No polls overnight as far as I can see, but I realised I had completely overlooked the first Scottish local by-election to be held since the general election.
Mid-Galloway and Wigtown West by-election:
Conservatives 61.8% (+22.3)
SNP 25.5% (+1.9)
Greens 6.4% (+4.2)
Labour 6.3% (-0.6)
At first glance that looks like an absolutely terrifying result, but it makes much more sense once you realise that independent candidates took 28% of the vote in the ward last time around, and those votes had to go somewhere because there weren’t any independents standing this time. In Dumfries and Galloway, people who vote for independent candidates are often Tory voters in other circumstances, so that will account for most or all of the huge boost in the Tory vote.
A 2% increase in the SNP vote can at best be described as “OK”, given that the change is measured from 2017, when the SNP were doing significantly less well than at last month’s general election. But perhaps they were hampered in this by-election by the modest success of the Greens.
The result is an indication that the Tory honeymoon effect isn’t necessarily stopping at the border, and given the reach of the London media in Scotland, we shouldn’t really have expected it to. It may seem ironic in the wake of the Scottish Tories losing half their seats, but it’s quite possible that the next Scottish poll will see an increase in the Tory vote – although if that does happen I would expect it to be largely at the expense of other unionist parties.
