Will Labour save the Union?!?

SNP candidate Katy Loudon on her way to crushing defeat, with Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf

A few minutes ago Labour won a huge victory in the Rutherglen & Hamilton West parliamentary by-election, caused by a successful recall petition against the disgraced SNP MP Margaret Ferrier, who had breached pandemic regulations.

This is a constituency on the outskirts of Glasgow, and was one of many that swung heavily to the SNP in 2015. Labour briefly took it back with a tiny majority in 2017, before losing again to the SNP in 2019.

Given the circumstances of the previous MP’s departure, no-one was surprised by Labour’s win, but what was remarkable was its scale: a swing of more than 20%, with Labour taking 58.6% of the vote (up from 34.5% four years ago).

With the collapse in the Conservative Party’s vote – losing their deposit on only 3.9% after polling 15% here in 2019 – it’s perhaps surprising that Reform UK made no impact at all, taking only 1.3% (almost identical to the UKIP vote in 2019). This was the second bad result in 24 hours for Reform UK: they managed only 6.3% in a local council by-election in Tamworth, where their candidate is also standing in the forthcoming Tamworth parliamentary by-election and there has been intense activity in recent weeks promoting him. UKIP also fielded their parliamentary candidate in this local Tamworth by-election and polled only 1.6%.

Nigel Farage was dancing with former Home Secretary Priti Patel at the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, while his friends in Reform UK were limping towards 1.3% in the Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election. Is the party over?

Back in Rutherglen, Niall Fraser from the Scottish Family Party fought an energetic campaign, opposing the absurd wokeness of the SNP and Labour on gender issues, but took only 319 votes (1.0%).

Perhaps the most significant aspect of this by-election result is that it is yet another signal of the end of SNP hegemony. Until the last year or two, many H&D readers might have been excused for being pessimistic about the future of the Union. But the SNP’s many crises look as though they might prove terminal for the cause of Scottish ‘independence’.

Another hopeful sign this week was a statement by Labour’s leader Sir Keir Starmer that he could not envisage circumstances where he would call a referendum in Northern Ireland on the future of the Union.

Of course H&D will continue to oppose Starmer and his party on almost all of their policies, and we can expect that (like the Tories) Labour will pursue policies that betray Ulster by stealth.

But that doesn’t stop us welcoming the total defeat of Jeremy Corbyn and his gang of IRA sympathisers, who had they somehow entered Downing Street would have betrayed Ulster to the IRA as well as abandoning our fellow Europeans to Vladimir Putin’s horde of barbarians.

The SNP are a less gruesome band of traitors, but their total defeat is again something to celebrate. One small step towards the renewal of the United Kingdom, which will of course also require the defeat of the other old gang parties!