Glenrothes by-election

[Rolfe]

Going for the ultimate award in tastelessness here, as the MP only died last night, but here is a thread to discuss the political implications of this.

This constituency is in Scotland, and the seat is currently held by Labour with a majority of about 10,000 (compare Glasgow East where the majority was 13,500).

In contrast to the unseemly rush to hold the Glasgow East by-election, I anticipate a bit of foot-dragging on this one.

Rolfe.

Hmmmm. I note that Glenrothes is 48.3 miles from my house, estimated journey time 1 hour 10 minutes. Cf. Glasgow East, which was 52 miles and 1 hour 4 minutes. Oh well, the rosette is still lying on the parcel shelf....

 

[Jaggy Bunnet]

Going for the ultimate award in tastelessness here, as the MP only died last night, but here is a thread to discuss the political implications of this.

This constituency is in Scotland, and the seat is currently held by Labour with a majority of about 10,000 (compare Glasgow East where the majority was 13,500).

In contrast to the unseemly rush to hold the Glasgow East by-election, I anticipate a bit of foot-dragging on this one.

Rolfe.

Hmmmm. I note that Glenrothes is 48.3 miles from my house, estimated journey time 1 hour 10 minutes. Cf. Glasgow East, which was 52 miles and 1 hour 4 minutes. Oh well, the rosette is still lying on the parcel shelf....

I suspect that the MP for the neighbouring constituency will be staying as far as possible away during the election campaign - maybe he would lend you his house to save on CO2 emissions?

 

[Rolfe]

The Times is the only online newspaper which seems to have any coverage of this.

Brown faces fresh by-election as Labour MP John MacDougall dies

Analysis: SNP hot favourites to win Glenrothes

The prevailing view seems to be that the by-election is likely to be delayed until October or November, in the hope of a Labour recovery, or the SNP shooting themselves in the foot. This makes a bit of a mockery of the haste to call the Glasgow East by-election, which was said to be due to a desire not to leave the people of the constituency without an MP for several months. (In fact it was a combination of trying to catch the SNP election response on the hop, and hoping that the by-election would be safely over before details of what David Marshall had been up to before he resigned became public.)

It was pointed out at the time that it is possible to call by-elections during the parliamentary recess, and that is still true, but I doubt if there will be a rush to explore that possibility.

It has been suggested that Labour might call an early general election rather than fight this by-election, but I seriously doubt that's in their thinking. Even if thay lose the by-election, that will only give the SNP eight MPs, and it won't disrupt the Commons arithmetic significantly. A general election would be turkeys voting for Christmas, plucking themselves and jumping in the oven, stopping only to make the cranberry sauce on the way. (Apologies to whoever I nicked that from.) Oh yes, make that bankrupt turkeys. A by-election will be expensive, but not nearly as expensive as a general election, in every way.

Of course Glasgow East cost the SNP money too, but I'm pretty sure the party is up for a repeat performance. This by-election has been anticipated for months anyway, and passing round the hat is likely to yield results. And the activists were quite explicitly regarding Glasgow East as a practice run for this one - and Motherwell, of course.

The Motherwell and Wishaw by-election is a different kettle of fish. That's a Holyrood seat, and if the SNP wins that, it makes their majority in Holyrood three rather than one. Tripling it in one fell swoop. I suspect that the good people of Malawi might have to wait quite a while for their new High Commissioner to take office.

There was a new YouGov poll out today, which is very poorly reported online (though I hear that the Independent has it splashed all over the front page of its Scottish edition).

The YouGov poll, conducted from August 6-8 with a sample of 1,028, puts the SNP on 44%, up 11% on their May 2007 election performance, with Labour trailing at 25%, down 7%.

The Liberal Democrats at 14% and the Tories at 13% are both down on their 2007 performance, by 2% and 4% respectively.

On one calculation, the figures could give the SNP 58 of Holyrood's 73 constituency seats, while Labour would slump to eight seats, the Lib Dems six, and the Tories one.

And from a comment on that thread, the information that Westminster voting intentions were also polled. (I think this is a quote from the Edinburgh Evening News.)

CHANCELLOR Alistair Darling could lose his parliamentary seat in Edinburgh South West at the next election, according to an opinion poll released today.
A huge swing towards the Scottish National Party would see a number of key Labour seats at Westminster wiped out, the YouGov survey indicates.

Edinburgh East MP Gavin Strang and Nigel Griffiths in Edinburgh South would also lose their seats if the predictions are correct.

The survey of voting intentions, which was commissioned by the SNP, found a doubling of support for the Nationalists since the last election.

