Closing summary
The blog is coming to a close. Thank for you joining us, below is a roundup of today’s stories:
Labour has won a “seismic victory over the SNP in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection. Labour’s Michael Shanks beat his closest rival, the SNP’s Katy Loudon, by 17,845 votes to 8,399 – a majority of 9,446 and a resounding swing of more than 20%.
Keir Starmer told jubilant Scottish Labour activists that they “blew the doors off” with the party’s overwhelming victory in the 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 SNP government.
Pat McFadden, Labour’s national campaign coordinator, said the party’s conference will be “policy rich”. Speaking to GB News, he said: “You’ll see a policy rich conference and one that will make clear that as the country wants change, the only people who can deliver that change are the Labour party.”
Rishi Sunak failed to defend Suella Braverman’s remarks that a “hurricane” of illegal migrants was coming our way. Speaking to ITV’s This Morning, he was asked if he was embarrassed or ashamed when he heard Braverman talk. He said: “If you just take a step back, what do I think we all agree on? We all agree that Britain is an incredibly welcoming place.”
Support for Scottish independence still remains strong despite the drop in support for the SNP, according to new findings released by the Tony Blair Institute. Polling carried out by the institute found that 45% of respondents would vote yes in a new independence referendum, compared with 41% who would vote no, a four-point lead for independence.
Buses are to be brought back into public ownership in Liverpool, making it the second area outside London to regain control of its network. The Liverpool city region combined authority voted on Friday to adopt a franchising model. The mayor, Steve Rotheram, said it “marks the start of a new era for public transport in our area – we’re taking back control of our buses”.
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The Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection was the first Scottish election where new voter ID laws were in force, some voters were turned away, Severin Carrel reports
This was the first Scottish election where new voter identification rules for Westminster elections were in force and South Lanarkshire council confirmed there were isolated incidents were voters failed to bring any ID or the correct ID.
Those are being investigated on behalf of the Electoral Commission. In many cases the voters returned with the correct documents, officials said. All the main parties had flagged the new voter ID regulations with voters, to avoid mass refusals at polling stations.
Dale Vince, the green energy magnate, has said he is to stop funding direct action climate groups such as Just Stop Oil and instead funnel money towards getting the vote out for Labour at the next general election.
The Ecotricity founder, who has funded a string of disruptive environmental protest groups, has supported Just Stop Oil since its inception, and has previously said his funding for the group has totalled “some hundreds of thousands”.
This summer, Vince took to the streets with the climate protesters, joining their campaign of slow marches in central London.
He said that even though he was still “comfortable with their methods”, Just Stop Oil’s tactics had not worked fast enough and it was time for a new strategy.
“The next general election is the most important of our lifetimes,” he wrote in the Guardian.
Labour would employ a special envoy for those detained abroad unfairly, shadow foreign secretary David Lammy has said.
Speaking to the Evening Standard, Lammy said: “It’s important that those individuals that find themselves in those very, very difficult circumstances know that there’s someone there for them.”
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was detained in Iran for nearly six years, supports the move. She is due to speak at the Labour conference which begins this weekend.
She said: “A special envoy has been really successful in the US, and would be great in the UK.
“It gives families someone to turn to in extreme need who has power to bring together the different parts of government needed to solve these cases and stop injustices being deflected.”
It's time for a step change in our approach to freeing UK nationals wrongly detained abroad.
— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) October 6, 2023
Too many countries are making it part of their foreign policy arsenal.
Building the US' success, @UKLabour will appoint a Special Envoy for Arbitrary Detention.https://t.co/RwSZMpIDdu
The government spent over £1.5m buying a property that was going to be affected by phase 2 of HS2, less than 24 hours before it was axed.
The i reports that the company behind HS2 bought a property worth over £1.5m under a compulsory purchase order (CPO) less than 24 hours before the Rishi Sunak announced the scrapping of phase 2 at the Conservative party conference on Wednesday.
A deal to acquire an estate in Staffordshire for more than £1.5m went through on Tuesday afternoon.
Humza Yousaf said the SNP should take its defeat in the Rutherglen and Hamilton by-election “on the chin”.
Speaking to the PA news agency in Dundee, the First Minister said: “It’s a tough day for the SNP, a disappointing result, there’s no point pretending otherwise.”
He said “a number of factors” were at play, including the “reckless actions” of former SNP MP Margaret Ferrier, whose breaking of Covid regulations led to her being kicked out of the party and a recall petition which sparked the by-election.
