[Robin McAlpine Blog] Could the SNP really lose the Hamilton by-election?

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Could the SNP really lose the Hamilton by-election?

I have been hearing from multiple sources that the SNP is worried about the Hamilton by-election. It has come out openly musing that Reform will come second and that it is tight. I understand this is at least in part from fear that Reform might not come second…

How on earth is this happening in Scotland? UKIP never made a dent in voting up here. Far right politics has always existed but was small, marginal and heavily associated with aspects of Orange Lodge politics. Reform has no structure and an unheard of candidate. What is going on?

Mainly I want to argue that politics in Scotland as a whole has been skating on ice much thinner than the politicians assumed and that our system of democracy is based on a whole set of tenets which are no longer supported by what actually exists in Scotland. But before I do I should probably explain the Hamilton situation.

It is a bizarre two-horse race. Labour heavily fancied a run at this seat only a year ago but have given the impression it wishes none of this was happening at all. Its candidate is shockingly bad. Chosen apparently for his Orange Lodge credentials rather than any coherent individual presence in the area, he has been stunningly absent.

I mean it; CND held the only hustings of the entire election and even the Tories turned up. Labour sent a dry statement saying ‘more nukes!’. It was bizarre to see, but I get it since Labour has nothing to say to a CND hustings (though neither have the Tories and Brian Whittle did a decent job of being a conscientious public servant…). But he won’t do TV interviews either? It is inexplicable.

There is definitely a Tory vote in Hamilton but it doesn’t seem to be voting Tory. In all of this Katie Louden should therefore be a sho-in, not least because she’s a pretty strong candidate who has actually got some effective local networks and at least a few people out working in the constituency. It’s what they’ve been finding out that is scaring them.

It’s not that an opinion poll would predict Hamilton for Reform. Larkhall perhaps (which is a big chunk of the seat), but not Hamilton. It’s just that when the SNP knocks doors, people are saying they’d rather just watch TV than cross the road to vote for a bunch of politicians they feel have completely let them down.

People don’t believe politicians are seeking to represent them in parliament at this election because no-one believes any politicians represents their constituents

I have a long family connection with Hamilton – my mum came from there, my gran lived their all her life and my aunt, uncle and all my cousins are there. I heard of someone locally who is an independence supporter who was going to vote Labour simply because ‘he said he wasn’t a politician’ (she was put straight on that point).

Someone else who is a strong independence supporter told me directly ‘who the hell would vote for the SNP given the state of Hamilton?’. Hamilton was a prosperous town which ‘knew’ it was a step above Motherwell because it had a Marks and Spencers. That closed years ago. Planning in Hamilton has been a disaster – an out of town retail park has utterly decimated the high street.

The only motivated voters are Reform. They are also the only non-demotivated voters (those aren’t quite the same thing). Everyone is furious with anyone who has been in politics. They don’t believe politicians are seeking to represent them in parliament at this election because no-one believes any politicians represents their constituents (which is fair enough because they literally just do what their party leaderships tell them).

That is the skating on thin ice point. I am coming across people in politics just now who think that ‘things are not good’ but that ‘at least we have a solid base’. As best I can tell now only Reform has a solid base that is a substantial proportion of those voting for them.

Let me put it like this – you can tell me that the SNP is sitting at about 30 per cent (I generally think that the list vote for Holyrood tells you a bit more about ‘what would people do if they had all the choices available’ and the SNP is hovering around 28 per cent). Now tell me this; when did you last meet someone who was positive about voting SNP?

I don’t mean ‘I’ll vote for them because I want to keep Reform/Tories/Labour out’ and I don’t mean ‘I support independence and so I have no option’. I mean someone who might offer the message the SNP activists themselves offer – ‘they’re not perfect but they’re doing a really good job in difficult circumstances and so I’m 100 per cent backing them’.

When did you last come across that person? This is true across all the parties, and especially so with Labour. (I’d like to pause at this point and count how many U-turns Morgan MacSweeney’s outfit have made since I recently wrote that piece saying ‘they’re so bad they used their U-turn quota up by Christmas’, but that is basically the only thing they’ve done since then).

The point isn’t that the political parties are almost all at rock bottom in terms of support, it’s that that support itself is wafer thin and really pissed off. Then again, so are the party activists. It is a long time since there was any kind of election and anyone I spoke to from any party said ‘we’ve got a really good local team working the ground’.

It is only months since I spoke to an MSP who said they can’t get anyone out of the door to do anything if they’re not on the payroll. My local SNP held a well advertised event with a high-profile guest speaker, and got eight people to come. There were 12 people at the AGM. I’ve been talking to people across the country and the picture is the same.

In fact if you counted everyone who was involved in any way in debate or discussion about the recent candidate selection process in the SNP (if the half a dozen or so I’ve had detailed reports from are representative), there weren’t 1,000 people actively involved. Including the payroll. Yet they were greatly outvoted by what appears to be about 2,000 people none of them have ever seen or met who voted electronically.

That’s not all. On many occasions I’ve heard that everyone who was involved locally was trying to overturn a leadership-favoured local candidate and that there were majorities in their favour at in-person events, but again and again the electronic voting system simply made that whole process irrelevant.

 What we have is no longer a democracy in the model our democracy was designed to be

It’s not just the SNP; Mercedes Villa-Alba and Monica Lennon are two of the best MSPs in the parliament just now and both would retain their seats if they were being voted for by local activists. But Mercedes has been deselected and I hear Monica is in trouble – again, winning the vote of identifiable activists but losing out to a swathe of electronic votes people locally have no way of verifying.

Let’s say the people who have nothing at all to do with local politics but who hunt out emails with download details for an app which they then download, use it to vote and then disappear into the ether again are all real (and I’m not taking that at face value any more), the SNP didn’t seem to have 3,000 people even nominally involved in its most important act of internal democracy.

Labour has shown that you can fall precipitously from what you thought was a low point. Why is this so easy? Because we count votes but not how scunnered the voter is feeling with who they are voting for.

This is sort of petrifying for me. It is just a stupid misunderstanding to believe that democracy is about voting. It is a system with many checks and balances on power – or is supposed to be. But it assumes a health local and national media (so someone knows what is going on), that you to read it (so that you know what is going on), that parties to respond to it, build around their own internal democracy (so they’re not just cartels for the leader).

There are supposed to be opportunities to quiz and examine politicians and you’re supposed to participate and care about it. There are supposed to be consequences for failure. There are supposed to be legal checks and balances that stop people doing things they’re not meant to (which is questionable in Scotland). They’re all supposed to respond to Freedom of Information requests so information is available.

None of the above is in place. What we have is no longer a democracy in the model our democracy was designed to be. In 1999 Naomi Kline published her groundbreaking book No Logo. In it she noted that US corporations had recently transformed themselves from being industries that made things into brands which commissioned other people to make things using their logo. The only value lay in the logo.

That’s where Scottish politics is now. In the old sense, the SNP isn’t a proper political party any more, it is a brand a leader has sole access to. Same for Starmer’s Labour. This is all skating along very thin ice and the drop below it will finish us off. My guess is that the SNP will win Hamilton a little more comfortably than they fear.

The point is, this ought to be a doddle for them. They shouldn’t have any fear at all – and yet they are right to be worried. As am I.

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