I wouldn’t be expecting miracles in a seat like this, but if our bedrock support is less than 1%, that IS something to worry about. When our country is in such a mess, the Labour Party has moved so far from its traditional “party of the people” role that gained it so many votes in this sort of place, and the Tory Party offers nothing but more and deeper of what Labour got us into this mess using, we OUGHT to be picking up some sort of vote everywhere, and have some sort of appeal to the traditional Labour voter who thinks his or her party has lost touch with its origins.

Matthew, what you need to remember also is that there has always been a bedrock Conservative vote in Scotland – the “working class Conservative” if you like. Up until about 1983, the Tories had Scottish MPs in places like Glasgow Cathcart (Teddy Taylor) and Inverclyde, so I’d say in most Scottish seats there is probably a hard core Tory support of around 5% (I don’t know when they last lost a deposit in Scotland – it may have been in 1997, but I don’t think they did even then.) I still think the comparison is better with similar by-elections in the West of Scotland than with a GE – Hillhead doesn’t really fit this because of its predominantly student and middle-class demographic.

Put simply, there are a large number of seats – mainly concentrated around Glasgow and the West of Scotland – where we’re never going to win in a month of Sundays. Indeed, to address crewegwyn’s point, in a lot of cases there simply isn’t even a local party worth noting to leave in a better position, never mind trying to increase our vote.

Yes, but the same applies to the Conservative Party. If we ended up with a similar share of the vote to the Tories here, fine, I’d accept your case. But we didn’t – it was far smaller.

I checked back today with some old general election figures I had from the 1980s, because I too thought “Oh, we always get tiny shares of the vote in Glasgow”. But back in 1983 we were getting respectable shares of the vote there – we weren’t going to win (but we did in the Hillhead by-election), but we were picking up enough not to be embarrassed, and a few second places amongst the also-rans who were anyone but Labour.

When there isn’t much on the ground, we do rely on a national image to pick up votes. So this marks a deep failure of the party nationally (I leave that “nationally” ambiguous, because I don’t know enough about what goes on in Scotland these days to be able to say is it a UK party thing or a Scottish party thing).

It doesn’t so much bother me that the Labour party came first – it’s the fact that four other candidates came ahead of the Lib Dems!

Put simply, there are a large number of seats – mainly concentrated around Glasgow and the West of Scotland – where we’re never going to win in a month of Sundays. Indeed, to address crewegwyn’s point, in a lot of cases there simply isn’t even a local party worth noting to leave in a better position, never mind trying to increase our vote. With this as a background, there are numerous by-elections over the years where our results have been far from satisfctory – Hamilton South, Monklands East, and Govan all spring to mind – but we’ve always been able to perform afterwards. Frankly, the electoral make up in those seats doesn’t reflect those in the seats we do hold – the likes of NE Fife, Gordon, Dunfermline & Edinburgh West – and although we do have to figure out how to break through in the likes of Glasgow it’s really important to understand just how entrenched the Labour party is in that part of Scotland (even with STV, they still have a majority on Glasgow City and North Lanarkshire Councils.)

DO WE LEAVE THE LOCAL PARTY BETTER EQUIPPED FOR THE FUTURE AFTER THE TENTS HAVE FOLDED AND MOVED ON ?

I think I know the answer in C & N – I rather think that I know the answer in GNE as well !!

ha ha ha ha ha – Your in free fall mate, time to ditch Tavish me thinks.

Next you’ll be losing your Highland & North East power base.

But they weren’t “squeezed to oblivion” – the other parties between them got 20% of the vote – more than the SNP. The votes of both Labour and the SNP were lower than in 2005, and two thirds of the electorate didn’t bother to vote.

Clearly, far from a “squeeze” being exerted by Labour and the SNP, there is tremendous disillusionment with both of them. That is a situation in which the Lib Dems should at least be holding their own – not dropping to sixth place and 2% of the vote!

We need to shake up the Scottish party. Tavish Scott needs to start improving fast. His dithering on the al-Megrahi release, and on an independence referendum, was almost as bad as Gordon Brown.

More fundamentally though, the terrible performance probably stems back to getting rid of Charles Kennedy and Menzies Campbell. Scottish voters warmed effortlessly to both. How can they possibly relate to Nick Clegg?