Glenrothes by-election

Come on you Scots! Let's get back to the business of kicking Labour, enough of this Westminster triumphalism over Gordon Brown's new image as economic saviour of the free world.
 
You wait till people don't get the rate cut. Except the investors of course. They'll get the rate cut.
 
mummymonkey said:
That was very wise of you Rolfe.
A bit of a hammering your boy got there.
Click to expand...

SNP total increased. Labour have recovered somewhat pulling off another upset would not have been easy.
 
Well, I guess the lucky socks weren't on form.

[Rolfe goes off to chenge avatar....]

Ah, that's better.

I think it's too early to start explaining this - or explaining it away, depending on your point of view. Though of course there are a lot of SNP-types spinning madly all over the place. (Geni is right, there was a swing of over 5% to the SNP, it's mainly that a much bigger swing was predicted and did in fact happen in Glasgow East. The also-rans were also squeezed madly again, to the point where both Conservative and LibDem parties lost their deposits. The collapsing LibDem vote, which had been quite high, went substantially to the SNP but also favoured Labour.)

Yes, expectations were probably unrealistic. People who had familiarity with the constituency and its communist-voting past said it would be a much harder nut to crack than Glasgow East and in the end they were right. However, expectations in the last week or two were based on solid canvass returns, and it wasn't just the SNP. Labour themselves actually thought they'd lost at close of poll, and were as surprised as anyone when, as one commentator put it, it appeared that "something had gone badly right".


Current high contenders on the differential diagnosis list:
  • The relentless scaremongering in the Labour campaign over the fact that the SNP-led local council had recently changed the charging formula for old age care help to a means-tested system, no less generous than those operated elsewhere in Scotland by Labour-controlled councils, but obviously meaning that some people would pay more. (It appears the outgoing Labour council shied away from doing this before the last election even though it was clearly going to be necessary.)
  • The spin on Gordon Brown's performance to portray him as the Saviour of Humanity in the present crisis.
  • The aforementioned communist-leaning electorate, many of whom still seem to think that Labour is a left-wing party.
  • Adverse economic circumstances leading voters to decide to stick with what they have rather than say "yes we can" to change.
And no doubt there will be others. But at the moment I think the question of why the result was so different from everybody's canvass returns is the interesting part.

Rolfe.
 
Last edited:
Rolfe said:
The relentless scaremongering in the Labour campaign over the fact that the SNP-led local council had recently changed the charging formula for old age care help to a means-tested system, no less generous than those operated elsewhere in Scotland by Labour-controlled councils, but obviously meaning that some people would pay more. (It appears the outgoing Labour council shied away from doing this before the last election even though it was clearly going to be necessary.)
Click to expand...

Complete colapse of the non SNP labour vote suggests not.

The spin on Gordon Brown's performance to portray him as the Saviour of Humanity in the present crisis.
Click to expand...

Posible.

The aforementioned communist-leaning electorate, many of whom still seem to think that Labour is a left-wing party.
Click to expand...

Doubtful. I doubt there would be much difficulty persuading that the SNP was at least as left wing as labour.

Adverse economic circumstances leading voters to decide to stick with what they have rather than say "yes we can" to change.
Click to expand...

Depends on the change. While the SNP may have been the stalking hourse in the by-election it is cameron who people will be thinking about.
 
I've been looking at some analysis, and this is one I found fairly thoughtful.

GML said:
That certainly was a good win for Labour, and I think almost everyone is surprised by the scale. I don't attribute it to media bias. (There is media bias of course, but it didn't stop the SNP winning in Galsgow East, or at Holyrood.) Nor do I think such a majority can be explained by local issues (care home charges versus bridge tolls looks at least a draw to me).

I think that the result shows that in troubled economic times more than half the voters of Glenrothes preferred the devil they know. Those Scottish Labour MPs reportedly punching the air with joy during the last Labour conference at news of the banking crisis were spot on about that.

Rather like wartime, a crisis like this puts the opposition parties (which includes the SNP in this context) into a difficult position. If they stir up too much trouble, they can be seen as dragging the country down. If they support the government, then they are saying the government is doing the right thing, and so are not a better alternative... that is exactly how George W Bush got re-elected, remember.

Politics is at least partly about taking credit and avoiding blame. Gordon Brown has obviously earned some credit from the Glenrothes electorate for his recent efforts, while avoiding the blame for his contribution to the development of the crisis in the first place (which, going back over ten years, is actually fairly significant.)
Click to expand...


