Rutherglen is a must win by-election for Labour
We are standing on Rutherglen high street. It is autumn 1997 and a gaggle of Scottish hacks is waiting in the Glasgow drizzle for one of the architects of the New Labour revolution. The tall figure of Peter Mandelson comes into view and we in the media move towards him, looking for a quote or some incident to liven up a campaign that has turned into a victory march. Mandelson has come to Glasgow to campaign for a “yes” vote in the devolution referendum, which led to Scotland getting its own parliament.
That autumn a number of New Labour grandees visited. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott emerged from a taxi branded Yes-Yes and played a saxophone in front of bemused voters.
Those were very strange times. New Labour was in its pomp, with Tony Blair having won a majority of 179 in the May general election. The delivery of a devolved Scottish parliament and the creation of a Welsh Assembly was supposed to herald the birth of a New Britain.
Scottish Labour was simultaneously master of all it surveyed while being paranoid about offending the leadership in London. New Labour took message control extremely seriously. There was a brittle quality to the party’s wielding of power, as though the winners could not quite believe they had won.
Still, to us observers in Rutherglen in 1997 it would have been incomprehensible that only a few years later the SNP would all but wipe out Labour north of the border. Yet that is what happened.
Even those of us – me included – who were sceptical of devolution on the grounds it risked letting in the Scottish National Party, could not have foreseen how fast the situation would deteriorate. Not only did the SNP get into power in Edinburgh, its stewardship of education, health, public transport and the economy proved so lamentable that it is not an exaggeration to say Scotland has been wrecked by the Nats.
We are about to find out to what extent this matters to Scottish voters. The SNP focus on identity politics, rather than delivery of anything useful, remains popular with the party’s core supporters who place leaving the UK above all else. This is still the case even though the party’s former leader Nicola Sturgeon is in disgrace and had to resign as first minister. Sturgeon is waiting to find out whether or not she will be charged as a result of the ongoing police investigation into SNP finances.
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.
On Thursday, all this will be tested in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election.
For Sir Keir Starmer, Labour leader, it is a must win. If the party triumphs on Thursday, it suggests he can win sufficient seats in Scotland to secure a majority at the next Westminster general election. Falling short would suggest not. For the SNP, defeat would constitute a humiliating confirmation of its slide.
A Labour win on Thursday will be an earthquake moment.
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