Labour’s biggest test yet is looming
On Thursday, Sir Keir Starmer faces perhaps his most critical leadership test to date. The outcome will provide a pointer on whether Starmer’s Labour party can win a majority at next year’s general election.
Scottish voters in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West Constituency are casting their vote in a crunch by-election. For the Labour leader, who knows only too well there is no route back to power that does not run through Scotland, this is a milestone moment, providing a key indication of whether former SNP voters are ready to desert their imploding party.
This also renders it the most significant electoral test Humza Yousaf has faced as leader. And he has every reason to be fearful.
We’re talking about a constituency that has bounced between Labour and SNP at every election since 2015.
The SNP – whose candidate Margaret Ferrier won the seat in 2019 before being suspended from the party for breaking lockdown rules – is defending a majority of just 5,000. This means Labour could win on a modest swing of about 6 per cent.
And as Iain Martin writes in Reaction today, “The opinion polls suggest Scottish swing voters, those less ideologically committed to leaving the UK, are swinging back to Labour as a result of the mess the Nationalists are in, but to what extent we don’t yet know.”
Polling expert Prof Sir John Curtice warns that it will be a big blow to morale if Starmer cannot win back a seat that even Corbyn managed to turn red in 2017.
But Labour’s candidate, secondary teacher Michael Shanks, is confident. Ferrier’s disgraced exit combined with Operation Branchform – the police investigation into the SNP’s finances – is the backdrop to this by-election, says Shanks. “People are very aware that the SNP has lost its way.”
The SNP’s own candidate, local councillor Katy Loudon, has tried to distract from this by seizing upon Starmer’s u-turn on the two-child benefit cap in an attempt to run a campaign with the message that Labour is no different from the Tories.
While Thursday is only really a battle between two parties, if Labour were to triumph, it’s worth paying attention to how many votes it seizes from Tory vs SNP defectors. In 2019, Conservatives secured 15 per cent of the vote in Rutherglen. If a Labour victory was largely achieved through Tory unionists voting red as a means to keep the SNP out, we’d have to be more careful about making generalisations about what might happen in key SNP-Labour battleground seats in 2024.
Even so, Thursday’s outcome is set to significantly shape the political narrative in Scotland – and the UK. A Labour victory would indicate that the party is on track to provide the solitary single seat it holds north of the border with some more company.
And a swing of at least 10 per cent to Labour, if repeated in a general election scenario, would make up to 20 SNP seats vulnerable. Such a result would certainly be evidence that Starmer can win sufficient seats in Scotland to secure a majority at the next general election.
It would also signal impending electoral meltdown for Scottish nationalists and perhaps mark the end of the era in which the SNP has dominated politics north of the border.
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