The party registered support of 36 per cent of those polled, with Labour down 11 percentage points since 2005 to 29 per cent.

The Conservatives showed a rise of two points to 18 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats dropping 10 points to 13 per cent.

Such a victory would swell the SNP's Westminster ranks from six to 26, making it the largest parliamentary party in Scotland. Labour would lose 19 MPs, leaving the party with just 22 Scottish MPs.

Yes, I don't suppose Labour will be all that worried if the constituents of Glenrothes are lacking a representative in parliament for a few months....

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

I suspect that the MP for the neighbouring constituency will be staying as far as possible away during the election campaign - maybe he would lend you his house to save on CO2 emissions?

Rolfe.

 

[Darat]

Sadly this one can't have come as a surprise to anyone so you'd expect that the Labour party machinery would be ready to run with it.....

 

[Rolfe]

Not after what happened in Glasgow East I wouldn't.

The really shocking thing about all that was the revelation that Labour's computer software can't cope with the Scottish system of numbering tenement flats. They had to do all the canvass returns manually as a result.

Now, east Glasgow is not the only area of Scotland to have such a numbering system. It's pretty universal in city constituencies. The suggests that they have been doing no canvassing and recording no data for any Scottish constituencies. Can that be for real, given that there was a Holyrood election only a year ago?

I understand they had only canvassed half that constituency by polling day. In contrast to the SNP, who had a third of it done in advance (John Mason's council ward), and got the rest done by ten days before polling day. Well, they called the election, and chose to call it with extreme haste.

This time, I anticipate a pause long enough to get a computer system in place and some canvassing done. Assuming they can get people prepared to do it. And I hope nobody will take this the wrong way, but using people with English accents to canvass in Scotland is often a bad idea.

I suppose at least they'll be vetting their volunteers a bit more carefully this time.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

A couple of interesting articles.

From the Herald....
Why McLeish could be ideal candidate

From the Times
MPs try to block Henry McLeish as candidate

.... if Mr McLeish was selected it would show that Scottish Labour had no talent pool to pick from and had to “go back to the future” for a candidate.

Uh, yes....

Rolfe.

 

[Architect]

Was "the plumber" all that bad? It all seems so long ago now.....

 

[Nogbad]

Henry is an OK guy but way too "off message" for NL I would have thought and far too independent of London.

 

[Rolfe]

Seems to me that Henry could be their best chance of holding the seat. But I suspect they'd rather lose it than welcome the loose cannon back into Westminster.

I wonder if they might try to have the Motherwell and Wishaw by-election the same day, in the hope of splitting up the SNP campaign effort? The trouble with that is, it would split the Labour effort too, and they seemed to have far less resources to call on than the SNP had last month.

Wishaw is only 29.5 miles from here, it's where I moved from last spring, basically lemme attit!!! I swear I'd pay good money to canvass the village where I was brought up, or even the area of the town where I lived latterly.

Rolfe.

 

[Nogbad]

Seems to me that Henry could be their best chance of holding the seat. But I suspect they'd rather lose it than welcome the loose cannon back into Westminster.

I wonder if they might try to have the Motherwell and Wishaw by-election the same day, in the hope of splitting up the SNP campaign effort? The trouble with that is, it would split the Labour effort too, and they seemed to have far less resources to call on than the SNP had last month.

Wishaw is only 29.5 miles from here, it's where I moved from last spring, basically lemme attit!!! I swear I'd pay good money to canvass the village where I was brought up, or even the area of the town where I lived latterly.

Rolfe.

Didn't even know Motherwell was up for a by election At this rate Cameron won't need to wait until 2010.

Did I see an opinion poll putting the SNP comfortably ahead of Labour recently or did I imagine it?

 

[Rolfe]

Didn't even know Motherwell was up for a by election At this rate Cameron won't need to wait until 2010.

It will be a Holyrood by-election. Our esteemed former FM (the one after Henry) was promised the job of High Commissioner to Malawi to get him to stand down and let the fragrant Wendy take over after Labour lost Holyrood last year. Rumour has it that he fancied a seat in the Lords but that wasn't on offer. Bit of a shame for all those working their socks off in the Diplomatic Corps in the hope of a posting like this, but there you go.

Anyway, Henry should have been off to Africa months ago. But Brown is bottling the by-election. Probably even more so than a Westminster one, because while one extra SNP MP is neither here not there in the Commons' arithmetic, a win in M&W would treble their Holyrood majority.

Did I see an opinion poll putting the SNP comfortably ahead of Labour recently or did I imagine it?

Only if you were real quick. The Herald had an article online, but only discussing the Holyrood figures, and even that got buried and the paper itself didn't have a syllable. I bought the Independent that day, because it was splashed all over the front page, but that article wasn't online.

