Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Labour Wins Scottish By-Election
Voters went to the polls yesterday in a by-election to fill the Holyrood seat of Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse seat. The seat fell vacant with the death of Christina McKelvie, of the Scottish National Party. The seat was pretty well-defended but Labour pulled out the win a few hundred votes ahead of the SNP. Reform UK finished third while the Tories were a dismal fourth. The collapse of the Conservative vote and the rise of Reform north of the border is not the same as the developments in England. Frankly, Reform has not really arrived yet.
Turn out was 44.2%, which is above average for a Scottish by-election. Labour secured 8,559 votes, beating the SNP which had 7.957 votes. Reform UK lagged at 7,088 while the Conservatives had 1,621. The Tories got just 6% of the vote, but that was enough to keep their deposit because the threashold is 5%.
By-elections are an opportunity for people to yell at the government without really doing any harm. The Liberal Democrats have made winning by-elections an artform because they have not been in government much in the last 100 years. Reform is riding high in the polls in the UK. Labour is unpopular because Sir Keir Starmer is PM, and he is having trouble getting his act together. The SNP still governs Scotland, and they have taken losses because of it. Finishing third here is a lousy result for Reform. It seems that they poached the Tory vote and got little else.
That is not to say that Reform has no future in Scotland. The Conservatives may have to fight to survive north of the border. Reform has no real infrastructure in Scotland, and that is what is going to change as a result of this by-election. There are some local organizers who now have voter lists with more names than they have ever seen before. By the next Scottish election, they may well be for real. By the next Westminster election, it is almost inevitable.
In what appears to be an unrelated development, the Chairman of Reform UK, Zia Yusuf resigned while the polls were open. He posted on X "Eleven months ago I became chairman of Reform. I've worked full-time as a volunteer to take the party from 14 to 30%, quadrupled its membership and delivered historic electoral results. I no longer believe working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time, and hereby resign the office."
This appears to have been over a propsed burqa ban and the future of spending under a Reform government. Frankly, he is a multi-millionaire and probably has better things to do than work.
While Reform is still finding its feet in Scotland, Labour has claimed a strength if probably does not have. The BBC interviewed Professor Sir John Curtice, who is THE authority on British political polls, and he is dubious of a Labour success built on this by-election. The Beeb reported on the Today Programme on Radio 4.
He says this by-election always looked "likely to be a close contest and that's what it's proven to be" and anyone following Scottish opinion polls won't have been overly surprised at the result.
But he says the outlook is not quite as optimistic as Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar would hope looking ahead to next year.
He says current polls, which proved to be quite accurate last night, show the SNP running at just over 30% of the vote nationwide, while Labour are sitting at around 20%.
"Such a result would not mean that Anas Sarwar would be Scotland’s next first minister," he says.
That is not to say the SNP will retain power, rather it simply means Labour has more work to do. Just like Reform.
© Copyright 2025 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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