British politics has witnessed some spectacular byelections over the past four years – with Liberal Democrats ousting Conservatives in the west of England, and Labour overturning a 20,000 Tory majority in Yorkshire. But there is a strong case for saying that the single most pivotal byelection of the current parliament has not taken place yet. Such a contest was, however, triggered this week by the announcement of the successful recall petition against Margaret Ferrier, the former Scottish National party (SNP) MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West, who had most recently been sitting as an independent.
Ferrier has had to quit because she broke pandemic regulations in September 2020. Unwell, she travelled from Scotland to Westminster, spoke in a Commons debate and then, having tested positive for Covid, returned north by train. She pleaded guilty to an offence in 2021, for which she was sentenced to community service, and in March this year MPs voted to suspend her for 30 days. On Tuesday it was announced that 15% of her constituents had signed the recall petition, sparking the long-expected contest.
Two special factors stand out about this byelection. One is that it again underscores the unforgiving and punitive mood of voters towards politicians who breached Covid rules. Ferrier joins Boris Johnson as one of its victims. The other is that the byelection is in Scotland.
Scotland has only 59 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons (falling to 57 after boundary changes at the next general election), but in the last three general elections these have been overwhelmingly won by the SNP. The nationalists have 48 of Scotland’s Westminster seats at present, to the Conservatives’ six, the Lib Dems’ four and Labour’s solitary one. So if Labour is to take power in Westminster, wins in some of its former Scottish strongholds are essential.
Rutherglen and Hamilton West is one of the most winnable of Labour’s targets in Scotland. Despite its name, it is essentially a Glasgow seat, stretching eastwards along the Clyde, not far short of the Gorbals district in the inner city, then down into Lanarkshire and beyond the former mill town of Blantyre, where there is a notable museum in David Livingstone’s birthplace. The Rutherglen district itself carries many all too familiar scars of urban deindustrialisation, but its main street sports a terrific Scottish baronial gothic town hall, complete with tower and turrets, which is category A listed.
Ferrier’s majority here over Labour in 2019 was 5,230 votes. So Labour will need a 5% swing to win. Given that Scottish polls currently show an SNP to Labour swing of more than 10%, a Labour gain is clearly on the cards. Rutherglen and Hamilton West is already a swing seat. Labour won here in 2010 and 2017, the nationalists in 2015 and 2019.
But the result will matter way beyond the streets of places such as Cambuslang or Blantyre. It will speak to the electoral mood of the many other west of Scotland battleground seats. It also will go a long way to show the scale of any likely change in party fortunes across Scotland since the fall of Nicola Sturgeon and the turmoil caused by the police’s Operation Branchform investigation into the SNP’s finances. And it will tell Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak which of them looks likelier to head the largest UK party after the general election. The stakes are therefore very high.
The byelection date has not been set yet, though it is likely to be in October. Yet, when it comes, Rutherglen and Hamilton West will be a high noon contest. The redrawn seats of the Greater Glasgow area – such as Rutherglen (as the current byelection seat will become), Glasgow North East, Airdrie and Shotts, Inverclyde and Renfrewshire West, and Motherwell, Wishaw and Carluke – make up one of the most concentrated battlegrounds of the next election, if not the most concentrated battleground of all.
This byelection is a contest that Labour cannot afford to lose. Its election campaign supremo Morgan McSweeney has made regular visits. Yet, as Uxbridge and South Ruislip showed, local factors can derail a nationally directed campaign. The London and Glasgow suburbs may feel like very different worlds, but the SNP and the Conservatives will have absorbed the message from Uxbridge. In Rutherglen and West Hamilton, the SNP will use every trick in its extensive campaign playbook to harness important policy differences – on issues such as gender recognition and child benefit – between Scottish Labour and UK Labour.
The other side of the same coin is that Humza Yousaf, who succeeded Sturgeon as SNP leader and first minister in March, desperately needs a win too. Support for the SNP has fallen more steeply than support for its signature goal of independence. But Yousaf is a less charismatic presence in Scottish life than Sturgeon and his personal ratings are poor. Anything less than a strong showing in the byelection – not easy in the circumstances of Ferrier’s fall – will lean into the end-of-an-era feel that now dogs the party.
It is sometimes said that Labour cannot win an overall UK majority without winning in Scotland. That’s an exaggeration – in 1997 Labour would have secured an overall majority on its 328 English seat wins alone, even if it had not won another 90 in Scotland and Wales.
But a Labour party that starts from 196 UK seats next time, as Starmer’s will do, needs to win more seats in Scotland. Such an opportunity has opened up in the wake of Labour’s UK-wide revival and as a result of the self-inflicted wounds of the once all-conquering SNP. Rutherglen and Hamilton West will put that possibility on the line. The consequences will be felt in every corner of British politics.
• This article was amended on 3 August 2023 because an earlier version referred to Margaret Ferrier as the SNP MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West, with the new version noting that she “now sits as an independent”. It was further amended on 4 August 2023 because it is not the case that she now sits as an independent MP; her seat became vacant as soon as the result of the recall petition was announced on 1 August.
• Martin Kettle is a Guardian associate editor and columnist
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