He added that the “collapse” of the Tory vote - with the party losing its deposit - and the subsequent shift to Labour, and the ongoing police investigation into the SNP’s finances also had an impact.
But he added: “The SNP has to really take the result on the chin as well and understand there’s a message that voters are sending to us too.
SNP leader Humza Yousaf has told PA news agency:
We’re not thinking about standing on anything other than the SNP’s message.
We will reflect, we’ll reorganise, we’ll regroup as a political party.
We are the biggest key player in the independence movement, I think that’s without any shadow of a doubt from anybody.
What I would say is that those that believe in independence believe that Scotland’s better days are as an independent nation, then it is important that - yes, of course we can be distinct parties, different parties - but come together with a common interest.
We do that, of course, within the Scottish Government with a co-operation agreement with the Green Party.
Former SNP leader Alex Salmond has said Humza Yousaf has “days to save his First Ministership” following the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election defeat in which the SNP came a distant second to Scottish Labour, in a result Sir Keir Starmer has described as “seismic”.
Speaking to the PA news agency, Alba Party leader Salmond - who has been an open critic of the SNP since he jumped ship ahead of the 2021 election- said the result “is something that the SNP have been asking for.”
He added:
The SNP fought an incompetent campaign in an unnecessary by-election and were comprehensively dropped by Labour.
I see that Humza says it’s disappointing, well I don’t think that quite gets the enormity of what he’s facing.
In my view, Humza’s got days to save his First Ministership.
The SNP’s Katy Loudon lost with a more than 20% swing to Labour’s Michael Shanks.
Liverpool to bring buses back into public ownership
Buses are to be brought back into public ownership in Liverpool, making it the second area outside of London to regain control of its network.
Liverpool City Region Combined Authority voted on Friday to adopt a franchising model. The mayor, Steve Rotheram, said it “marks the start of a new era for public transport in our area – we’re taking back control of our buses”.
He said it will take a few years to regulate the service but the result will mean greater control over fares, tickets and routes.
Manchester launched its regained publicly owned bus network last month.
🚍 "Today marks the start of a new era for public transport in our area – we’re taking back control of our buses!"
— Mayor Steve Rotheram (@LCRMayor) October 6, 2023
👇 A statement from @MetroMayorSteve. pic.twitter.com/o3EhZ4wJG6
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The government has “misrepresented” the Climate Change Committee (CCC) by wrongly claiming it said the would need a quarter of its energy to come from fossil fuels by 2050, scientists have said.
In order to justify signing off new oil and gas licences in the North Sea, ministers have said the country will still require a quarter of its energy to come from gas in 2050, the year the UK is supposed to meet net zero.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) says this figure comes from the CCC, the government’s statutory advisory body, which has strongly advised against licensing new fossil fuels.
Claire Coutinho, the energy security and net zero secretary, said recently: “We will not play politics with our energy security. Even the independent CCC has said that in 2050, we will need oil and gas for a quarter of our energy.”
DESNZ confirmed to the Guardian that the figure often cited by the department came from the CCC’s sixth carbon budget.
When asked for its methodology – how it arrived at this figure from the CCC’s data – a department spokesperson did not respond.
A spokesperson for the CCC said: “The data is used from our sixth carbon budget but they used their own calculation to get to that.” It is understood the committee does not endorse the 25% figure.
Prof Michael Grubb, from University College London, said: “I cannot find any credible basis for the government’s claim – not in the CCC analysis, nor in any serious analysis of net zero scenarios.
“The government must explain where it got this claim from and – speaking as a former member of the CCC – I’d ask specifically for the government to justify its reference to CCC analysis. The fiscal fiasco last year showed the dangers of the government withholding rigorous analytic advice from its own official channels – major misrepresentation, if this is what it is, is just as bad, if not worse.”
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Libby Brooks and Severin Carrell have this write-up on Labour’s latest reaction to their byelection win.
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 SNP 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!”
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Support for Scottish independence leads by four points
Support for Scottish independence still remains strong despite the drop in support for the SNP, according to new findings released by the Tony Blair Institute.
Polling carried out by the institute found that 45% of respondents would vote yes in a new independence referendum, compared with 41% who would vote no, a four-point lead for independence.
Despite this, the issue of independence is not the priority issue for voters in Scotland before the next general election. A third of SNP voters polled said that defeating the Conservatives was their priority.