Actually, there is sometimes quite a lot of difficulty in parts of Scotland in persuading people that the SNP is at least as left-wing as Labour. The smear "Tartan Tories" is practically a mantra. The role of the SNP in the vote which brought down the Callaghan government in 1979 and so ushered in the Thatcher years is persistently spun as the SNP single-handedly and knowingly delivering Thatcherism to Scotland, ignoring the wider influences which were at work there.

Also, I very much doubt if many voters in Scotland think much about Cameron at all.

My main point of interest is, how come Labour's (in the end quite comfortable) hold wasn't spotted by anyone in advance. OK, the SNP campaign might have been suffering from an excess of optimism (though their canvassing is usually realistic), but the Labour campaign people quite genuinely thought they'd lost, too. Where did all these Labour voters actually come from?

By the way, can anyone tell me what the actual swing was? The BBC originally quoted it as 8.15% to the SNP, but this was challenged by someone declaring it was just over 5% or thereabouts. Now I read claims that the 8.15% was in fact correct. I'm not quite sure how this ought to be calculated.

Rolfe.
 
Last edited:
BBC are reporting it as "4.96% swing from Labour to the SNP" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7714670.stm . It really does seem to have come out of the blue, the SNP folk I've seen and heard being interviewed seemed to have been totally taken by surprise. I wonder if the next General Election will be a two horse race between the SNP & Labour?

(But Rolfe don't despair too much - there was some good news coming out of Scotland today.)
 
Rolfe said:
Actually, there is sometimes quite a lot of difficulty in parts of Scotland in persuading people that the SNP is at least as left-wing as Labour. The smear "Tartan Tories" is practically a mantra. The role of the SNP in the vote which brought down the Callaghan government in 1979 and so ushered in the Thatcher years is persistently spun as the SNP single-handedly and knowingly delivering Thatcherism to Scotland, ignoring the wider influences which were at work there.

Also, I very much doubt if many voters in Scotland think much about Cameron at all.
Click to expand...

I, on the other hand, think they do and I doubt they think much about Callaghan and Thatcher. In times like this they mostly think about jobs, families, homes, stuff like that. This is no time to indulge in the unknowns of nationalism. It was a few months ago, but no longer.
 
Last edited:
Rolfe said:
Also, I very much doubt if many voters in Scotland think much about Cameron at all.
Click to expand...

Voters in britian do.

Where did all these Labour voters actually come from?
Click to expand...

Where I suspect fear of Cameron or at least not-labour kicks in. Filling in the ballot form do you vote the way that will localy help the SNP but nationaly helps the tories?
 
Darat said:
BBC are reporting it as "4.96% swing from Labour to the SNP" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7714670.stm . It really does seem to have come out of the blue, the SNP folk I've seen and heard being interviewed seemed to have been totally taken by surprise. I wonder if the next General Election will be a two horse race between the SNP & Labour?
Click to expand...

Not in Cardiff it won't :).

(But Rolfe don't despair too much - there was some good news coming out of Scotland today.)
Click to expand...

That is excellent news.
 
Swings

Wikipedia has two different ways to calculate swings in British elections.

The first is the Butler Swing which seems to be calculated as the average of the gain in percent for Labour and the loss in percent for the SNP.

Labour got 19,946 or 55.11% of all the votes cast. In 2005 they got 51.91% so they increased their share by 3.20%.

SNP got 13,209 or 36.49%. In 2005 they got 23.37% so their increase was 13.13%.

The Butler swing seems to be the average of 3.20% and -13.13% or -4.96%.

The Steed Swing excludes the votes that weren't for the SNP or Labour. Labour went from 68.96% to 60.16% and so they suffered a swing of -8.80%.

Labour suffered a swing against them even though their vote increased in both number of votes cast and in percentage of total votes cast because the SNP did even better.

These calculations are my interpretation of the wikipedia article, so I may be wrong.
 
Last edited:
Rolfe said:
I've been looking at some analysis, and this is one I found fairly thoughtful.




Actually, there is sometimes quite a lot of difficulty in parts of Scotland in persuading people that the SNP is at least as left-wing as Labour. The smear "Tartan Tories" is practically a mantra. The role of the SNP in the vote which brought down the Callaghan government in 1979 and so ushered in the Thatcher years is persistently spun as the SNP single-handedly and knowingly delivering Thatcherism to Scotland, ignoring the wider influences which were at work there.

Also, I very much doubt if many voters in Scotland think much about Cameron at all.

