(CN) — In a special election that spells continued trouble for the largest party in Scotland, the Scottish National Party suffered a historic defeat to a resurgent Labour Party, results released on Friday revealed.
Michael Shanks, the Labour candidate, won 59% of the vote in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West parliamentary constituency near Glasgow, leaving the SNP candidate, Katy Loudon, with just 28%.
The result is a stark turnaround from the last time the constituency went to the polls, during the 2019 U.K. general election. Then, the nationalist party picked up 44% of the vote to Labour’s 34%.
The loss of support in Scotland over the past decade has been a key factor that prevented Labour from re-entering the U.K. government since their last term of office ended in 2010, when the Conservatives took power.
Scottish constituencies are viewed as crucial in securing Labour a comfortable path back to Westminster government at the upcoming general election, widely expected next year.
The special election was called after Scottish National Party member Margaret Ferrier was removed from Parliament because she broke coronavirus lockdown rules.
The result is indicative of a wider picture in which political support and momentum appears to be draining away from the SNP, which has dominated Scotland’s politics for more than a decade.
“There’s no part of this country where Labour can’t win,” said Shanks in his victory speech. In reference to both the Conservative-led British government in Westminster and the SNP-led Scottish administration in Edinburgh, Shanks concluded that voters have “had more than enough of managed decline, more than enough of division, and more than enough of distracted, chaotic government.”
Scotland has its own parliament, which oversees areas not specifically designated to the British Parliament.
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sawar described the bigger-than-expected victory as a “seismic result” which showed that “Scottish politics has fundamentally changed.”
Though never an SNP stronghold, the scale of victory in the Glaswegian outskirts suggests momentum is behind Scottish Labour at a crucial moment, with a British general election on the horizon. The result also spells danger for Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, who has struggled to assert his authority on the SNP since taking over as leader in March.
“It’s been a disappointing night,” conceded Yousaf, who insisted he would win back the trust of voters who have deserted the SNP in recent months.
The precarious position the national party now finds itself in is in stark contrast to only a year ago. Last October, the party was more than 20 percentage points ahead of their nearest challengers — then the Conservative Party — despite having been in power in Scotland for over 15 years. Their leader, Nicola Sturgeon, a popular and authoritative figure unrivaled within the party, was launching a new push for Scottish independence from the U.K. following a triumphant victory in Scottish elections.
However a Supreme Court verdict last November appeared to let some of the wind out of the independence movement’s sails. The court ruled that the Scottish Parliament — in which the SNP and Greens form a pro-independence majority — could not authorize a referendum without British government approval.
The decision left the SNP with an unclear strategy towards their primary goal, and internal divisions began to emerge. This was followed in February by the shock resignation of Sturgeon, who said that she no longer felt she was the right person to lead her party.
Sturgeon was later arrested as part of a police probe investigating the SNP’s finances in which her husband, Peter Murrell, is also implicated. The arrest plunged the party into crisis mode, with many retrospectively questioning the timing of Sturgeon’s apparently unrelated resignation.
The subsequent leadership election between Yousaf —Sturgeon’s preferred successor — and rival Kate Forbes was a bruising and confrontational process which exposed significant strategic and ideological divisions that Sturgeon had largely managed to keep under wraps.
Yousaf narrowly triumphed over Forbes, who had advocated a move to the center-right that strongly contrasted with Sturgeon’s approach. Since taking on the leadership, Yousaf has struggled to reunite his party, with Forbes remaining a prominent critic and becoming a figurehead of the party’s right-wing faction.
The internal instability and divisions have proved to be electoral gold dust for the Labour Party, which has closed the polling gap with the SNP to just a few percentage points.
This week’s damning special election result looks set to weaken Yousaf yet further, and strengthen the criticism of his rivals, at a particularly crucial moment. The SNP’s annual party conference starts Sunday. Former leader Alex Salmond has said that Yousaf has “days left” to save his leadership, as rivals begin to circle.
But it is not just the SNP that will be licking their wounds following the special election. Both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats failed to gain 5% of the vote in the poll, meaning they lost their electoral deposits — a down payment refunded to any party that reaches that percentage. The Labour Party appears to have benefited from declining support for all three of their opponents.
Traditionally the dominant party of Scotland, Labour saw their support decline as the SNP’s rose, starting from the mid-2000s. In recent years they had begun to slip into third place, as the fiercely unionist Conservatives and pro-independence SNP began to dominate an increasingly divisive debate over secession.
National leader Keir Starmer — increasingly positioning himself as a prime minister-in-waiting — has hailed the result as evidence that Labour is “the party of the change here in Scotland, the party of change in Britain, the party of change right across the whole country.”
However, Labour’s newfound popularity has largely come as the result of their opponent’s crises on both sides of the English-Scottish border. Starmer’s cautious approach to opposition has seen him remain tight-lipped on policy, in order to limit his rivals' potential lines of attack. It’s an approach that has succeeded so far but may not play so well in an election year, with a number of party grandees this week warning about the risk of complacency.
With Labour apparently resurgent in England and Scotland, the next election looks to be Starmer’s to lose. But while voters appear to have decided that they dislike his party the least, they have yet to see his would-be platform.
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
