Yesterday’s by-election in Glasgow North East saw a rare gain for the Labour Party. The seat was held by the former Speaker, Michael Martin, in 2005 when, by recent tradition, the main parties did not oppose him.
Labour will be relieved to see their parliamentary majority increased. Although losing the seat was never a serious prospect, and the win certainly doesn’t indicate any sort of revival or endorsement for Gordon Brown, new MP Willie Bain secured nearly 60% of vote – a higher percentage that Michael Martin secured in 2005.
Does anyone else have cause to be pleased?
Turnout was a low 33% – fewer than one in three voters bothered to turn out.
The SNP dropped nearly a thousand votes compared to 2005 (their percentage of the vote was slightly up). The Conservatives were the only other party to hold their deposit, and only just – 5.2% of the vote suggests David Cameron shouldn’t be relying on Glasgow to deliver the Conservative victory at the General Election.
The BNP managed over a thousand votes across the constituency and came close to holding their deposit. Compared to 2005, they gained 93 votes.
The Lib Dem vote was a less-than-impressive 474, in a seat where the party was always going to be an also-ran (if they all moved to Kilburn, Ed Fordham would be pleased) .
Most impressive was the collapse in the socialist vote. Socialist Labour and Scottish Socialist together secured 5,438 votes in 2005. Yesterday that fell to just 199.
And in a warning to anyone thinking a celebrity candidate is the sure route to success, John Smeaton – of terrorist punching fame – secured just 258 votes standing for Jury Team.
Full Result
William Bain – Labour – 12,231 (59.39%)
David Kerr – SNP – 4,120 (20%)
Ruth Davidson – Conservatives – 1,075 (5.22%)
Charlie Baillie – British National Party – 1,013 votes (4.92%)
Tommy Sheridan – Solidarity – 794 (3.86%)
Eileen Baxendale – Liberal Democrats – 474 (2.30%)
David Doherty – Scottish Greens – 332 (1.61%)
John Smeaton – Independent Backed by the Jury Team – 258 (1.25%)
Kevin McVey – Scottish Socialist Party – 152 (0.74%)
Mikey Hughes – Independent – 54 (0.26%)
Louise McDaid – Socialist Labour Party – 47 (0.23%)
Mev Brown – Independent – 32 (0.16%)
Colin Campbell – The Individuals Labour and Tory (Tilt) – 13 (0.06%)
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26 Comments
This was a poor result for the Lib Dems. Let’s face it, we are not doing well in national by-elections and to come behind the Tories, BNP and Solidarity is not exactly good news. No excuses please. Somewhere along the line we seem to be losing our campaigning zeal and urgently need to raise our game.
Depressing that the BNP got more than twice as many votes as the Lib Dems and came within 62 votes of overtaking the Conservatives.
“Most impressive was the collapse in the socialist vote. Socialist Labour and Scottish Socialist together secured 5,438 votes in 2005. Yesterday that fell to just 199.”
This is silly.
Most of those 2005 votes went to the Socialist Labour candidate – in a seat where that was the only mention of Labour on the ballot paper. That 199 also takes not account of Sheridan’s solidarity party which almost certainly fish in the same pond.
Hywel – It’s significant that nearly all those votes returned to Labour. Even with Solidarity, the combined three-party vote is short of a thousand votes, compared to 5,438 last time round. Those on the far left must be disappointed their vote has turned out to be so soft.
No excuses please. Somewhere along the line we seem to be losing our campaigning zeal
No excuses – but I simply disagree with what you say. There’s no doubt this was a bad result but there have always been lots of by-elections where we get an atrocious result, but without it signalling any loss of campaigning zeal. A few examples include: 1997 Uxbridge (3rd on 5.6%), 1999 Hamilton South (6th on 3.3%), 1999 Kensington & Chelsea (3rd on 9.4%), 2000 West Bromwich West (3rd on 9.6%), 2002 Ogmore (3rd on 8.8%), 2006 Blaenau Gwent (4th on 5.4%). In between all of these we also had some excellent by-election and General Election gains. What has happened recently is that we haven’t had the by-elections in really good places to help offset these poor results.challengers.
I would accept the argument that if we want to look like a credible UK-wide party we need to be doing better than this. After all, whilst the Tories didn’t do well they at least held their deposit. But I don’t think it’s a sign of us losing any campaigning zeal. The only thing that has changed is our higher expectations and the fact that the other parties have upped their game and understand how to campaign. What I think we perhaps do need to look at is whether there is another innovative way of fighting these elections we don’t expect to win that we haven’t tried before.
Lucky no-one mentioned our loss of campaigning zeal to the team in Bedford, or those behind our many local by-election victories.
Voter turnout, at 33.2%, was a record low for a Scottish by-election.
A truly shocking statistic made even worse by the state of this particular constituency, the poverty of ambition that resides there, the lack of aspiration, the constituents acceptance of their lot and the willingness to continue to vote for a party that has failed the area so miserably is an affront to those that have fought & died to give us these freedoms.
