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Losing the Glasgow by-election would be a blow, but big swings to the SNP are not unprecedented, argues YouGov president Peter Kellner in a new online essay.
“Brown quits four months after SNP captures Labour stronghold”. No, that’s not a prediction for this autumn; it’s a glimpse at Labour’s past.
We’ll discuss that historical episode in a moment. Meanwhile, the message that should be spreading through the party is: calm down, dear; it’s only a by-election. The prospect of Labour losing Glasgow East has caused some excitable journalists and panicky Labour MPs to depict impending apocalypse. Some think (wish?) that the Prime Minister’s fate will depend on the result. Yet a brief trip down memory lane should warn against reading too much into the result.
Think back to September 1999. Two years into office, Labour is way ahead of the Conservatives. It has delivered on its manifesto pledge to set up a devolved Scottish Parliament. Labour and the Liberal Democrats share power at Holyrood. And Bill Tynan enters Parliament as MP for Hamilton South.
You don’t remember Bill’s victory vividly? I am not surprised. He was Labour’s candidate, and he held the seat. (The vacancy had been caused by George Robertson’s elevation to the House of Lords and appointment as Nato Secretary-General.) Yet Bill’s majority was just 556. If the 23 per cent swing to the SNP in that contest were to be repeated today, Labour would lose Glasgow East. Yet nobody then said that the collapse in Labour’s share of the vote, from 66 to 37 per cent, should drive Tony Blair from office.
Go back another five years to 1994. John Smith’s sudden death causes a by-election in Monklands East. Helen Liddell holds the seat, but again with a savagely reduce majority. The swing to the SNP this time: 19 per cent. Once again, Labour rightly reacts calmly to this adverse swing.
Bigger swings caused the SNP twice to capture Glasgow, Govan from Labour in by-elections: in November 1973 on a 27 per cent swing, and in November 1988 on a 33 per cent swing. Did Harold Wilson (1973) or Neil Kinnock (1988) fear revolts against their leadership? Of course not. On both occasions, the party wisely held its nerve and gained seats (including winning back Govan) at the subsequent general election.
The biggest swing to the SNP in modern times occurred at Hamilton in November 1967. Winnie Ewing captured the seat from Labour on a 38 per cent swing. That figure, though, is distorted by the fact that the SNP hadn’t fielded a candidate at the previous general election. Admittedly that historical precedent is not a happy one. The by-election took place at a time of economic turmoil when Labour was in power, two weeks before devaluation, and Labour went on to lose the subsequent general election.
The media and political context then was similar to today. However, the muttering about Wilson’s position was more muted than that about Gordon Brown’s today. Indeed, when the Times responded to Hamilton and a series of other by-election losses, its editorial, headed “Crisis of Confidence”, called for the resignation not of Wilson but of George Brown, the frequently drunk Deputy Prime Minister. As the Times put it (without actually mentioning alcohol): “His conduct is too erratic, too bizarre, too damaging and too consistently offensive.”
The Times got its way the following March, when Brown quit the Government. Wilson, though, carried on. Despite the rocky months that followed devaluation, when Labour crashed further behind the Tories than they have this year, Wilson presided over a recovery in Labour’s fortunes that took the party’s support to within three per cent of the Tories at the 1970 general election. In those days, that was not enough to deprive the Conservatives of victory. Today, a deficit of just three points would leave Labour as the largest party.
None of this analysis should be taken to minimise the failure that defeat in Glasgow East would mean: it would unquestionably be bad news. But it would not be surprising. To say that Labour must win the by-election for Gordon Brown to remain Prime Minister is politically daft. It defies the key message from history that big swings to the SNP in by-elections in Labour seats are neither unprecedented, nor fatal to Labour’s national prospects.
Peter Kellner is President of YouGov
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