The stakes in a by-election are unusually high
—it’s all mince,” says a retired cleaner in Rutherglen, when asked how she would vote in an upcoming by-election. The last time voters in that suburb south of Glasgow went to the polls she backed the Scottish National Party ; this time she might plump for Labour. Her ambivalence, apparently shared by many formervoters, reflects the party’s dramatic decline.
Labour could hardly find a better place than Rutherglen to test its Scottish fortunes. In the general election its priority will be to pick up the handful of seats it won in the election in 2017. Rutherglen has swung in recent general elections between the and Labour . In 2019 Ms Ferrier won there by 5,230 votes. A swing of only 5% would return it to Labour.
Such a boost from Scotland would ease Labour’s path to winning outright. Sir John calculates that for every dozen seats Labour picks up in Scotland “you can knock a couple of points off the lead it would need across theto win an overall majority”. Strength in Scotland also reduces the risk of a hung Parliament, and thus the awkward prospect for Labour of being dependent on support from small parties, such as the.
For such voters, a desire to kick out the Conservatives has been intensified by Labour’s lead in the polls. That surged following a disastrous mini-budget in September 2022. A ruling by the Supreme Court, in November, that an independence referendum is not possible unless Westminster agrees, has made it harder for theto argue that it could bring about secession. It also weakened the case for Unionists to vote Conservative.
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