The report found that Scottish voters say the top priority for the next government should be improving the NHS, followed by delivering better schools and faster economic growth. Few Scottish Conservative voters said cutting taxes was a priority.
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Sunak says that Britain is 'welcoming place' after failing to defend Braverman's 'hurricane' remarks
Rishi Sunak failed to defend Suella Braverman’s remarks that a “hurricane” of illegal migrants is coming our way.
Speaking to ITV’s This Morning, he was asked if he was embarrassed or ashamed when he heard Braverman talk. He said: “If you just take a step back, what do I think we all agree on? We all agree that Britain is an incredibly welcoming place.
“We’re all living proof of the fact that immigrants can come here, do well and that’s something I think we do better than any country in the world.”
When asked if the UK had failed in any way, Sunak replied: “No, no, I think it’s something we should be so proud of as Brits, it’s something that we do better than anyone else.
“But I think we also agree a couple of other things – when people do come here they should integrate, they should sign up to British values so we have that shared understanding amongst us.”
He added: “I think we also all agree that it should be us who decides who comes here, not criminal gangs.
“Illegal migration isn’t right, not least because people are being exploited and die when they make these crossings, but also because we’re a compassionate country who wants to welcome people here, we’re not going to be able to do that if our system is overloaded with people who have jumped the queue, and that’s why I want to be able to stop the boats.”
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Polling expert John Curtice said if the results of the byelection were extrapolated across the whole of Scotland, the SNP would be left with six seats in Westminster.
Speaking to BBC News, Curtice said: “If you take the results of the byelection and extrapolate across the whole of Scotland, you’ve got about a half a dozen SNP seats still, which means the SNP would be back down to the level they had in 2010.”
In 2019, the party won 48 seats in Westminster. Labour won one Scottish seat.
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Labour conference will be 'policy rich' says party's campaign coordinator
Pat McFadden, Labour’s national campaign coordinator, has said the party’s upcoming conference will be “policy rich”.
Speaking to GB News, he said: “We go into our conference in a confident frame of mind, but also, we know the scale of the challenge after the last election. We’ve changed the Labour party. It’s a very different force from the one that was offered to the electorate a few years ago. Keir Starmer has driven that change. Now the project is to lay out in front of the country the kind of policies that Labour would put in place were we to win the next election.
“The next step in doing that is our conference which starts this weekend in Liverpool. So you’ll see a policy rich conference and one that will make clear that as the country wants change, the only people who can deliver that change are the Labour party.”
McFadden’s comments come after New Labour figures who powered the party to victory in 1997 warned against Keir Starmer’s cautious approach, which they said could damage his chances of winning the next election.
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The superlatives are flowing at Scottish Labour’s victory rally in Rutherglen this morning.
The newly elected MP Michael Shanks describes his win as “a historic result” while Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, describes it as “historic”: “We have changed the face of Scottish politics.”
Congratulating Shanks, UK leader, Keir Starmer, who travelled up to the constituency overnight, said: “They said we’d never beat the SNP in Scotland and we did it … you blew the doors off!”
Interesting to hear Shanks and Sarwar hammering home their message that this result proves Scotland is the route to Downing Street. Given the resources poured into this single byelection campaign they’ll be calling for more before a general election.
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Starmer says this is the “first step” of an important journey for “all of us” across the UK.
He says Labour will lay out their “positive case for change” at the Labour conference in Liverpool this weekend.
“Why Labour? Because we’'ve changed, we’re hungry for power and ready to serve across Scotland and the United Kingdom.”
Starmer now sets his sights on the SNP.
“This isn’t about just a few months of turmoil in the SNP – this is about years and years of non-delivery. And that is why we are the party of change.”
Starmer turns to the Tory party conference in Manchester.
“What a circus,” he says.
Starmer criticises “nodding dog” Sunak for passing through decisions he is now claiming are failures, Tory MPs mingling with Nigel Farage and cabinet ministers jostling for the job of PM because they know Sunak “is not up to it”.
“We are the party of change,” he says.
Starmer: Labour 'blew the doors off' byelection
Starmer continues.
“When I left here a week ago with the team, I said you’ve go to win it. You blew the doors off!”
He congratulates Shanks.
Scottish voters “turned their back” on the Tory government but also “not so long ago saw a Labour party that drifted away from them”.
“We’ve changed and because we’ve changed we are now the party of the change here in Scotland, we’re the party of change in Britain, the party of change right across the whole country.”
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Keir Starmer is speaking in Rutherglen.
“They said we couldn’t change the Labour party – and we did it.
