‘Labour can expect to win in Rutherglen. But there’s no such thing as a sure thing’

Nearly three years since Margaret Ferrier lost the SNP whip after a series of flagrant breaches of Covid regulations, and following a police investigation, a trial, a conviction, a Commons select committee review, a parliamentary suspension and a recall petition, we are finally set to see a by-election in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, probably in early October.

This could all have happened faster had Ferrier short-circuited the whole process and stepped down as an MP in 2020, as a great many people including the SNP’s then leader Nicola Sturgeon had called for. Then, the SNP would have been strongly favoured to retain the seat, with Sturgeon’s popularity riding high during the pandemic and Labour struggling to cut through across the UK. 

Circumstances have changed since then. Sturgeon has left the stage (if not the headlines) and her beleaguered successor Humza Yousaf faces a more challenging political context, complete with a resurgent Scottish Labour which fancies its chances of claiming a scalp under Anas Sarwar’s energetic leadership.

In fact, the outcome here shouldn’t be in much doubt. While the picture from opinion polls varies, and Scotland-only polls remain a relative rarity, the SNP’s lead over Labour has eroded significantly over the course of 2023. The three most recent polls of Westminster voting intention (from Survation and Redfield Wilton) put the gap at just 3 points – to put this into context, the difference at the 2019 election was 27 points.

Projections suggest that Scottish Labour can hope to gain as many as twenty seats at the next election, easing the task of winning a majority at Westminster. Rutherglen and Hamilton West is fourth on their list of targets, with a swing of under 5% required. That would suggest that Labour are very well placed here indeed.

This assumption is supported by two summer council by-elections, where Labour romped home ahead of the SNP in Bellshill and the confusingly named East Kilbride West, in both cases benefiting from sizeable swings. Neither ward is within the Rutherglen and Hamilton East constituency, but neither is far away either, and recent Scottish elections have seen relatively consistent swings across the broader Glasgow and Lanarkshire area. 

All other things being equal then, we should be expecting a comfortable Labour victory – with the magnitude of the swing from the SNP indicating roughly how many seats we can expect to turn from yellow to red at the next general election. Of course, it’s never that simple and both parties are fighting the seat hard.

Both are running a local candidate: Labour have put forward Michael Shanks – a teacher who ran in Glasgow North West in 2017, left Labour in spring 2019 in protest at antisemitism and the party’s then Brexit position before returning the following year, runs a scout group for disabled children and has run down every street in Glasgow. He has been a highly visible presence at the front and centre of Labour’s campaign (though Sarwar and Keir Starmer have also campaigned in the constituency).

The SNP candidate, Katy Loudon, is a sitting councillor for the Cambuslang East ward within the constituency. So far, she has had a lower profile than Shanks, with Yousaf the principal public face in the early days of a campaign which represents his biggest electoral test since taking office in March.

This difference reflects the broader approaches that the parties are taking. Labour are in large part fighting the by-election as a local contest, framing Shanks as a contrast to Ferrier. The SNP, by contrast, are training their fire squarely on Starmer, presenting the contest as a chance for Scots to reject the UK Labour Party’s alleged conservatism. 

In response to this, Shanks has been keen to stress his personal opposition to the two-child cap and the bedroom tax, and has sought to emphasise the differences between Scottish Labour’s position and the UK party’s stance. It remains to be seen how well that might neutralise the issue among left-leaning floating voters.

These strategies aren’t what we would normally expect. Conventional wisdom would dictate that the best chance for the underdogs – and the SNP are underdogs here – to spring a surprise would be to localise the race as much as possible, to try to make the context about specific factors rather than the general popularity of the parties involved.

This was of course the approach which enabled the Tories to defend Uxbridge at the same time as Labour overcame a much larger majority in Selby and Ainsty (and one which frequently pays off for the Liberal Democrats). By-elections offer a context in which local issues can dominate – as opposed to general elections, when the air war tends to drown out everything else.

Unfortunately for the SNP, that isn’t helpful when the local context is ‘the previous SNP MP was suspended from parliament after being convicted by a court of law of extensively breaching Covid regulations’, so the attempt to run hard against UK Labour (and play the old branch office card that has succeeded in the past) may be their only option.

Conversely, Labour – the party strongly favoured based on national trends – is seeking to localise the race, making it a choice between Shanks and Loudon (or, if they can pull it off, an implied choice between Shanks and ‘Margaret Ferrier’s candidate’).

Labour will still expect to win. If that happens, the size of that victory will tell us a lot about what to expect at next year’s general election: a handsome winning margin would be the best evidence yet that Labour’s revival north of the border is real. It would indicate that up to a couple of dozen of the seats won by the SNP in 2019 may be as vulnerable as the polls suggest, and would put Yousaf under more pressure. A narrower win would still be viewed with relief, but would suggest that the party is not yet on track to make dramatic progress next year. 

And if the SNP beat the odds and hold on, it will be deeply disappointing for Labour. When the party failed to break through in Uxbridge, it was unfortunate but could be attributed to specific local factors. The fact that the SNP are focusing on broader attack lines in Rutherglen and Hamilton West means that this situation is very different – there is no reason to expect this seat to be any worse for Labour than dozens of others in the central belt, and a loss here would call into question any path to victory running through Scotland.