The SNP's hegemony over Scottish politics is over

The Rutherglen by-election is a pivotal moment like Hamilton '67 or Govan '88 - only in reverse

In the 2015 “tsunami” general election, the SNP won 56 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats. The Scottish Labour Party lost 40 of its MPs and was reduced to one solitary member of the House of Commons. What goes around comes around and on the evidence of the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election, Labour is on course to win back most, if not all of those 40 seats.

This was truly a “seismic” result, as Professor John Curtice said on BBC’s Good Morning Scotland. He was clearly as surprised as the SNP and Labour at the scale of the 20% swing against the nationalists. Opinion polls had been indicating that Labour was back in contention in Scotland – but not on this scale. So, how did they do it and what does it really mean?

Well, the SNP insist, rightly, that this was a most unusual by election, caused by the ousting of the SNP MP, Margaret Ferrier, in a recall ballot following her suspension from Westminster for disobeying Covid lockdown rules. And the turnout was low, under 40%. The nationalists fully expected to lose and had been briefing as such for weeks.

Our voters just stayed at home, they say, it’s no biggie. But no amount of spin can prevent this result being huge blow to the SNP government and to Humza Yousaf personally. It confirms what many of his leadership rivals, like the former finance secretary, Kate Forbes, said about him last summer: that he is a three time loser. “Humza Useless”.

The voters of Rutherglen were evidently disgusted at the circus of incompetence that the SNP has presented to the Scottish public since Nicola Sturgeon’s dramatic resignation last February. The arrests of senior SNP figures, Sturgeon included, in the “cash for campervans” affair; the chaos of the cancelled deposit return scheme for bottles and cans; the mismanagement of Ferguson Marine ferry contracts.

Scottish voters seem fed up too with Yousaf’s genuflections to the Scottish Green Party policies on gender reform, increasing taxation, banning boilers, and illiberal legislation like the Hate Crime Bill. In Rutherglen, Humza Yousaf’s coalition partners received only 600 votes in this West of Scotland bell-weather seat. They didn’t seem to heed the Green’s candidate cries that the planet is “burning”.

But this is not just a story about the SNP’s faltering leadership, incompetence and ideological confusion. Rutherglen marks the end of the SNP’s hegemony of Scottish politics and the return of Labour, but it also indicates a shift in ideological positioning of the main Scottish parties.

Back in 2019, when Jeremy Corbyn was leader, the Scottish Labour Party was significantly to the left of the SNP on issues like taxation, LGBT and public spending. In recent months, Anas Sarwar has repositioned Labour significantly to the centre right on tax, gender, Net Zero and welfare. Meanwhile, the “First Activist” as Humza Yousaf likes to call himself has gone in the opposite direction under the tutelage of the Scottish Greens and is promising to increase the tax burden on the middle classes.

In Rutherglen, Labour’s message was, by contrast, that Scots are being taxed enough already and not getting anything in return. Labour now has a “presumption against tax increases”. Nor has Sarwar joined the SNP in condemning the UK Tories’ two child cap on benefits – what Labour MPs used to call the “rape clause” because a raped mother of two might not be eligible for child benefit if she gave birth.

On the environment Labour’s rhetoric has also changed markedly. Sarwar now accepts that the development of the controversial Rosebank oil and gas field will go ahead as planned and agrees with Rishi Sunak that fossil fuels will be needed “for decades ahead” as part of the transition to renewables . Labour even opposed Glasgow’s Low Emission Zone and is keeping very quiet over the SNP’s policy of banning gas boilers from 2025.

Sarwar has also disowned the Scottish Government’s stalled Gender Recognition Reform Bill despite Labour having voted for it only last year. The Scottish Labour leader now says he would not vote for the GRRB unless there were better protections for women against predatory men invading their single sex spaces after self-identifying as female. This bill, effectively vetoed by the Tory Scottish Secretary, Alister Jack, under Section 35 of the Scotland Act, has caused immense damage to the SNP in its West of Scotland heartlands. It was one of the proximate causes of Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation in February.

Scottish voters, who have no prejudice against transgender people as such, were nevertheless appalled in January when it emerged that sex offenders, like the rapist Isla Bryson (aka Adam Graham) were being placed on remand in women’s jails after they self-ID’d as female following their arrest. The GRRB remains still a political running sore as Yousaf attempts to lift the veto in the courts.

Labour in Scotland is not only returning to the centre of politics, it is actually aligning itself, in major respects, with the policies of the UK Tory government - most markedly on the constitution. The former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has said that Scotland should have the right to a repeat referendum on independence, but Keir Starmer has rejected this out of hand and so has his Scottish lieutenant, Anas Sarwar. Around half of Scots may still say they support independence in theory, but all the steam has gone out of the drive for Indyref 2. Humza Yousaf’s talk of turning the next general election into a de facto referendum is now a political liability for the nationalists. On this showing they’re going to lose it.

The SNP woke up to the implications of all this during the Rutherglen campaign. Their candidate, Katy Loudon, avoided talk of tax and independence and instead was talking in her campaign literature about protecting pensions and even tax relief on mortgages – neither of which are actually the responsibility of the Scottish Government. Her insistence that Westminster only notices Scotland when it votes SNP is now contradicted by events. Westminster is not only noticing Scotland but is agog at the very real prospect that Scotland could help deliver a Labour government next year.

The Rutherglen campaign revealed a party in chaos. It is bitterly divided internally over the alliance with the Greens – the most obviously manifestation of which was the suspension of the veteran SNP MP Fergus Ewing for daring to criticize the “wine bar revolutionaries”. Prominent figures like the Western Isles MP, Angus MacNeil are saying openly that the party leadership is clueless. Humza Yousaf is living on borrowed time only six months after becoming leader.

A succession of policy disasters and scandals has wrecked the SNP’s reputation for running a competent, if not imaginative government. It has been in power in Scotland for sixteen years and is failing on every dimension: the attainment gap in education, hospital waiting lists, economic performance, transport infrastructure even policing. It’s only memorable initiative recently has been to decriminalise hard drugs and authorise a heroin consumption room in Glasgow.

That is why the Rutherglen result is so significant. It is one of those transformational moments in politics, like the Hamilton by-election in 1967 or the Govan by-election in 1988 - but in reverse. Everything has changed. A whole concatenation of factors, ideological as well as party political, have toppled the Scottish National Party and reminded it that, in politics, all things must pass. And the first to go into the dustbin of history may well be Humza Yousaf himself.