It was a YouGov poll, and it had the SNP comfortably ahead for Westminster as well as Holyrood, in seats as well as votes. I'll see if I can find an online reference to it.

This is the first poll ever that has shown the SNP ahead of Labour in Westminster voting intentions. It's a bit startling that the Herald had nothing at all on it, that's the paper that used to commission a System 3 poll every month.

Rolfe.

 

[Nogbad]

The Herald is less good than it used to be although it is light years ahead of the tabloids. I like the letters page, some of the regulars are quite entertaining. I picked a Telegraph up by mistake a couple of weeks ago and was horrified by the feeble "Britain isn't what it used to be" one line letters. Turned back to the front page and realised my mistake (I felt sullied and it quite spoiled my morning commute )


Forgot all about the Malawi thing.

 

[Rolfe]

Ah, Malawi. I had a feeling I'd got that wrong. Mind if I edit my post?

The Scottish edition of the Independent seems just to be a front page wrapped round the same as England gets. That front page was worth paying for, but the rest of the paper wasn't. A couple of times recently my paperboy has given me a Telegraph instead of a Herald and it wasn't a bad effort, with a number of Scottish articles inside, but while I find it quite a good read, I like a purely Scottish paper and I don't think I'm Torygraph at heart.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

OK, here's a quick summary of the figures from the Independent.

SNP will rout Labour in general election - poll
Darling and Browne face losing Westminster seats

SNP - 36% (26 seats) (up 18% and 20 seats on 2005)
Labour - 29% (22 seats) (down 11% and 19 seats)
Conservative - 18% (4 seats) (up 2% and 3 seats)
LibDem - 13% (7 seats) (down 10% and 4 seats)
Other - 4%

Oddly enough I can't find this even on the SNP web site.

What I do find there is the Holyrood figures, as reported in the Herald.

SNP: 44% [+11]
Labour: 25% [-7]
Lib Dem: 14% [-2]
Con: 13% [-4]
Other: 4% [+2]

Applying these figures to the Weber Shandwick Scotland Votes model, the SNP would win 58 of Scotland's 73 Holyrood first-past-the-post seats.

SNP - 58 constituency seats (plus 37)
Labour - 8 constituency seats (minus 29)
LibDems - 6 constituency seats (minus 5)
Tories - 1 constituency seat (minus 3)

The SNP would gain the seats of all three Labour leadership contenders - Iain Gray, Andy Kerr and Cathy Jamieson.

Labour would obviously get a lot of list MSPs in that situation, I'm sure someone somewhere has done the arithmetic. Nice to watch them backtrack on their present efforts to make list MSPs second-class citizens!

Oh yes, found this calculation.

Although the poll did not ask the regional intentions, the last election results show a pattern of about 2% away from the major parties to the minor parties on the list vote with the Greens getting about half of the minor party vote total.

According the Scotland Votes predictor, 44% constituency vote would give the SNP 58 seats.

Using the constituency vote minus 2% for the major parties and Greens with half of the minor party vote, the regional list could be expected to be similar to this and the totals to this

Scottish Parliament (129 seats)
73 Const. seats, 56 Reg seats, majority is 65 total

Party (Reg) (Const) (Total)

SNP 42 (6)(58) (64)
Labour 23 (24) (8) (32)
LibDem 12 (9) (6) (15)
Tories 11 (12) (1) (13)
Green 6 (5) (0) (5)
Others 6 (0) (0) (0)

It is currently showing the SNP one seat short of an overall majority. With currently one independent, Margo MacDonald, a former SNP member, could that single vote be the difference?

The SNP site also gives a "poll of polls" Westminster analysis for May and June, extracting the Scottish responders from ten UK-wide opinion polls to derive a reasonably meaningful number to play with.

The study based on the ten UK opinion polls conducted in May and June following the first anniversary of the SNP Government gives the following ratings (change from 2005 election in brackets):

SNP: 34% (+16%), Lab: 28% (-12%), Tory: 21% (+5%), LibDem: 12% (-10%), Other: 5% (1%)

It's reasonably in line with the figures reported by the Independent this week, allowing for a spot more movement in the SNP direction. I think the general feeling is that Labour are in trouble in Glenrothes. One dilemma most be, if they throw everything at it, including Henry as a candidate and GB campaigning on the ground, and still lose, do they have any credibility left at all?

Rolfe.

 

[Nogbad]

Ah, Malawi. I had a feeling I'd got that wrong. Mind if I edit my post?

