casey28

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Wikipedia page including full result here. This by-election in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse constituency was for the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, and was caused by the death of the sitting SNP MSP Christina McKelvie in March. The by-election was held under the first past the post system used for Westminster elections, and the top four in the result were as follows:

Labour......... 8,559 (31.6%, -2.0 pts)
SNP............ 7,957 (29.4%, -16.8 pts)
Reform......... 7,088 (26.1%, new)
Conservative... 1,621 ( 6.0%, -11.5 pts)

The six other candidates were even more also-rans than the Tories, with none of them winning more than 2.6% of the vote. Turnout was 44.2%.

I wonder how many people saw this result coming? There'd even been a front-page interview in the Daily Record by the SNP's First Minister, John Swinney, which was predicated on the idea that this would be a straight SNP/Reform fight and "Labour can't win here". In the event, they could and they did. My own view, for what it's worth, was that the SNP would probably hang on with a reduced majority, with Reform and Labour in a close battle for second. I was wrong too.

From down here in England I'm obviously missing some context, such as how much of a personal vote McKelvie had, but a few things come to mind. First, the days of the SNP simply cruising to election victories are gone. They've been in power at Holyrood for a long time now, and Swinney just doesn't have the star power of Nicola Sturgeon. "It's all England's fault, vote for us and independence" is a rather unfair way of representing the SNP's pitch, but the heavy fall in the party's vote suggests they'll need a lot more than that. They may struggle to get close to a majority in Holyrood next year.

Labour will be delighted on the surface, and after all a win is a win. However, they lost vote share since last time (2021), and only won the seat because the SNP lost a lot more. Given that Labour is an opposition party in the Scottish Parliament, getting under a third of the vote is not some kind of overwhelming mandate. I suspect that a lot of anti-Reform and anti-SNP voters simply coalesced around Labour as the least worst option. In parts of this constituency unionism is still a strong factor, and Labour might have been seen as best placed there, too.

Reform has, inevitably, got the lion's share of media attention. This has been a bit silly in places -- as someone said elsewhere, the BBC in particular has been a bit "Labour won from the SNP, now let's talk to third-place winner Nigel Farage", which is something they do far too much. Nevertheless, going from zero to over a quarter of the vote isn't something anyone can ignore. I said a little while ago that Scottish (and Welsh) politicians should not be smug about Reform's victories in English local elections and imagine they were magically immune. This underlines that.

The Tories had a terrible night. I'm sure they expected that, but it was a fall from a respectable position four years ago. They clearly lost a lot of voters to Reform, but Reform didn't only win from the Conservatives. I suspect in fact they took some from Labour -- and even some from the SNP. Although the SNP is fairly unusual in modern Europe in being a liberal, left-wing nationalist party, not all its members are of that persuasion. It would be a mistake to assume that Reform's blend of social conservatism and left-wing economics didn't appeal to some SNP voters.

First Past the Post is a poor electoral system, but it's an even worse one now we have an extra major party in the mix. I suspect that in Westminster by-elections too, we will see more results like this in the coming years, with winners on barely (or even less than) 30% of the vote. The optimist in me hopes this will finally see us adopting a modern voting system, but the optimist in me has been repeatedly disappointed over the last decade or so.

I do have one final thought about Reform's popularity, both here and in Great Britain as a whole. These days, the main traditional parties go for an almost obsessively targeted, data-driven approach to canvassing, concentrating heavily on winnable floating voters or getting their base out. That means a lot of people never see a canvasser at election time. It's easy for those voters to feel the main parties don't care about their views. There's a clear space there for a party who'll "do things differently", and some evidence suggests many Reform voters usually don't vote at all. I think the traditional parties need to take some note of this. To a certain extent, their laser focus on a small subset of voters may be helping Reform...