THE four local by-elections on Thursday were always going to be a daunting challenge for the SNP, because all four were in seats technically being defended by Labour.
Although two were in wards where the SNP actually won the popular vote last time around, one of those was the Whitburn and Blackburn ward in West Lothian, where the SNP's lead in 2022 was a fragile one percentage point.
Given the Scotland-wide progress Labour have made over the last couple of years, it would have been a major shock if the SNP had won more than one of the seats up for grabs, and it therefore can't be regarded as much of a setback that they have fallen short in all four.
The one true disappointment was Kilmarnock West and Crosshouse, where the SNP were defending a big enough lead to have had a fighting chance of winning.
They won't be overly concerned by the middling five-point drop in their own vote share in the ward, but they may be a little troubled by the net swing to Labour of 8%.
That would be consistent with a nationwide Labour lead over the SNP of around four percentage points, significantly better than Labour's showing in recent Scottish opinion polls.
However, none of the other results point to anything like such a strong Labour performance. In Doon Valley, the swing was only 3%, and in Whitburn and Blackburn it was below 2% – just barely enough to push Labour into the lead on the first preference vote.
In the Edinburgh ward of Colinton/Fairmilehead, there was actually a nominal swing in the opposite direction of 4% from Labour to the SNP, although that's not especially meaningful. The SNP only finished fourth in the ward and their own vote share dropped back substantially.
The real story was of a massive unexpected movement of votes from Labour to the Liberal Democrats, who leaped from fourth place to first to claim a spectacular victory.
Nevertheless, an average of all four results gives Labour only a 2% swing from the SNP, which if extrapolated across Scotland suggests the SNP have a national lead over Labour of around eight percentage points, marking a radical and rapid transformation from Labour's five-point lead on general election day in July.
That may be intuitively hard to make sense of given the apparent lack of anything for the SNP to celebrate in the by-elections, but if the batch of wards being contested hadn't been so favourable for Labour, the outcomes would undoubtedly have looked very different.
It may also occur to the more thoughtful Labour strategists that Colinton/Fairmilehead, although it was the only ward Labour failed to win, is potentially the best guide to Labour's true standing with the public at present.
It was the only one of the four wards where unionist voters didn't need to “fear” an SNP victory, because the SNP were in a distant third place in 2022 on just 17% of the vote.
In that context it seems the overwhelming instinct of voters was to seek out a viable alternative to Labour, and to register a protest against Keir Starmer's actions in government, most notably the cuts to winter fuel allowance.
It's intriguing that the alternative they settled on was a centrist Unionist party rather than Reform UK, who suffered the rarity of a relatively poor result, taking less than a 4% vote share.
However, the threat posed by Reform to the established party system certainly hasn't disappeared overnight, as can be seen from their 16% vote in Whitburn and Blackburn, which is actually better than three of their four results last week.
So despite Labour's jubilation on social media, the overall picture we're left with is one that broadly corroborates the message of the opinion polls.
Starmer's missteps in government seem to have re-established the SNP as slight favourites to remain the largest single party after the 2026 Holyrood election, and Reform UK still appear to be performing strongly enough to win list seats and thus potentially throw a spanner in the works for the Unionist camp by making it much harder for Anas Sarwar to cobble together a Labour-led coalition government from second place.
