The Tories are celebrating their Westminster by election win in Aberdeen South today. But just as Labour celebrated its Holyrood by election win in Hamilton, Larkhall, and Stonehouse in 2025 only to go on to lose this year’s Holyrood election, all this by election result really tells us is that tactical voting in by elections is more likely to be successful when the turnout is low, voters know that they are not choosing a government, and the BBC helpfully tells anti-independence voters who to vote for tactically. This isn’t a Tory revival in Scotland, it’s just the corpse twitching.
Anti-SNP tactical voting was very much in play in Aberdeen South where the Tory vote share increased by 25.14% and the Labour vote almost completely collapsed. Labour effectively sat this contest out in order to help the Conservatives. The Tories were also helped by a British media in Scotland which relentlessly painted the campaign as a close two horse race between the Tories and the SNP, tacitly encouraging opponents of independence in a constituency with a high proportion of English born voters linked to the oil and gas sector to vote tactically for the Conservatives.
Yet this was primarily a referendum on the future of oil and gas in a seat where the economy is closely tied to fossil fuels from the North Sea. The SNP was hamstrung by its fudging on oil and gas. The SNP was caught between its lack of clarity on the North Sea, its perceived poor delivery on a just transition to renewables, and right wing tactical voting. The Scottish Government must take this by election result as a warning that it must urgently get to grips with its energy policy.
It’s worth pointing out that the Tories won Aberdeen South with 14,308 votes in an electorate of 76,033. They got support from just 18.8% of the electorate on a 38% turnout. Over 81% of people in Aberdeen South didn’t vote Tory, but you won’t be hearing the Tories use the argument they’re currently deploying against the SNP to claim there’s no mandate for an independence referendum because most people didn’t vote SNP last month. British nationalist double standards strike again.
The good news is we will no longer have to thole the odious Douglas Lumsden in Holyrood, he can bugger off and enjoy his six chips in Westminster’s subsidised restaurants along with the equally odious Andrew Bowie while he asks ChatGPT to generate pointless questions. The bad news is that as a list MSP he’ll be replaced by some other unpleasant Tory in Holyrood.
In the end the Murrell scandal which has so obsessed the anti independence media in Scotland to the point of unhinged derangement has had very little effect. If Murrell had been a real factor, the SNP share of the vote in the Arbroath and Broughty Ferry by election would also have been seriously dented, voters there were as exposed to the media’s Murrell fixation as much as those in Aberdeen South, but in this constituency, the SNP vote share actually increased by 5.74%. The Aberdeen South result wasn’t about Murrell, it was about oil and gas and about the willingness of anti-independence Labour voters to vote tactically and support the Tories.
The Scottish results were a catastrophe for Labour, whose votes collapsed in both seats, down 18% in Arbroath and Broughty Ferry and down 19% in Aberdeen South. Sarwar will be hiding away today. Sarwar has the full backing of BBC Scotland and the Daily Record yet support for Labour is still cratering. Labour fell to fourth position in both seats. Starmer’s jaiket may be on a shoogly peg today, but so must Sarwar’s be. He’s proven to be a disaster as leader of the Scottish branch office. His uncompromising über-unionism has made Labour unattractive to independence supporters while encouraging its remaining core of hard line anti-independence supporters to see Reform or the Tories as viable alternatives.
We now have proof that the Murrell scandal is largely a media construct which does not have the cut through with voters which the anti-independence media in Scotland so desperately hoped for. The Arbroath and Broughty Ferry result proves that. In a sign of the extent to which the British media in Scotland has lost all sense of perspective in its desperation to stave off independence, the Daily Record’s Paul Hutcheon said on social media this week that the Murrell scandal will still be running to the end of this decade. The reality is that Murrell is a minor footnote in Scottish political history who will drop off the radar after next week when he is sentenced, most probably receiving a substantial custodial sentence whereupon he’ll be forgotten by everyone except Paul Hutcheon and his colleagues in the British media in Scotland, wistfully reminiscing about their orgy of SNPbad even as their precious union falls apart around them. Today Hutcheon is trying to spin the comments of a former SNP advisor about Stephen Flynn being responsible for this loss into an “SNP civil war”, all while ignoring the elephant in the room of Labour’s very real civil war.
