The run-up to and aftermath of the Hamilton by-election is another case study in people who write about politics in Scotland getting it wrong. There is much head-scratching about an ‘unexpected’ result and chitter-chatter about shockwaves and the like.
Except if you look at what happened, the only thing it really confounds is the people who’d been writing about politics. It is entirely consistent with recent trends. Basically, the by-election voting pattern looks exactly like the voting pattern in the last couple of elections in the constituency and all the national-level polls – if you filter the numbers based on enthusiasm and spend.
Let’s start with Reform. Everyone is talking about this being a major change in Scottish politics but it is no such thing, it’s just a realignment within the right – with added enthusiasm. The vote that the Tories and Reform got in the by-election is only 600 more than the Tories got on the list in 2021, when they were at what was then a low point. It doesn’t look like a massive breakthrough for the right to me. Reform voters just enjoy voting just now.
The Labour Party openly admits that it identified about 8,000 people who voted for it from its data from last year’s General Election and shipped workers in from all over Britain to make sure they turned out while they kept their candidate out of view and hammered the line that the SNP candidate was having her third go in three different seats. That’s a pretty de minimis approach, but it is all that it took for them to win it.
Because the SNP does not appear to be losing voters to anyone, it is just losing voters. I have been trying to point this out endlessly but to little avail – forget the oohings and aaahings of the political lobby, the SNP remains locked in its low point under Humza Yousaf, give or take a margin of error.
But Swinney has swept all dissent from his party by losing them all their seats and demotivating the activists so much they have mostly walked away from the party. This is the definition of creating a desert and calling it peace, but because no-one is briefing the hacks against the leader any more, they think this is a great success.
It is also a great example of not reading the numbers. The SNP is at 28 per cent on the list, but surely (and I mean surely) the journalists must know some ordinary SNP voters. They must be aware of the scale of the disillusionment. I’ve been trying to get this across – having little more than one in four people giving you support and only very grudgingly is not a strong electoral position.
We are once again inside a not-very-intricate clockwork mechanism which is wound and will now run its course pretty well no matter what anyone does
Another reason the chattering classes called this wrong is that they are all obsessed with court politics. The one that thinks this is all about hatred of political elites thinks this one was a backlash against political elites. The one who thinks it is all a hangover from the SNP leadership election is convinced it’s ‘social conservatives’ that caused the problem. The one who thinks everyone was in a backlash against gender self id sees that in every vote.
Yet what people in Hamilton are largely talking about is the state of Hamilton and the general sense that things are almost universally in decline. ‘I can’t get a doctor’s appointment and my back is killing me but forget that, this is my chance to register disapproval at Scotland’s quangos’ or ‘I can’t afford a house even here, but let’s get serious – what is the policy on gender segregation in prisons?’.
Why is it that the chattering classes among themselves are never, ever done complaining about every iniquity in their lives (you know, disasters like having to wait seven minutes longer at passport control because of Brexit). But when they see the public they project outwards the priorities of the political court and then can’t explain why things happen the way they do.
This not to say I’m not surprised. I didn’t think Labour would win and if I’d had to put money on it (from what I knew) I think I’d have bet on the SNP ending up a touch further clear in first place than people expected. What I was sceptical about was a complete Labour collapse. There is no obvious evidence that the rump of hard-core Labour voters that are left have been actively going anywhere else.
The fact that even Labour insiders were projecting defeat meant I thought they must be getting SNP levels of disillusionment on the door, but it seems they just weren’t sure their 8,000 were enough or that they could get them out.
So this is in many ways an ‘as you were’ election but with SNP voters extremely demotivated, the old Tory vote suddenly being highly-motivated by Reform and the Labour vote not so much motivated as press-ganged to the polling station by an imported army of party apparatchiks.
How can any of them respond to this? I don’t think they can. I think we are once again inside a not-very-intricate clockwork mechanism which is wound and will now run its course pretty well no matter what anyone does.
