes; delivering the £1.7m natural rivers and green corridors project; and installing 828 electric vehicle charge points across the city. 'We are proud of our successes to date,' the council said in early 2024. 'We look forward to working with our city's stakeholders and citizens in delivering our climate change, nature and net zero programme, reducing our emissions and improving our resilience to climate change.'
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
'A Calamitous Failure': Social Media Reacts In Fury As HS2 Is Delayed Yet Again
Transport secretary Heidi Alexander has confirmed that HS2 has been delayed yet again – and the reaction on social media was predictably withering. She told MPs there is 'no route' to meet the target date of having it up and running by 2033, and refused to say when it might be. 'It's an appalling mess, but it's one we will sort out,' Alexander said. 'We need to set targets which we can confidently deliver, that the public can trust, and that will take time. But rest assured, where there are inefficiencies, we will root them out.' HS2 was originally due to run between London and Birmingham, then on to Manchester and Leeds, but the project was severely curtailed by the previous Conservative government because of spiralling costs. In 2013, it was estimated to cost £37.5 billion for the entire project, including the now-scrapped extensions from Birmingham. But in June last year, the cost of building the line between London and Birmingham would be up to £66 billion. Alexander said: 'This government will get the job done between Birmingham and London. 'We won't reinstate cancelled sections we can't afford, but we will do the hard but necessary work to rebuild public trust.' On X, the news was greeted with predictable anger. A calamitous failure of the British state.. of scrutiny, accountability, responsibility and political will… and not by any means an isolated example. — steve richards (@steverichards14) June 18, 2025 I always take hs2 as one of the most prominent examples of how fucked we are as a country. 16 years at least now for a single rail line. China would knock it out in an afternoon. Embarrassing. — Corvideo Crowjima MD𓅃🏳️🌈🇵🇸 (@Minignu1) June 18, 2025 HS2 will end up as the defining joke of the 21st was a ridiculous concept from the start, made only more ridiculous by the advent of modern technology which has already made it an unnecessary waste of time and — Darren Parkin (@EditorParkin) June 18, 2025 What an absolute farce & waste of billions of pounds. Stop HS2 now, it's not too late. @UKLabour@Conservatives@reformparty_uk — percy greenfingers (@pgreenfingers) June 18, 2025 I feel like we've been posting about HS2 for longer than social media has existed. — Simple Politics (@easypoliticsUK) June 18, 2025 #HS2 - all that destruction, all that disruption and any (very limited) benefits disappear even further into futurehttps:// — Natalie Bennett (@natalieben) June 18, 2025 New Transport Secretary Admits She Doesn't Know How Much Renationalising The Railways Will Cost HS2 U-Turn: Rishi Sunak Confirms Manchester Line Is Scrapped 'Do You Feel Humiliated?': Trevor Phillips Monsters Michael Gove Over HS2
