Keir Starmer has made no secret of the fact that winning the byelection in Rutherglen and Hamilton West on the outskirts of Glasgow next Thursday is crucial to Labour’s path to government.
Labour sees a win as a critical test of the party’s wider prospects in Scotland and the UK before the general election expected next year. Starmer needs a chunk of the 41 seats that Labour held as recently as 2010 to win a workable majority at Westminster.
“There has not been a more important byelection for us this parliament,” one shadow cabinet minister said. A victory here would also indicate whether voters were deserting the crisis-hit SNP after Nicola Sturgeon’s shock resignation.
“It’s a big prize here. We all know this isn’t just about this constituency. It’s not just about Rutherglen and Hamilton West, is it?” Starmer told activists on a visit to the seat on Friday. “It’s about Scotland. This will be a milestone if we win this election on the hard road back for Labour to power.”
The bellwether seat, which Labour lost to the SNP in the 2015 landslide and has gone back and forth between the two ever since, could provide what party insiders describe as a “make or break moment” for a Labour comeback.
The contest was triggered by former SNP MP Margaret Ferrier being ousted in a recall petition for breaking Covid lockdown rules in 2020. Her majority in 2019 was 5,230, meaning Labour could win on a swing of about 6.5%.
If that result was replicated across Scotland in next year’s election, the party could take between seven and 10 seats, up from the solitary one it holds north of the border now. If Labour wins more convincingly, with a vote share of 42% or above, it’s more in the territory of winning at least 15 to 20 seats.
While Labour insiders acknowledge there is no great love for Starmer in Scotland, they point to a Redfield & Wilton poll earlier this month, in which he was the only party leader to get a positive approval rating. They attribute it, in part, to him paying six visits so far this year.
“We need to win seats in every part of the country, but there is no obvious route back to power for us that does not run through Scotland,” says one London-based party official. “If we take Rutherglen, that shows we’re on track. If we don’t, it’s a disaster.”
Polling expert Prof John Curtice said: “If Starmer cannot win a seat Corbyn won in 2017, those who think the party is going in too Blairite a direction will say, ‘Hang on, where are we going?’ And the claims of Labour keeping the Tories out at Westminster become much more difficult to sell.”
However, Labour is confident it can win in Rutherglen next week, and that the nationalists’ implosion represents an opportunity more broadly. Sturgeon’s departure has left SNP loyalists dismayed, and taken the sheen off for many others.
SNP sources admit they expect to lose the seat, with only the margin of defeat in doubt. Party activists claim that on the doorstep, their supporters say that independence is further away than before. That, combined with the desire to kick the Tories out of power, could yet persuade some to switch.
The SNP has put Starmer’s decision not to scrap the two-child policy, and his caution on Brexit, at the centre of its byelection campaign. “We want to show voters that there’s not a cigarette paper between Labour and the Tories,” said one party official.
Yet Labour insiders claim that it is the cost of living crisis and the NHS that come up on the doorstep, and that independence is not the salient issue that it would recently have been.
“We’re saying to people, we may not agree on the destination,” said one party official. “But there are big parts of the journey that we have in common.”
