Hamilton and Clyde Valley: winner in 2019 of predecessor seat of Lanark and Hamilton East: Angela Crawley (SNP)
HAMILTON will always hold a special place in the history of the Scottish independence movement as the scene of the SNP’s most significant electoral breakthrough.
Before Winnie Ewing’s stunning victory over Labour in the 1967 Hamilton by-election, the SNP had never been represented in Parliament apart from a period of a few weeks at the end of the Second World War.
But since 1967, the SNP have never been without parliamentary representation. In that sense, it was arguably one of the most important by-elections of the 20th century anywhere in the UK.
It has to be said, though, that the wider history of by-elections in Hamilton is more of a curate’s egg for the independence cause because the town has also been witness to some of the SNP’s most telling setbacks. Margo MacDonald’s defeat in the 1978 Hamilton by-election was a key landmark as Labour’s embracing of devolution started to pay dividends by sending the SNP’s support into reverse.
Last October, a portion of Hamilton participated in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election, which saw Labour inflict an unexpectedly severe drubbing on the SNP, thus generating momentum for Labour across Scotland that has contributed to the SNP’s somewhat weakened national position as they go into the General Election.
SNP activists in the west of Hamilton may feel the Boundary Commission has done them a good turn by decoupling their own patch from Rutherglen, meaning they no longer have to worry about the daunting task of trying to overturn Labour’s majority of more than 9000 votes from the by-election.
But could it be a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire? In spite of the radical boundary revision, the constituency Hamilton West is being added to is recognisably the successor to Angela Crawley’s old seat of Lanark and Hamilton East, in which the SNP came within fewer than 300 votes of suffering what would undoubtedly have been their most shocking defeat to the Conservative Party in the 2017 General Election.
Although the SNP lost 12 seats to the Conservatives across Scotland in 2017 due to the Ruth Davidson surge, those were all in areas where the Tories had been historically strong or where the demographics obviously favoured them. But Lanark and Hamilton East would have been a Tory win in a traditional Labour heartland seat with high numbers of working-class voters.
To explain that oddity, many eyes turned – whether fairly or unfairly – towards the presence within the constituency of Larkhall, often stereotyped as the most staunchly Protestant community in the Central Belt. That’s something of an over-simplification given that almost 10% of the town’s population is Catholic.
The twist in the tale, though, is that if the SNP are seriously challenged on July 4 in the new seat, the threat will not come from the Tories but from Labour, who finished third in 2017, just fewer than 100 votes behind the second-placed Tories and fewer than 400 votes behind the first-placed SNP, producing one of the most extraordinary results of that election anywhere in the UK.
Labour slumped to a much more distant third in 2019, but on a uniform swing would still gain the new seat this time if they are as much as nine points behind the SNP nationally. The polls currently show them doing far better than that.
The local swing to Labour could even exceed the national trend if a lot of the Tory votes in 2017 and 2019 did indeed come from anti-independence diehards in places such as Larkhall. If those people now start viewing Labour as the most effective vehicle for stopping the SNP.
Crawley is stepping down to spend more time with her young family, and her successor as SNP candidate is Larkhall councillor, Ross Clark.
To have a fighting chance of being elected, he may paradoxically need the Tories to shore up their position among the most committed Unionists in his own town.
