Staying at home

 So, the expected happened in the Rutherglen by-election. Labour won, and did so comfortably. What was unexpected was the size of the swing - 20% from SNP to Labour. There's nothing like a by-election victory to make a conference go with a bang. I speak from experience. There was a great feeling seeing our new by-election victors around the conference centre. Labour members will have a spring in their step when they arrive in Liverpool. But let's not get carried away....

While it was clear that Labour were able to pull off a significant gain, take a look at the votes cast. There was a big collapse in the SNP vote but Labour's vote, compared to the general election, was largely unchanged, indeed it was down a smidgen, from 18,545 to 17,845. Remember - the last general election saw Labour's vote down to its lowest level since 1983. What has happened is that SNP voters are staying at home. They are currently sitting out election contests, unsure on what to do. Unlike 1997 when the Blair government was able to reach out and soak up some of the undecided votes of other parties, Rutherglen is an illustration of the limited appeal of Labour. Dig a bit further back in time and the total Labour vote in the byelection is their lowest since the constituency was created in 2005. Indeed, in 2010, Labour's winning candidate in the constituency notched up over 28,000 votes in a general election in which Labour went down to defeat.

The appeal of opposition parties to voters who had previously supported the government (SNP in Scotland and Conservatives in England) is what will decide the outcome of the next general election. Both Labour and the Lib Dems aim to appeal to Conservatives who are currently staying at home. But how successful has that appeal been? Take a look at the Somerton and Frome by-election. The Lib Dem vote increased by about 4,000. But how much of that was the result of a successful squeeze on the Labour vote?  The Conservative vote meanwhile dropped from 36,000 to 10,000. Clearly, most of that stayed at home though the figures suggest a modest inroad by the Lib Dems into the Conservative total.

On the same day, the Selby by-election produced a similar result in terms of vote changes: a collapse in the Conservative vote and a modest increase in the vote of Labour with the Lib Dem vote squeezed. But the biggest group of voters across the constituency, as in Somerton and Frome, is likely to be stay-at-home Conservatives unhappy with their party's performance.

As we get closer to the general election, this group of undecided Conservatives will start to move. Some will go back to the Conservatives, others to the opposition parties (at a constituency level they will move to the party most likely to defeat the Conservatives - likely to be Labour in Red Wall seats and Lib Dems in Blue Wall). The killer question is, what proportion of the undecided Conservatives will turn out to vote Conservative?

Back to Rutherglen. The bloated representation of the SNP in the UK parliament annoys me. While the SNP has most seats, their vote share in Scotland is in a minority - in other words, most people in Scotland didn't vote SNP in the last general election. Yet, because of Parliamentary arithmetic, they are the UK's third party in the Commons. This results in media coverage going to the SNP that is unmerited while stripping it from the Lib Dems. We have the daft situation of the SNP being invited on to UK wide news programmes to explain SNP policy on issues that in Scotland are devolved. The SNP leader in Scotland gets 2 questions at PMQ while Ed Davey gets pot luck.

So Labour may have done us a favour in Rutherglen. If they are able to take seats in the Tartan Wall from the SNP, we could see the Lib Dems overtaking the SNP in Parliament, and returning to third party status in the House of Commons.