“They said we couldn’t win in the south of England and the north of England – and we did it.
They said you couldn’t beat the SNP in Scotland – and Rutherglen you did it.”
The Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, said the party would continue working hard to earn the trust of Scottish voters.
Speaking at a victory rally in Rutherglen before introducing Keir Starmer, he said: “That hard work doesn’t stop now that we’ve won this byelection. That hard work ramps up because we are very clear. We will have to work to earn your trust, earn your support.”
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Keir Starmer had arrived in Rutherglen for a victory rally. Scottish Labour's Ian Murray is welcoming him.
Our Scotland correspondent Libby Brooks is on the ground and will be bringing us the latest.
Scottish Labour’s Ian Murray welcomes Keir Starmer to Rutherglen victory rally pic.twitter.com/pc4hB6hKWH
— Libby Brooks (@libby_brooks) October 6, 2023
Here is a graph from our visuals team showing the difference between the 2019 vote in Rutherglen and Hamilton West and the results from last night.
The Scottish Conservatives lost their deposit in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection after securing less than 5% of the vote.
Thomas Kerr, the Scottish Conservative candidate, won 3.9% of the vote, below the 5% needed to retain his deposit. In 2019, the party won 15% of the vote.
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Stephen Flynn, the SNP leader at Westminster told BBC Breakfast: “We have a big challenge on our hands” after the party’s loss in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection.
'I do recognise we have a big challenge on our hands'
— BBC Breakfast (@BBCBreakfast) October 6, 2023
Stephen Flynn MP, SNP leader at Westminster, spoke to #BBCBreakfast after his party lost the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election to Labourhttps://t.co/jllClsrd81 pic.twitter.com/gwI0ZNoGpJ
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Labour leader Keir Starmer said voters in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West have “sent a clear message, it is time for change”.
Writing on X, formerly known as Twitter, Starmer said: “Congratulations, [Michael Shanks], Labour’s new MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West. This is a seismic result.”
Congratulations, @mgshanks, Labour’s new MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West.
— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) October 6, 2023
This is a seismic result. Voters have sent a clear message: it is time for change.
Labour will deliver. https://t.co/ijp6sjipBp
Our Scotland editor, Severin Carrell, has done an analysis of what this result means for the SNP and UK politics.
Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, had used the word “earthquake” last week to foreshadow Labour’s remarkable victory in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, where its winning margin of 30 percentage points exceeded even its predictions.
He did it cheekily, stealing one of the favourite lines often used by the former Scottish National party leader Alex Salmond when the nationalists were crushing Labour at repeated elections in the past. That theft of Salmond’s phrase has additional resonance. It points to a change in Scottish political alignments that spells danger for the SNP and its current leader, Humza Yousaf.
Labour won with a crushing 58.6% vote share by shifting itself rightwards, moving much closer to the political centre in Scotland. That positioning was key to Salmond’s victories in the run-up to 2014, when he won and held power by freezing council taxes and small business rates Scotland-wide.
This time, Labour ran its campaign attacking the SNP for allowing councils to raise council tax rates, for a planned congestion charge mooted by SNP councillors to enter neighbouring Glasgow (ignoring the implicit rejection of Labour’s support for London’s congestion charge), and for suggestions income tax might go up again.
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Labour celebrates 'seismic' byelection victory
Scottish Labour’s Michael Shanks has won the Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection in an overwhelming victory over the SNP that the party leadership declared “seismic”, and a clear demonstration that Scotland could lead the way in delivering a Labour government at Westminster at the coming general election.
In a result that exceeded Scottish Labour expectation, Shanks beat his closest rival, the SNP’s Katy Loudon, by 17,845 votes to 8,399 – a majority of 9,446 and a resounding swing of more than 20%.
The result marked a “seismic night in Scotland”, and proved that “Scottish politics has fundamentally changed”, said the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar. Voters were sending “a very clear message that they are sick of two tired, failing, incompetent governments”, he added.
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Labour crushes SNP in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection
Good morning, I’m Sammy Gecsoyler and I’ll be here to keep you updated on today’s political developments.
Overnight, Labour has won a “seismic victory over the SNP in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection.
Labour’s Michael Shanks beat his closest rival, the SNP’s Katy Loudon, by 17,845 votes to 8,399 – a majority of 9,446 and a resounding swing of more than 20%.
The result marked a “seismic night in Scotland”, and proved that “Scottish politics has fundamentally changed”, said the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar.
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