59
‘Seismic night in Scotland’: Labour crushes SNP in Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
59 points (98.4% liked)
UK Politics
3096 readers
178 users here now
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a result that exceeded Scottish Labour expectation, Shanks beat his closest rival, the SNP’s Katy Loudon, by 17,845 votes to 8,399 – a majority of 9,446 and a resounding swing of over 20%.
But Yousaf added that the “circumstances of this byelection were always very difficult for us” – the contest was triggered after constituents voted for the Covid rule-breaking former SNP MP Margaret Ferrier to be removed from her seat.
During the campaign Shanks, a modern studies teacher at a local high school, said people were desperate for “a fresh start” following years of limbo with Ferrier, who sat as an independent after she was suspended from the SNP.
Both candidates centred their campaigns around the cost of living crisis, with Shanks attacking the SNP government at Holyrood’s record on public services and Loudon accusing UK Labour of “colluding” with Tory policies like the two-child benefit cap.
Polls suggest the SNP’s dominance is diminishing as the party struggles with questions of transparency and governance linked to the police investigation into its financial conduct, with Labour the beneficiary.
With no clear route to a second independence referendum and the public overwhelmed by cost of living concerns, there are strong indications that Scottish voters are now less likely to choose which party to back based on their constitutional preferences.
The original article contains 654 words, the summary contains 219 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!