The inability to imagine change, to envision real progress and that this area can really improve has been shown to be completely missing from Glasgow North East and must surely be a matter of concern for all political parties and in particular the Labour Party who have represented these people for so long.
Will anything change, I doubt it.
It will take big ideas to change Springburn and no party offered that change during this campaign, no-one other than Tommy Sheridan offered an alternative vision to the failure of the last twenty five years and yet the voters flatly rejected that vision in favour for a campaing run negatively with no real policy content.
Waking the Dead
It would be interesting to see the demographic of those that voted, Glasgow City Council reported over 6000 registered postal votes, a rise of some 2000 over the last two months which accounts for 30% of votes cast, surely some kind of record in there too.
Equally chilling is the revelation that over 4000 extra voters have been added to the electoral register in the last month, accounting for 25% of those that voted.
Lastly, it’s been reported that the Police are investigating two alleged incidents of voting fraud in the contest. The investigation is focusing on two ‘known’ incidents at polling stations where voters turned up and when they identified themselves they were told their names had already been scored off the list – somebody had been given a vote in their name.
Officers are investigating “alleged personation”.
This alone is pretty worrying given the very low turnout, how many others may have been fraudulently used to cast votes?
Not a bad result for Labour. It could have been much worse.
“…suggests David Cameron shouldn’t be relying on Glasgow to deliver the Conservative victory at the General Election”
A time classic, that, Iain!
“Equally chilling is the revelation that over 4000 extra voters have been added to the electoral register in the last month, accounting for 25% of those that voted.”
Proably due to the change in the law that allows new entrants to the register to be added during the closed ‘canvas period’ in the event of a by-election. These are people who would not normally have appeared on the published register until the annual update on 1 December.
Equally many could have neglected updating their electoral roll entry due to having moved into the speaker’s constituency.
Anders is absolutely right.
The Scottish Lib Dems should be congratulated for not wasting tens of thousands on an unwinnable by-election. The money will be better spent on winning marginals next May.
I bet there are some target seats in England that would be glad of the money that has been wasted on some by-elections south of the border in recent years…
We were right not to put a lot of resource into campaigning in this by election, but our low vote is not something to simply shrug off. It indicates that, with only a few months to go until the general election, we are getting nowhere in the air war north of the border. This is a problem.
Our party hardly exists in the Scottish news media. If even I have no idea what our distinctive policies for Holyrood are, how can we expect the general voting public to know what we stand for?
There is a failure of our Scottish parliamentary party in general, and our Scottish leadership in particular, to carve out a political identity for the Lib Dems. We have some very hard-working and energetic PPCs and campaigners in Scottish target seats, but they are not helped by our party’s near-invisibility in the media. The Scottish party leadership seems gloriously complacent about this, and it may well harm us not only in Holyrood, but more immediately in Westminster.
Our low vote in this by election is hardly a surprise, but it is symptomatic of problems that may cause us more serious upset in the near future.
Not a bad result for Labour. It could have been much worse.
“…suggests David Cameron shouldn’t be relying on Glasgow to deliver the Conservative victory at the General Election”
A timeless classic, that, Iain!
Obviously it’s not the most favourable territory – though on the other hand why should Glasgow be a no-go area if the party in England is targeting former Labour strongholds in the cities? – but no matter how you spin it, it can’t be good that less than 0.8% of those eligible to vote supported the Lib Dems!
We OUGHT to have voters in former Labour strongholds streaming to us, seeing how Labour has moved so far from its original goals and become another right-wing pro-businessman party, and the Tories are still the Tories. As ever it seems, yes, we can get that going when we work hard on the ground, but when we don’t, the sort of people who ought to be considering us just don’t even have us as a possibility. The blame has to fall on our national leadership and its campaign people for failing to create an image which can drag at least few people over to us when those people feel let down by everyone else.
Herbert & Matthew, the problem is that in Scotland the anti-Labour vote tends to go to the SNP – remember that the Scottish Labour party is still much more socialist in its outlook than south of the border, and the SNP politically isn’t as far from Labour as many think (setting aside independence, of course.) As a result we don’t benefit from this in the same way as in England.
Iain, this by-election has barely touched the radars of the Scottish media, never mind the national ones, so attempting to create any sort of profile was impossible. However you do have a point about our media coverage – but it’s hard to get a media which is either staunchly Labour (Daily Record, most of the weekly local titles) right-wing (the Scotsman, the Courier, the Press & Journal) or confused (the Sun) to give any coverage at all. And as for TV, other than FMQ politics barely features at all. Bear in mind too that the coverage that Jim Wallace and Nicol Stephen had was mainly because of their positions as Deputy First Minister.
… the problem is that in Scotland the anti-Labour vote tends to go to the SNP …
But it didn’t go to the SNP in Glasgow North East, did it? The SNP vote dropped by 900, or nearly a fifth. The SNP attracted just under half the anti-Labour vote.
