The Labour government showed what a desperate state they were this/last Thursday, when they declared the Glasgow North East by-election win as a ‘dramatic victory’ and an endorsement of Gordon Brown’s precarious position.
The by-election victory of Labour’s Willie Bain, caused by the resignation of former commons speaker Michael Martin- who was forced to resign in shame at the wake of the expenses saga- should do little to settle Brown’s sleepless nights. The Glasgow North East seat in parliament has been a Labour safe seat for nearly 74 years and it would have been a huge embarrassment for the party to have lost; hardly a ‘dramatic victory’.
Voter turnout, at 32.97 per cent, was a record low for a Scottish by-election and a further 12.8 per cent down on the 2005 General Election in which Martin was originally elected. It’s a sad sad time for the Labour party when a tenuous election result gets described as a ‘dramatic victory’, in a seat in which a Labour by-election win wouldn’t normally have warranted a single column inch of news. Perhaps ‘dramatic sigh-of-relief’ would have been a description of what was going through the mind of Jim Murphy, the current Scottish Secretary of state, who feared yet another SNP victory, in a Scotland which is increasingly becoming a no-win area for the Labour party.
Mr Murphy arrogantly added in a radio interview that: “The people of Scotland are seeing through the SNP, the people of Glasgow have spoken for the whole of Scotland.” It’s not what election results to the Scottish Parliament would tell you though, where in the 2007 election, the SNP boosted their share of votes to win 20 more seats and take the majority in the assembly, largely at the expense of the Labour party. Perhaps even more worrying for the UK government was the fact that the BNP took nearly five per cent of the vote in an unprecedented step in Scottish politics.
Mr. Murphy must hope his comments stand up to the electorate in the 2010 general election.
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