Winning a by-election by 365 votes is normally nothing to get to excited about. Unless you manage to overturn a majority of 13 507 and get a swing of 22.5% in your favour.  That’s what the Scottish National Party managed in the Glasgow East by-election. The results that are of interest to readers of this site are below:

• John Mason, SNP – 11,277
• Margaret Curran, Labour – 10,912
• Davena Rankin, Conservative – 1,639
• Ian Robertson, Lib Dem – 915
• Frances Curran, Scottish Socialist Party – 555
• Tricia McLeish, Solidarity – 512
• Dr Eileen Duke, Scottish Greens – 232

A similar swing in a general election would lose Labour 150 MPs’ seats. The appalling Des Browne has already been traipsing round the studios saying that the government must “hold its nerve”. Coming from the man with day to day oversight of the imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan it’s pretty clear what he means. He could have thrown in some detail about bringing the private sector into the NHS, a winter of fuel poverty for millions and below inflation pay rises for public sector workers but decided not to.

The SNP government have repositioned themselves to New Labour’s left. Not a major hurdle but an electorally successful one to jump. For example prescription charges were reduced to £5 in April and it is intended to abolish them completely by 2011. New Labour bulwark UNISON has supported the move. Scottish students no longer have to pay tuition fees and SNP leader Alex Salmond has established a profile for the party as combative and willing to take on London. The fact that that the same time the SNP has been cultivating its support in the business world and has not reversed any significant Labour privatisation reminds us that it is a bourgeois party, albeit one that is picking up lot of working class support including from the SSP and Solidarity.

Both organisations had disappointing results and there is no doubt that the pre-split organisation would have fared better, though probably not much better. The Lib Dems and the Greens had poor votes too and these are parties which often serve as the protest option.

The essential message from this election is that almost every Labour seat is vulnerable to a serious challenge and that is welcome. The bad news is that in only a tiny handful of areas will it  be possible to launch a challenge that is more than a propaganda campaign.

What a result! by Richie Venton

This comes from the SSP’s site.

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What a phenomenal result on two parallel levels: the earth-shattering defeat of Labour in Red Clydesider John Wheatley’s seat, Labour’s 3rd safest seat in Scotland, held by them since 1922; and the tremendous achievement for the SSP in winning 5th place, the highest position for any of the smaller parties, despite all the apparently insurmountable obstacles we faced.

If we compare the votes with those of the 2005 Westminster election in the identical Glasgow East seat, Labour has gone into freefall from 18,775 to 10,912; the SNP rocketed from 5,268 to 11,277 – in a turnout down from 48.2% in 2005 to 42.1% this time.

Thousands of Labour voters simply stayed at home in disgust with their record on food and fuel prices; failure to tackle poverty and inequality; assaults on the sick and disabled, and their wholesale neglect of the working class. Others did a straight swap to the SNP, as punishment for New Labour in an area they have treated with decades of contempt, stepping on people’s heads en route to grossly overpaid political careers.

The disgust at Labour politicians, and indeed politicians in the mainstream parties in general, was palpable on the streets, people spitting out angry words about them, responding warmly to the SSP’s policy of ‘A workers’ MP on a worker’s wage’.

Class differentials

There seems to have been a significant class differential in the turnout, with higher voting in the more affluent parts, such as Garrowhill, parts of Baillieston, Mt Vernon – which would be to the SNP’s advantage, because John Mason has been councillor for Garrowhill/Baillieston since 1998. The most deprived districts had generally far lower turnouts, to Labour’s further disadvantage.

The squeeze between the two political Juggernauts that we predicted, whilst agreeing we should stand an SSP candidate, took place with a vice-like vengeance. For example, 85% of those who voted went to either the SNP or Labour. In 2005 the equivalent figure was 77%.

My first impression of the voting figures is that the SNP upsurge was also substantially boosted by defection to them from both the Lib Dems (who plummeted from 3,665 votes three years ago to 915) and even some Tories (who fell from 2,135 to 1,639). In both cases, defecting voters judged that the best way to boot Brown and New Labour was to vote SNP.

This is an unqualified catastrophe for Labour and Gordon Brown. Labour activists were devastated, with talk of the need for a ‘lurch to the left’ amongst a couple of the most unlikely Labour hacks I spoke to at the count.

The national question

There was not widespread, overt, explicit talk on the streets of this being a vote on independence. But it clearly is a clash of contrasting opinions on the Westminster Labour government compared to the Holyrood SNP government – and is a massive impetus towards independence … which will be exponentially added to when Labour’s thrashing in Glasgow East adds to the Labour crisis and therefore increases the likelihood of a Cameron government in Westminster.

All of which positions the Scottish Socialist Party well over the next couple of years, with our pro-independence but unashamedly socialist vision for Scotland, in contrast to the pro-big business agenda of the SNP.