The story of the Scottish by elections is eclipsed by Andy Burnham’s resounding victory in the Makerfield by election. It was a bizarre by election in which the winning Labour candidate stood as the anti-Labour candidate on a platform of “Vote for me, my party leader is terrible”. In the end it wasn’t even close, voters agreed that Keir Starmer is indeed terrible. Burnham won over 55% of votes cast in a by election which the polls had told us was going to be a close race.
Reform UK was trounced in a seat which it should have won comfortably if it was really on course to win the next Westminster general election. Makerfield was one of Reform’s top target seats. It’s a constituency where Reform swept the board in the recent local elections and which voted strongly for Brexit. Reform needed to win here if it wanted to prove it was on track to win the next general election. It failed, and it failed badly.
This is the third by election in a row in which Reform has failed when it was expected to win and confirms the pattern of Reform significantly underperforming in real elections compared to its polling figures. Farage is currently in an emergency meeting with Richard Tice to work out how to blame Muslims for the by election result.
This was a truly terrible result for Farage, with the icing on the cake for all of us who loathe him being that he can’t even blame the even more loathsome Restore Britain for Reform’s defeat. The combined Restore/Reform vote still didn’t come close to winning. It is however cause for alarm that over 40% of voters in Makerfield chose to put their burning crosses next to the far right. Starmer’s attempt to appease the far right has failed spectacularly and threatens us all.
The wheels are coming off Farage’s corrupt bandwagon. A large and significant section of the electorate have fallen for the venomous snake oil of the far right, but an even larger section detest Farage and his politics of hatred, racism, and division and are willing to vote tactically to keep him out of power. Farage no longer looks unbeatable. He can be defeated with the hope of a more left wing politics. Whether that politics can be realised is the real challenge.
It is however hard to enjoy Starmer having such a terrible day, because Burnham isn’t a whole lot better. In most important respects, the EU, immigration, LGBT rights, Israel-Palestine, electoral and political reform, and a Scottish referendum, Burnham simply represents a continuation of Starmer’s policies but with slightly more emotional intelligence. Although that’s not hard, a Gregg’s sausage roll has more emotional intelligence than Keir Starmer.
Burnham parrots the mantra of change, but whether he’ll deliver is the question. We’ve been here before with the man Burnham seeks to replace. The signs do not look promising. Burnham remains close to the Labour Together faction which is responsible for taking the party firmly to the right. He’s already watering down his promise to introduce voting reform and has signalled he’ll continue with the performatively cruel immigration policies of Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.
I suspect we’ll see a similar pattern to what happened under the Conservatives after Cameron with Labour thinking that repeatedly swapping their figurehead will somehow substitute for a failure to change is policies or political trajectory. Burnham will have a brief honeymoon, but unless there’s a real and meaningful change in direction, Labour’s polling numbers will drop again and the party will attempt to find another centrist clone.
Attention is now focused on Starmer, whose reaction in the immediate aftermath of Burnham’s triumph in Makerfield has been to insist he’s staying in office and will fight any attempt to remove him.
MPs who had previously been supportive of Starmer are now calling on him to consider his position. The party wants a bloodless transition with Starmer agreeing to step down. Wes Streeting has not abandoned his leadership ambitions and would seek to contest the leadership.
The knives are out now. Either Starmer goes quietly or we are in for a prolonged bout of Labour civil war. One way or another it’s the woes of the Labour party which are going to be the dominating political story in the months ahead. No one cares about Peter Murrell, sorry, not sorry, media in Scotland.
After wrestling for hours with PayPal, I have finally compiled a list of the emails of almost everyone who makes a regular monthly donation to the blog and will soon launch the weekly bonus premium email article for those who make a monthly contribution to the blog. I had hoped to launch this this week but unfortunately it will be delayed for a while. There are a number of people whose emails I am unable to find. Some people donate monthly by Ko-Fi, one makes a monthly donation to last year’s GoFundMe fundraiser, a few people make monthly payments directly by bank transfer. I cannot access the email addresses of any of these people and so cannot add them to the new mailing list. If you are one of these folk, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com and I’ll add you to the mailing list.
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