Judging from the way people were talking about the by-election result in East Kilbride West (not to be confused with West Kilbride East), I thought I was going to be telling you about a calamity of biblical proportions, but actually the result is not quite as bad as it sounded. It’s true that the SNP have dropped from first place to third in the popular vote, but in last year’s election the ward was what would be described in first-past-the-post terms as a tight three-way marginal, with the third-placed Tories only trailing the SNP by around eleven percentage points. So it wasn’t necessarily going to take huge swings to change the placings, and the SNP’s eight-point drop is certainly not out of line with what the opinion polls would have led us to expect.
East Kilbride West by-election result on first preferences (6th July 2023)
Nevertheless, on a uniform swing Labour would be ahead nationally by several points based on these changes. The SNP’s national vote tends not to be quite as high in local elections as in Westminster or Holyrood elections, so a Labour lead in local elections wouldn’t necessarily translate into a Labour lead in other arenas – but nevertheless I think we have to face the possibility that Labour may already have a slight national advantage over the SNP on Westminster voting intentions. All of the last three Scottish subsamples from YouGov showed a Labour lead, the most recent Panelbase poll showed a dead heat, and the new Survation and Redfield & Wilton polls show a tiny SNP lead that is well within the standard margin of error.
I remain optimistic that the SNP will ultimately eke out some sort of “win” at the 2026 Holyrood election (although not necessarily one that maintains the overall pro-independence majority in the parliament). That’s because it’s very possible that two big changes will have occurred by then – Labour may have entered government in London and then moved into a spell of richly-deserved mid-term unpopularity, and Humza Yousaf may have been replaced as SNP leader by someone who is more popular with the voters. But as far as next year’s Westminster election is concerned, if the SNP want to avert defeat they really need to start from the assumption that they’d be coming from behind to do it – which means “continuity won’t cut it”, as the saying goes. They’ve made a step in the right direction by sort of half-reviving the popular de facto referendum plan, which was always a prerequisite if the independence supporters who have drifted off to Labour were ever going to be tempted back. But as I keep on saying, the SNP are going to have to address the leadership problem too, and do it before the election. Either Humza will have to go, or a Unity Cabinet with a much more collective form of leadership will have to be appointed, to demonstrate to the public that the SNP have turned the page on a Sturgeon era that is now associated (rightly or wrongly) with sleaze. Such a step would also inevitably improve the average quality of the ministerial team and thus help to offset Yousaf’s personal unpopularity.
It’s worth making the point that although it’s not surprising that the SNP vote fell enough in East Kilbride West to slip behind the Tories, what is surprising is that the Tories gained as much as six percentage points themselves. Remember that since this ward was last contested in May 2022, the Trussmageddon has occurred and the Tories haven’t fully recovered from that sequence of events in the polls. So in local by-elections you’d expect their vote to be slipping back or remaining steady. If we do see some sort of Scottish Tory recovery going forward, that’s very likely to indirectly benefit the SNP in a first-past-the-post general election, because returning Tory voters are far more likely to be coming from Labour than from the SNP. We’ve been assuming that a Scottish Tory renaissance would only ever occur on the coat-tails of an English Tory rebound, but of course there’s a precedent in 2017 for the Scottish Tories surging while the English Tories fell back (admittedly partly due to the Ruth Davidson Factor, which is now very much a thing of the past).