The Scottish edition of the Independent seems just to be a front page wrapped round the same as England gets. That front page was worth paying for, but the rest of the paper wasn't. A couple of times recently my paperboy has given me a Telegraph instead of a Herald and it wasn't a bad effort, with a number of Scottish articles inside, but while I find it quite a good read, I like a purely Scottish paper and I don't think I'm Torygraph at heart.

Rolfe.

◊◊◊◊! I never even noticed you had something else in there - it has been a long week and I am watching Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii on You Tube. I am obviously not a multi tasker - so be my guest

 

[Rolfe]

Looking at those poll figures, I remember all the protestations that we don't need an independence referendum because a vote for the SNP is the way to express that preference (handily editing out all the Labour voters who are in favour of independence). I wonder how long it will take, if these figures are anywhere near repeated at an actual election, for the result to be declared a protest vote, and of course this doesn't in any way signal a desire for independence!

Rolfe.

 

[andyandy]

There's a good article about what Labour should do in the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/15/glenrothes.byelections

For one thing, delaying a byelection goes against current Labour instincts about such matters, which are haunted by the loss of Brent East to the Liberal Democrats in 2003 - a byelection loss now put down by the party to the three-month gap between the death of Labour's Paul Daisley and polling day. Modern byelections have to take place quickly, one former Labour manager argued to me before Glasgow East. Going early maximises your own control, minimises your own weaknesses, denies your opponents time, and, if you lose, it gets the bad news out of the way.

This last is a potent factor in any calculations about Glenrothes. If, in the real world, Labour is bound to lose there, then what is the advantage of delaying? In the wake of Glasgow East, nobody expects Labour to hold Glenrothes, so would it not be best - or least worst - to just take the hit?

The crucial political question about Glenrothes is whether a defeat there will trigger a challenge to Brown. There are no easy answers, but the impact of a November defeat in Glenrothes on a relaunched, reshuffled and even modestly resurgent Labour party would in my view be much more damaging to Brown than the impact of a September defeat on a Labour party fully braced for the loss and ready, in the aftermath, to stand by its leader as he attempts to turn things around.

None of this, let's be clear, does much, if anything, to address Labour's central current problem. That problem, as a former minister graphically puts it, is that the electorate now thinks of Brown in the same way as a householder who sees an unwelcome visitor through the spyhole in the front door when the bell rings. At first, the householder just refuses to answer the door. But if the same visitor simply goes on ringing the same bell, the householder will go to any lengths to get rid of him. Labour's challenge is to work out how to persuade the electorate to answer the door. That's partly about the face they see through the spyhole, but in the end it is even more about the message he brings.

Seen from now, in the middle of August 2008, Labour seems willing to allow Brown another chance to ring the bell on its behalf. In my view that is a piece of self-indulgence Labour cannot afford. Yet if I am wrong, as I may be, and the Brown strategy is to have some chance of succeeding - however modestly such success must now be defined - then Labour has to find a way of taking the electorate's punch in Glenrothes and not allowing that punch to lay it on the canvas. That way is to hold the byelection at the earliest possible, if ominous, date: September 11

I think the reasoning is pretty sound. The absolute worst thing for Labour would be to oversee a "party relaunch" with a new mission statement, some new policies and a Cabinet reshuffle in the autumn, only to be trounced just as badly in a following by-election. Given that the economy is only going to deteriorate, and with it Labour support is likely to deteriorate even further, you could certainly make a case for getting it over and done with. This argument is further reinforced by the fact that the SNP can mobilise large numbers of supporters and the fact that the Labour Party have no money, so any protracted by-election campaign would play into the hands of the SNP. Of course, I don't think there will be a snap election. Gordon will try to avoid having to deal with the issue for as long as possible, as he seems quite adept at head in the sand politics.

 

[gtc]

The Scottish edition of the Independent seems just to be a front page wrapped round the same as England gets. That front page was worth paying for, but the rest of the paper wasn't. A couple of times recently my paperboy has given me a Telegraph instead of a Herald and it wasn't a bad effort, with a number of Scottish articles inside, but while I find it quite a good read, I like a purely Scottish paper and I don't think I'm Torygraph at heart.

Out of interest, how different are the Scottish editions of the Guardian and the Times?

I have read that Scotland has one of the most competitive newspaper markets given that you get the full suite of London papers plus the Scottish ones.

 

[Nogbad]

Out of interest, how different are the Scottish editions of the Guardian and the Times?

I have read that Scotland has one of the most competitive newspaper markets given that you get the full suite of London papers plus the Scottish ones.

I do know that the Scottish Daily Mail does not run with the intemperate anti-Scottish head lines, articles and editorials printed in the English edition....


not surprising really I suppose.