My main point of interest is, how come Labour's (in the end quite comfortable) hold wasn't spotted by anyone in advance. OK, the SNP campaign might have been suffering from an excess of optimism (though their canvassing is usually realistic), but the Labour campaign people quite genuinely thought they'd lost, too. Where did all these Labour voters actually come from?

By the way, can anyone tell me what the actual swing was? The BBC originally quoted it as 8.15% to the SNP, but this was challenged by someone declaring it was just over 5% or thereabouts. Now I read claims that the 8.15% was in fact correct. I'm not quite sure how this ought to be calculated.

Rolfe.
Click to expand...

There were apparently over 7,000 postal votes - prolly Fife Labour voters on their hols on the French Riviera.
 
I have heard a CT that the postal ballots were stuffed. I don't believe it. First, because the result really did seem to take the Labour bigwigs by surprise, and that wouldn't have been the case if they had been involved in any fiddling extensive enough to produce a majority of this size. But second, because we didn't hear any strange rumblings when the postal votes were opened.

The opening of the postal votes is a time when it is possible for observers to get an idea of how real voters are voting, in advance of the actual poll. They are sworn to secrecy but usually leak like the proverbial sieves. A postal vote of near-on 100% to Labour would have been noticed. The fact that there were no rumours flying after the postal vote opening suggests to me that the unexpected result was achieved by voters in person. This is of course consistent with the observation that none of the parties seem to have noticed the size of the Labour vote in advance.

On the radio this morning the matter was discussed in detail, and the preferred explanation was that the high turnout (well, a fair bit higher than expected for a by-election on a rainy November day) had come about late in the day. There were a lot of late voters turning up, and they seem to have voted Labour. It appears that Labour simply managed to get their vote out, whether by an intensive knocking-up effort or as a result of their campaign, and did so to a greater extent than anyone predicted.

Of course, we are now being asked to believe that Gordon Brown and only five trusted people knew that this result was coming up, ten days in advance. But they kept it deadly secret so as to lure the SNP into making claims of impending victory. I don't believe this either.

First, you can't hide canvass returns like that from everybody, and it was clear to anyone looking at the faces of the Labour people (including the candidate and the Secretary of State for Scotland) as they entered the count that they didn't think they were going to win. Second, the SNP's canvassing isn't so deceptive. If it was possible to tell that Labour were going to hold comfortably, ten days in advance, the SNP would have known too. And they didn't.

I think the "late (and rather unexpected) outpouring of Labour loyalists" explanation is the most plausible one, and the attempts to make the Labour machine and Gordon Brown appear all-knowing are merely post-hoc spin.

Rolfe.
 
gtc said:
Wikipedia has two different ways to calculate swings in British elections.

The first is the Butler Swing which seems to be calculated as the average of the gain in percent for Labour and the loss in percent for the SNP.

Labour got 19,946 or 55.11% of all the votes cast. In 2005 they got 51.91% so they increased their share by 3.20%.

SNP got 13,209 or 36.49%. In 2005 they got 23.37% so their increase was 13.13%.

The Butler swing seems to be the average of 3.20% and -13.13% or -4.96%.

The Steed Swing excludes the votes that weren't for the SNP or Labour. Labour went from 68.96% to 60.16% and so they suffered a swing of -8.80%.

Labour suffered a swing against them even though their vote increased in both number of votes cast and in percentage of total votes cast because the SNP did even better.

These calculations are my interpretation of the wikipedia article, so I may be wrong.
Click to expand...
Thanks.
I'd no idea it was as complex as that. I thought it was simply the movement of voters from one party to another. (Which I expect is what most people think when they watch Jon Snow on election nights).
 
It can't have had anything to do with voters remembering Salmond's comment about "the arc of prosperity" he wanted Scotland to join?

http://www.snp.org/node/10359

2006-08-11

SNP Leader Alex Salmond has today called for Scotland to join northern Europe's arc of prosperity, with Ireland to the west, Iceland to the north and Norway to the east all small independent countries in the top six richest nations in the world. In comparison, the UK is 14th and devolved Scotland 18th * with similar, oil rich Norway over £12,000 per person better off.
Click to expand...
 
No matter what the current strains of the world economy I think it fair to say that these countries are still some of the most prosperous places on earth. That is, I don't think a global banking problem has suddenly catapulted Zimbabwe above them.

The quote I liked best was from the Conservative candidate. "the electorate realised a vote for the SNP was not a vote for change"

So they voted Labour? Politicians speak the most dreadful tripe.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom