LABOUR COULD scarcely have received a bigger fillip in the run-up to its annual party conference, which starts in Liverpool this weekend. On October 5th voters in a by-election in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, a suburb south of Glasgow, signalled that they had had enough of the Scottish National Party (SNP), the dominant force in Scottish politics in recent years. Nearly 59% of voters plumped for Labour’s Michael Shanks, a secondary-school teacher (pictured middle). Katy Loudon, the SNP’s candidate, got only 27.6% of the vote.

Mr Shanks’s victory offers the first concrete sign that Labour can restore its fortunes in Scotland in next year’s general election. In 2010 Labour won 41 of Scotland’s current 59 seats in Westminster. After the independence referendum in 2014 it haemorrhaged support to the SNP; at the last election in 2019 Labour took only one seat.

Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, described the win as a “seismic result”. He has been a regular visitor to Rutherglen since August, when Margaret Ferrier, Rutherglen’s former MP, lost her seat in a recall petition. (She had been kicked out of the SNP in 2020 after taking a train from London to Glasgow despite testing positive for covid-19; she had continued to sit as an independent.) Once a Labour stronghold, which has swung between Labour and the SNP at every vote since 2005, Rutherglen was a must-win for the party. Yet the scale of its victory surpassed expectations. Labour needed a swing of five percentage points to win the seat back; it got more than 20.

That has led to predictions that the party will see a big revival in Scotland in the general election. Sir John Curtice, a political scientist at the University of Strathclyde, said that if the swing was replicated across Scotland in 2024 Labour could win 42 Westminster seats north of the border in the general election, and the SNP be left with only six. Labour will not count on that, but it will certainly hope to win more than the 20 seats polling forecasts had previously suggested it might.

That would in turn smooth Sir Keir’s journey to Downing Street. Psephologists reckon that every dozen seats Labour picks up in Scotland knocks a couple of points off the lead it would need elsewhere in Britain to win a majority in Parliament. Returning to health in Scotland makes Labour’s job in England easier in another way, too. In recent years the Conservatives have warned English voters that a weak Labour government would be in the “pocket” of the bullying SNP, and give in to its demands for a second independence referendum. That claim looks less credible now.

The campaign in Rutherglen did expose some differences between the Labour Party north and south of the border. South, where the chief battle is for Tory votes, the party emphasises its moderation and fiscal credibility. But Mr Shanks, like many Scottish Labour activists, is a leftie who has said he would vote to remove the two-child cap on benefits which the Conservatives introduced and which Sir Keir has said he would not scrap. Mr Shanks was fiercely opposed to Brexit, which the Scots overwhelmingly voted against; Sir Keir does not want to reopen that wound.

Yet such differences were obscured by a couple of big things in Labour’s favour. The first is the ebbing of Scottish independence, the raison d’être of the SNP, as a voting issue. Although support for independence remains steady, at about 48% of Scottish voters, a ruling last year by the Supreme Court, that an independence referendum is not possible unless Westminster agrees, has made it harder for the party to argue that it can bring about secession.

The second is that the SNP appears to offer little else to voters. It has been sliding in the polls since Nicola Sturgeon, its former party leader, was arrested in June as part of police investigations into the party’s finances. Humza Yousaf, who was elected as party leader (and thus Scotland’s first minister) in March, doesn’t seem to have helped much. He only narrowly beat Kate Forbes, his main (and continuing) rival, and, says James Mitchell, a professor of politics at Edinburgh University, has done little to impress since.

All of which ensures that Mr Yousaf will endure awkward questions at the SNP party conference in Aberdeen later this month. At the Labour conference in Liverpool, meanwhile, Mr Shanks will be lionised. ■