As scores of Labour activists queued up for Keir Starmer’s final rallying speech before next week’s Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection, another queue was forming at the church next door. Inside the church hall in Burnbank, two volunteers, Alex Gilmour and Anne Paul, were preparing trays of cheese- and ham-filled rolls and cups of tea for about 80 local people who rely on its daily free breakfasts, its food bank and its council-funded money advice service. This byelection, to replace the disgraced former Scottish National party MP Margaret Ferrier, has been a head-to-head contest between Labour and the SNP, with the cost of living crisis, in-work poverty and Scotland’s overstretched health service the key issues on the doorstep. For Gilmour, a former mental health worker, the parish church’s services are where those crises bite hardest. Some of the cafe’s customers are “self-medicating” with alcohol, others are mentally unwell and some are homeless and living in “scatter flats” – short-term accommodation aimed at preventing rough sleeping.
“There’s a lot of people struggling with the cost of living now,” Gilmour said, as volunteers piled up heavily stuffed carrier bags of food on the church hall stage on Friday morning. “They want a politician that’s going to be honest, that’s going to be somebody standing up for them, somebody with integrity, and no just in it for themselves.” That antipathy to politics has been echoed on the doorsteps, say Labour activists. The Conservatives’ repeated crises, such as Partygate and Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget last year, mirrored in Scotland by the SNP’s internal feuding and the police inquiry into party finances, have left many voters in Rutherglen and Hamilton West deeply disillusioned. For Labour and the SNP this is a must-win byelection. Starmer has to prove that his centrist policies, his heavy emphasis on making work pay, his economic prudence and his divorce from Jeremy Corbyn’s tax and spend policies can win back seats in Scotland for Labour. Under Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, the SNP humiliated Labour in successive landslide election victories, leaving Labour with just one Westminster MP and languishing in third place at Holyrood.
Starmer’s ascendancy and the arrival of his close ally Anas Sarwar as Scottish Labour leader appears to have transformed its chances. Opinion polls show Labour support up at 35% – double its ratings three years ago – leaving it only a few points behind the SNP. Those shifts coincide with Labour’s shift to the centre under Starmer and the SNP’s drift to the left under Humza Yousaf, Sturgeon’s successor as first minister and SNP leader. Once great high taxation enthusiasts in Scotland, Labour now attacks the SNP for proposing council and income tax rises, and for a mooted congestion charge in Glasgow. If Michael Shanks, a cleancut and earnest modern studies teacher, fails to win the seat for Labour on 5 October, it will be a shock. Ever since MPs recommended earlier this year that Ferrier be suspended from Westminster for 30 days, in punishment for taking long train journeys and visiting local shops in 2021 while she suspected she had coronavirus, Labour’s election machine has been in overdrive. Pressed hard by Sarwar to prioritise Scotland, Starmer acknowledges the potential significance of a Labour win next Thursday. “There’s a big prize here,” he told the small rally next to the church, before urging party activists to “pump it up again” in the last six days of what has been a lengthy campaign. Jackie Baillie, Sarwar’s deputy, told the rally that 1,200 activists had been campaigning in the constituency since April; they had visited 80,000 households and spoken to 30,000 voters. “We have had the most amazing campaign,” she said. Yet there is little visible evidence of that on the quiet streets of Rutherglen and Hamilton West. The SNP has struggled to mobilise its activists for this contest; it hired a leaflet delivery company, allegedly using workers on zero-hours contracts. Its chief whip had to chide SNP MSPs to campaign.
Katy Loudon, the SNP’s candidate, is gamely trying to deflate expectations of a Labour rout, and says hundreds of SNP activists are about to descend on the seat for a final push. A part-time councillor and party worker, Loudon is fighting to make this byelection a battle over Starmer’s reluctance to commit to tax rises, his refusal to lift the two-child cap on child benefits and his U-turn over scrapping university tuition fees. “I’m asking people to vote SNP to say that we are not going to accept Keir Starmer’s lurch to the right. Where’s the hope in that? That’s not as good as it gets, Michael,” she told Shanks during a council workers hustings organised by the Unison union on Thursday. Shanks believes these attacks are not landing with voters, with the SNP – in power now for 16 years – presiding over deep cuts to council funding and NHS underfunding that has left 20,000 local voters on NHS waiting lists. “It’s a distraction tactic, to attack me,” he said. “The truth is they have tried to find wedge issues to cut through in this byelection but it hasn’t worked.” The voters, he said, “just don’t buy it”.