Keir Starmer: Labour are vindicated with landslide by-election win
The morning after the night before, saw Keir Starmer in Burnside – still celebrating strongly, after the landslide victory for Michael Shanks (a local Modern Studies teacher and Labour’s second Scottish MP in this parliament) in the hotly-contested by-election at Rutherglen and Hamilton West.
With a turnout of only 37% – one of the lowest-attended in recent years – parties can expect a drop in their vote share. But the SNP wouldn’t have expected such a drop, with Labour getting a swing of 20.4%. While the Tories and the LibDems lost their deposits by both getting under 5%.
Despite analysis of the polling data showing if the voting intentions stay the same Labour would return over 40 Scottish seats in a Westminster election – Starmer, the man who many consider to be the prime minister-in-waiting, told us he isn’t getting carried away and that this result shows that independence is not a priority for voters anymore.
The Labour leader said: “We are the party that believes very strongly in the union, not just for the very many historical reasons that everybody supports the union and or should support the union.
“But also because if we look at the challenges of the future, it is obvious to me that we will face those challenges, whether it’s climate, whether it’s the economy, whether it’s conflict, we will face them better as four nations together.”
“I think the independence referendum is the last thing that anybody should be focused on,” he continued. “We just had a campaign over a number of months, knocking on I don’t know how many thousand doors, how many thousand conversations, and the number one issue is the cost of living crisis, followed very swiftly by the state of public services, particularly health.
“They are the key priorities. And when I set out the five missions of an incoming Labour government, if we’re privileged enough to serve, they are the absolute focus of what we hope to achieve in government, and we’re not going to get sidetracked by the arguments of others.
“The SNP has got its priorities completely wrong. And I think that’s been reflected in the vote yesterday.”
Labour have done a lot of work in Scotland to turn around their fortunes, and Starmer believes they have been “vindicated” with this result.
In the press pack Starmer, said: “When I took over as leader of the party, I knew that if we were to go from our worst general election result since 1935 to a general election victory, we needed to do three things in this order.
“Change the Labour Party at speed and ruthlessly. We’ve done that, the work is never finished.
“Expose that the SNP is unfit to govern. And I think you saw vindication of that last night and to set out our positive case for change.”
He added: “So I will ensure that we complete on the strategy which has taken us from our worst general election [result] to a historic night here in Scotland.”
Speaking at a victory rally in Rutherglen on Friday morning alongside the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, and the winning candidate, Michael Shanks, Starmer said to party members: “They said that we couldn’t change the Labour party and we did it. They said that we couldn’t win in the south of England and the north of England, and we did it. They said: ‘You’ll never beat the SNP in Scotland,’ and Rutherglen, you did it. You blew the doors off!”
The Scottish Labour leader, said: “It’s important to stress, in Michael we had a phenomenal candidate. We ran a phenomenal campaign and I’m really proud of the team. But this win is not just two months or six months in the making, this is two years in the making.
“And I think it’s important to stress, two years ago, we were 32 points behind the SNP. People were talking about Scottish Labour’s survival.
“Two years on for us to win a parliamentary by-election with a swing over 20% to get more than double the SNP vote, I think sends you a really strong signal and message.”
He said the result “was even beyond our expectations”.
“I think what that demonstrates is that there’s something happening in Scotland. There is something happening out there that I think every political party has probably not quite seen the extent of.
“And that is people are sick to the back teeth of the failure, of the decline, of the chaos and the division, and they want change, and Scottish Labour is determined to be that change.”
Sarwar said Labour’s victory was because they were reaching out beyond their core vote.
“The Tories are only speaking to their hardcore base. The SNP is only appealing to the hardcore base. We are the only ones trying to reach out and appeal to voters and persuade voters that a different future is possible.”
SNP depute leader Keith Brown said the party was disappointed but put Labour’s victory down to Tory supporters voting tactically.
“The SNP has run a positive, energetic and engaging campaign – but sadly we were not able to deliver the result we hoped for,” he said.
“As the Tories face the prospect of losing all their seats in Scotland, with a devastating result that saw them lose their deposit, it’s Sir Keir Starmer’s pro-Brexit Labour Party that benefitted from support from Tory voters.”
He paid tribute to Katy Loudon, calling her “a superb candidate.”
Brown added: “The SNP will work hard to ensure we are earning, and re-earning, the trust of the people of Scotland in this seat that has switched between the SNP and Labour at every election since 2010, and across the country.”