Reform are probably at their ceiling and I doubt there is all that much more growth in them. Reform’s biggest enemy is always itself. It’s politicians are ill-disciplined and often quite mad. If you’ve not bought into them by now… The Tories seem done for.
Labour is a deeply cynical outfit, its every strategy is now to win by the skin of its teeth by being as clinical as possible – but the underlying product is still disliked and it can’t run that kind of get-out-the-vote operation in two seats at once never mind across all of them in a Scottish election. The Scotland-wide polls aren’t wrong, they just don’t tell you about specific cases.
And then there is the sorry, sorry state of the SNP. It has become as potent brew of arrogance and incompetence. The SNP is basically being run by Stephen Noon who, in the decade in which we exist, is the definition of a knife to a gun fight. He was the ‘mastermind’ behind Swinney’s Stop Reform summit and of the ‘two horse race’ strategy in this election.
Noon does not understood that politics is a combat sport played in the real world. At the referendum, now, and at every point in between he believes the future is won and lost in the comment pages of broadsheet newspapers. He actually believes (openly – he’ll tell you this if you ask him) that civic Scotland is the key to every political result in Scotland if you can activate it.
This isn’t true, but all his friends tell him he’s great and the SNP keeps giving him a job so onwards this godawful strategy goes. He has no B-game, there is no ‘pivot to’. Stephen Noon and John Swinney will just assault you with more chattering class patter about values until there is no-one left in the room.
They don’t have enough talent to fill half a cabinet never mind being able to refresh the party with a reshuffle
Is there any way out of this for the SNP? In theory. The party is suffering from its emotional relationship with its own voters. It promised so, so much and asked them to get in on and believe the hype. A lot of people did. And then they delivered so, so little. Nothing will blow the contract with voters more than betrayal. Not boredom, not anger, not ridicule, it is betrayal that hurts most.
The SNP needs to relaunch with an entirely new policy programme. The problem is that they have been (falsely) claiming to be pursuing that programme for the last decade and so if they say it again now, no-one is going to believe them. You can’t talk your way out of a corner you find yourself in as a result of talking too much.
Some would like the party to save itself via independence. But at the same time all of this debacle has been unfolding, the SNP leadership has been briefing journalists that it is going to turn independence into a 20-year issue. I mean, they hired a chief strategist who has stated this position as his only position on innumerable occasions.
The SNP hasn’t earned the political space to talk about independence and in any case has nothing to say. If it tries it will look like exactly what it is – an utterly cynical misdirect it will not follow through on. No-one will believe it either.
So they should change personnel (John Swinney, visionary and decisive as always, has said he might think about perhaps having some kind of min-reshuffle, or something, if they can get round it at some point). But they have no personnel to swap in.
They’ve spent 15 years shutting down internal party democracy, forcing out any credible, capable candidates they thought might be a challenge, promoting ranks of nodding dogs purely on the basis of unthinking loyalty and have chased most of their activists out of the party through a combination of belligerence and contempt.
The result is that they are utterly substandard at every level. The basic systems that should operate in party HQ do not exist. They have no data, they have no ground game, they have no proper capacity development, candidate training, basic media support. They don’t have enough talent to fill half a cabinet never mind being able to refresh the party with a reshuffle. Their strategists don’t have a strategy and their communications team have nothing to communicate.
If you’re being honest, any suggestion that they are changing is a lie. They’re not. And so if claiming to change is seen as a lie (which it will be), they have no option but to stay the course. Which is what they will do – all the way to Swinney’s tenth electoral test next year. He has lost every single one of them so far and has led the party to historic setbacks on every single occasion until now. But fingers crossed, eh?
Four political parties (actually five – the Greens are just nowhere) have now ground themselves into a mutually-assured stasis. The public has lost confidence in all of them. There does not appear to be among them anyone with the spark, vision or talent to kick any of this up a gear. It is hard to see any immediate future that is not this over and over again for another 12 months.
And then? Well, something will break…