The person who calls an election before the day is either gallus or foolhardy—or both. In its efforts to catalyse conversation, this blog has sailed close to the controversial winds. But in over a thousand posts, it has never stuck its neck out quite so far as now.

This one is different.

Tomorrow, the voters of Rutherglen and Hamilton West go to the polls to elect a new MP. The seat—like every other former Labour seat in and around Glasgow—had been held by the SNP, although one of the most marginal. Created in 2005, it was first won for the SNP in 2015 by Margaret Ferrier. She lost it to Labour in 2017, but won it back in 2019with a ore comfortable majority. However, she was foolish enough in 2020 to travel back to Glasgow  from a vote at Westminster while she had tested positive for Covid and was stripped of the SNP whip when this was discovered.

All this led to a recall petition being initiated, which gathered the requisite signatures from 10% of the electorate by July of this year, with the seat being declared vacant on August 1^st.  A by-election was duly called for the 5^th of October—tomorrow.

This contest bears no resemblance to the three by-elections held in England this summer. As the Conservatives are irrelevant here. Though there are 14 candidates, Ferrier is not among them. The real contest is between the SNP’s Katy Loudin and Labour’s Michael Shanks. Whatever their personal qualities, they have been swamped by the political juggernauts of party campaign machines pouring resources into the area.

For this will be a showdown, a litmus of how well the SNP has survived increasing criticism from ferries to drug deaths and the degree to which Humza Yousaf has steadied the ship since the demise of Nicola Sturgeon and her Chief Executive husband. This will be measured against Anas Sarwar’s ability revive Labour’s fortunes in Scotland from its single-MP nadir. The result will be rightly judged as an indication how many seats Scotland might add to Starter’s tally across Britain. This may well decide the 2024 General Election.

Both main contestants will say this is a tight race, that there is everything to play for. But the result will be a Labour triumph and rather grim for the SNP.

This writer says this with a heavy heart. After four decades of SNP membership and several senior posts in the party, we parted our ways around the Independence Referendum as those running Holyrood succumbed to an inertia born of cosiness in their MP billets, [trbrlance of loyalty over initiative, and a predilection for voter bribes over inspirational vision from the leadership.

Sarwar is not setting the heather alight with inspirationsl visions of what Labour might do at Holyrood, any more than Starmer is at Westminster. Both are gambling that their opponents are making such a pig’s ear of things that power will simply fall into their laps.

Napoleon once said “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake:. Humza’s mistake is to keep Sturgeon’s pedestrian policies without displaying the steely competence with which she made them appear worthwhile.

Though it gars me greet to say it, Michael will walk it. This will undermine already shaky SNP confidence, such that, many of the other yellow dominies covering the Greater Glasgow area may well topple in similar fashion, as wayward sheep of ex-Labour voters come back into the fold.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Rutherglen has been a bellwether for change The Conservatives permanently  lost the seat to Labour in the 1964 by-election which presaged their decline in Scotland to the rump of MPs that are all  they have garnered here for years now.

#1084—626 words