But the most striking feature of the election was the derisory turnout. The fact that two thirds of the electorate couldn’t be bothered to support any of the parties standing should surely convey some kind of message to the politicians.
“Hywel – It’s significant that nearly all those votes returned to Labour.”
I don’t think most of those votes ever left Labour though so it’s not at all surprising.
As someone who spends quite a bit of time in Glasgow each year and knows the Springburn area well, what saddens me most is that people who have been completely let-down by Labour for generations still vote for them.
The post above saying that nobody other than Tommy Sheridan offered any kind of alternative vision is correct… but Tommy Sheridan no longer enjoys mass support anywhere in Glasgow and is something of a busted flush as his result shows. A few years back he’d have got 5,000 or more votes in this constituency.
If the Lib. Dems. ever had the people and resources to mount really effective campaigns against Labour across Glasgow then in my view there is no reason why Glasgow couldn’t go the way of Liverpool, Newcastle, Sheffield and all the other great cities where we’ve gained large numbers of seats through effective campaigning against rotten and often corrupt Labour administrations.
Labour fought a good campaign against the SNP. Are there any lessons for anyone else or any pointers for the General Election. Nope. This will not go down in history as one of the most memorable of by-elections.
Libertarian Party didn’t bother this time, then?
A measure of the enduring deep animosity the Scots feel towards the Tories is the fact that Dennistoun, an enclave of middle-class tenements just east of the Necropolis, elected Conservative councillors well into the 1970s.
I am a little surprised at how badly the SNP did. I suppose their dismal showing is a product of (1) the tribal loyalty Labour enjoys among almost all working-class Roman Catholics and many, many working-class Protestants, and (2) Labour’s success in painting the SNP as “tartan Tories” (I am talking of the ones who vote, of course, not those who stay at home and sit in front of the telly). Salmond can see that Labour knows how to dam the nationalist tide in its heartlands, even in the most inauspicious of circumstances. Not a good result for the “gnats”.
I am amazed that the BNP, a party that is chauvinistically English, succeeded in getting any votes at all in Glasgow. I guess they profited from the presence of asylum-seekers in a constituency already plagued by mass worklessness.
The Lib Dems had a better Scotland-wide profile when Charles Kennedy was leader. Not that I want CK back, but he did have his uses.
This byelection achieved very little coverage in the UK media, and the poor Lib Dem showing will soon be forgotten, if anyone much noticed it in the first place.
“This byelection achieved very little coverage in the UK media, and the poor Lib Dem showing will soon be forgotten, if anyone much noticed it in the first place.”
Ah well, so long as there’s not much coverage in the _UK_ media and it will soon be forgotten, we can all safely ignore it.
Thank goodness for that.
We should remember that glasgow will be subject to proportional elections for the scottish parliament and local government and as I understand it labour actualy has a majority on glasgow council, so this result is very bad for us as we are failing to reach out to people that could help us at these elections
This result proves that this seat will be held by Labour even if as a party they are reduced to single figures!
Demographic changes saw the Conservatives lose Glasgow Cathcart in 1979 and Glasgow Hillhead in the by-election to Roy Jenkins (SDP). They haven’t returned.
In fact the last time a non-Labour/non-Speaker candidate won in a GE was Roy in 1983 only to lose in 1987. But Glagow Hillhead had posh parts and high number of graduates.
The question on my lips is not can we win a Glasgow Westminster parliamentary seat but why haven’t we won a Parliamentary seat in Liverpool? A far easier task I would have thought.
In this case, a particularly poor candidate may be part of the explanation for the result.
To be fair, the Greens did even worse.
Writing off an election in advance – by failing to fully resource the campaign – is no excuse for failure on this scale, though it surely is no recipe for success either. Acting as a ‘main party’ during the expenses row and failing to offer a real alternative on the big issues of the economy, foreign/war policy, and the major public services has left the party exposed to disillusion and disaffection. The USP of the Lib Dems – proportional representation – is a busted flush, as only a commitment to win under the existing system is remotely credible, and then only if coupled with strong candidates and well presented commitments to attractive policies. This would require outbidding the Tories to the right as well as Labour to the Left – for example, a regional ‘minimum living wage’, education vouchers, an end to public housing, a referendum on the Euro following a referendum on Europe, a clear priority for either means tested or universal benefits (but not a mix) or better yet a negative income tax, a clear statement of foreign/defense priorities, preferably a ‘no to nuclear power’ commitment, something for the motorists (e.g. phasing out of vehicle excise duty and/or road tax), and an end to airline passenger taxes (better to tax the fuel used as with cars). The mottos should be ‘no more blank cheques’ and ‘tending the home fires’ rather than radical or constitutional reform…
Er
If the Lib Dems ever adopt most of what you put, I’ll leave the Party.
This is right wing libertarianism which I want no part of