The SNP are riding high in the opinion polls right now, and will be an even more rampant force in the aftermath of Glasgow East, but the contradictions in their all-things-to-all-classes approach are beginning to be revealed to more far-sighted sections of the working class. They face strikes by civil servants against their imposition of a 2% pay ceiling; anger from cou
ncil workers facing cuts where the SNP are in control or coalition, and growing questions over why they dumped their previous commitment to bus re-regulation in the wake of SNP party funding by multi-millionaire bus tycoon Brian Souter.

SSP: the biggest small party

Given the monumental squeeze on all the smaller parties – and even the Lib Dems – the Scottish Socialist Party scored a fantastic achievement, winning 5th place with 555 votes – ahead of the Solidarity vote of 512, and with a crushing lead over the Greens (despite them having 2 MSPs) who could only muster 232 votes.

Of course we need a sense of proportion. Our 555 compares to 1,096 in the 2005 general election, before the split in the SSP. But what is quite remarkable is that the combined left vote held up so well (1,067 – almost literally identical to that of 2005). And in fact the combined share of the vote rose from 3.5% in 2005 to a combined 4.1% this time!

Given the far tighter squeeze in the focussed intensity of this by-election, the prevailing objective conditions that nurtured that dog-fight between SNP and Labour, and the serious, deep damage done to the credibility of the left through the split, it is remarkable that this was achieved, that the left vote held up so well.

This also serves to underline the destructive, wreckless consequences for the socialist left caused by the small minority, led by Tommy Sheridan, who split off from the SSP two years ago. If they had instead accepted the decisions of the majority of members in the SSP and kept a united party intact, the combined vote of 1,067 would have put us in 4th place, above the Lib Dems – and that is taking no account of the huge additional vote a single, united SSP would have won.

In the tragic circumstances of a divided left, which the SSP was founded precisely to overcome in 1998, there is a profound significance in the relative votes of the SSP and Solidarity. Obviously we can’t compare figures with 2005 on this as we had one party then. The nearest comparator is the 2007 Scottish election results for Baillieston (which makes up roughly two-thirds of Glasgow east) and Shettleston (the other third).

A mere 12 months ago Solidarity got 5 times and over 4 times the SSP vote in these two seats respectively. In Glasgow East, the SSP got 53% of the total left vote!

Solidarity boasted about their 5:1 vote advantage in the by-election campaign, including at press conferences. Tommy Sheridan contacted journalists declaring the SSP was “as dead as a Dodo”, repeating the 5:1 differential of last year to try and convince people there was only one party of the left – his.

Solidarity will have got a very substantial family and friends vote for their candidate, and some votes from the family and friends of the child killed by an airgun in Easterhouse.

On top of that they crudely attempted to confuse people into thinking Tommy Sheridan was the candidate, with their one and only leaflet taking the format of a message from him, and the party name on the ballot forms being ‘Solidarity – Tommy Sheridan’ … not even the softer option of ‘co-convener Tommy Sheridan’ which they could have legally used.

Given all this, it is a signpost to the future when the SSP not only closed down the 5:1 differential but actually won the biggest vote for a left party in horrendously difficult circumstances.

For the broad mass the headline is Labour’s slaughter, the SNP’s victory. But for an astute and observant minority the SSP/Solidarity result helps explode Solidarity’s false claims to be Scotland’s foremost socialist party.

A conscious socialist vote

Considering the weight of the aforementioned squeeze on us, every vote for the SSP was an extremely conscious vote for socialism, for the rich traditions of Glasgow’s east end, in the full knowledge we were not going to win, but that our undiluted socialist message deserved support. A very courageous, conscious, socialist vote.

Some parties and journalists are trotting out claims that the good SSP vote was due to confusion over the two Currans – Frances for the SSP, Margaret for Labour. That is arrogant, patronising nonsense. Labour put out tens of thousands of leaflets explaining which Curran to vote for. So did we, with the theme that ‘there’s only one socialist Curran in this election – Frances Curran’. We spelt out the two opposing worlds these two candidates represented.

The visibility, colour, dynamism and élan of the SSP’s campaign on the streets left nobody in any doubt about what or who they were voting for. We never held back on our socialist message, in leaflets, a newspaper delivered to 45,000 homes, giant banners, through street meetings, and in media appearances. The quality of our campaign – which started out with literally no money or material exactly three weeks before polling day at the meeting of members where we selected Frances Curran as our candidate – was praised by the Greens, SNP, Lib Dems and letter writers to the Herald.

SSP pivotal to the future of socialism

We shouldn’t exaggerate what this result for the SSP signifies, given the very modest votes involved at this stage. But we have to feel vastly proud and confident that the SSP is pivotal to the medium-term unification and growth of a united socialist party in Scotland. It is a time to be proud of the principled socialism the SSP stands for; a time to join us and give renewed impetus to the rehabilitation of the socialist traditions of Red Clydeside in one of its historic strongholds.