Keir Starmer has told jubilant Scottish Labour activists that they “blew the doors off” with the party’s overwhelming victory in Thursday’s Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection. The party leader said the result was “not just about a couple of months of turmoil but years and years of non-delivery” on the part of Holyrood’s Scottish National party government. Speaking at a victory rally in Rutherglen on Friday morning alongside the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, and the winning candidate, Michael Shanks, Starmer said to whoops and cheers: “They said that we couldn’t change the Labour party and we did it. They said that we couldn’t win in the south of England and the north of England, and we did it. They said: ‘You’ll never beat the SNP in Scotland,’ and Rutherglen, you did it. You blew the doors off!” In a result that exceeded Scottish Labour’s expectation, Shanks secured double the vote of his closest rival, the SNP’s Katy Loudon, winning by 17,845 votes to 8,399 and a resounding swing of more than 20 percentage points. The Conservative candidate, Thomas Kerr, lost his deposit.
Earlier in the morning, Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s Westminster leader, said the party needed an urgent postmortem to investigate why it had lost so comprehensively, and admitted on BBC Radio Scotland that some SNP voters switched sides in the byelection. The contest was triggered after constituents voted for the former SNP MP Margaret Ferrier to be removed from her seat after she admitted breaking Covid travel restrictions but refused to step down. Flynn said the party needed to respond better to the cost of living crisis – the overarching issue in the byelection. “I don’t think you need to do any focus groups to realise that people are skint,” he said. Speaking on BBC Breakfast on Friday morning, Sarwar said Scottish Labour was “targeting significant gains” at the next general election. “I’m very clear that Scotland will lead the way in delivering a UK-wide Labour government.”
He told reporters after the rally that it would be a “big mistake” to interpret the result solely as a reaction to the SNP. “People were coming out in their thousands in the rain to vote for change and a changed Labour party.” Turnout on Thursday was low, 37.19% compared with 66.5% at the last general election in 2019, in the seat to the south-east of Glasgow that has changed hands four times between the SNP and Labour since 2010.
Following predictions that a similar swing at a general election could result in Scottish Labour winning more than 40 seats, Starmer refused to speculate on potential seat numbers, but reiterated that the road to Downing Street “runs through Scotland”. Starmer said the high number of activists who were galvanised to participate in the campaign was a reflection of “a party on its way up”. After the Guardian reported that key figures from Tony Blair’s 1997 campaign were warning him to be more radical before the party’s conference in Liverpool this weekend, Starmer insisted that, “bang on target, right on time”, he would be revealing more of his “positive case for change” in the coming days. With polling showing that, despite the slump in SNP popularity, support for independence remains around 50% among Scottish voters, Starmer said a second referendum was “the last thing that anybody should be focused on”. Instead, he highlighted the “thousands of conversations” had on doorsteps in the constituency about the cost of living crisis and state of public services.
Speaking alongside Starmer, Sarwar said: “Even the people in the SNP don’t believe there’ll be an independence referendum”. He added: “It is really, really clear for people, regardless if you voted yes or no [in the 2014 referendum], if you want change, Scottish Labour is now the party of change and electing a UK Labour government is that change.”
Scotland’s first recall byelection was also Humza Yousaf’s first major electoral test since he became the SNP leader and first minister in the spring. Responding to the “disappointing” result, he said the party would “reflect on what we have to do to regain the trust of the people of Rutherglen and Hamilton West”. Yousaf said the “circumstances of this byelection were always very difficult for us”. He also partly blamed the collapse in Tory support, which he said “went straight to Labour”.