Labour’s comfortable victory in this week’s Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection, beating the Scottish National party on a swing of more than 20%, gives reasonable cause to expect that Sir Keir Starmer will next year replace Rishi Sunak in Downing Street. Labour has never controlled the Commons without a significant haul of Scottish seats.
The prospect of recovering terrain lost to the SNP in recent years makes winning a Westminster majority look less daunting. But the road is still steep after the crushing defeat of 2019, which is why Labour cannot afford to be complacent. Byelections don’t lend themselves to simple extrapolation of national trends. In Scotland as in England, polling trends express more irritation with an exhausted and discredited incumbent government than enthusiasm for the opposition. The Labour leader deserves credit for capitalising on the Tories’ unpopularity and not falling into the traps his opponent has laid.
