Sturgeon had rock star status as people saw her as a force for good

To Labour, it’s a vindication of Keir Starmer’s leadership and the ushering in of a new era. As for pundits like me, we’re scrutinising individual reactions for hints of fear/complacency/arrogance, and talking about what the volte face in this bellwether constituency says about Humza Yousaf/independence/the state of politics and the nation.

But what are people in Rutherglen and Hamilton West - the minority who put their X in a box, and the majority who didn’t - doing?

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Getting on with their lives, I suspect. Trying to navigate their way through a cost-of-living crisis that is hitting all but the very wealthiest. Worrying about paying their bills. Worrying about NHS backlogs. Worrying about how they will cope if there are further school strikes. Looking for action, without any real confidence that it will come.

Vox pops are a much diminished form of journalism these days. That’s because doing them properly is resource-intensive. It takes time to find a cross-section of the community, as opposed to grabbing the first five people you see, and to encourage them to open up about their lives and opinions.

But those reporters who did go out (and, hands-up, I was not, on this occasion, one of them) found people preoccupied with their dwindling finances and wary of *all* parties and politicians. What else would you expect after years (decades) of broken promises? What else would you expect in the run-up to the first Scottish by-election ever to be prompted by the recall of the sitting MP?

Margaret Ferrier’s breach of Covid rules at a time when others were abiding by them, will have stirred up resentments specific to Rutherglen and Hamilton West. But her fall from grace is symbolic of a much deeper rot: a perception of entitlement; a belief that politicians are all in it for themselves.

It’s a perception heightened when the losers blame everything but their own incompetence, but also when the winners celebrate the result as a “great day” for themselves. As if the fortunes of political parties are more important than the lives of the people they are put into power to serve.

Nicola Sturgeon took on rock star status precisely because people saw her as a force for good (Image: free)

In any case, voters in Rutherglen and Hamilton West aren’t stupid. They only have to look at Labour-led North Lanarkshire Council - where massive cuts to services were announced one week, then rescinded the next - to see their new party of choice is just as capable of game-playing as the old one.

What do people *want” from their politicians? Hope, in the first instance. But then for those hopes to be fulfilled. And change, of course. Better lives for themselves and others.

When tens of thousands defected to the SNP in the mid 2010s - when the line “I didn’t leave Labour, Labour left me” became a mantra - it was, for many people, less a push against the Union than a push against being taken for granted, a push against the status quo.

There will always be those for whom independence is an end in itself, but for many more it was merely the mechanism by which change might be achieved. A means of breaking away not merely from Westminster, but from Westminster-style politics.

That hope was palpable in the run-up to the referendum, and immediately after it. Cynics may have mocked it, but there was something seductive about the idea we could do things differently.

Nicola Sturgeon took on rock star status precisely because people saw her as a force for good, a conduit to a higher purpose. If that seems naive now, well so be it. But, briefly, the world burned brighter for the prospect that we might indeed work as if we lived in the early days of a better nation.

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The SNP was upended by events, some of them external - Brexit, the pandemic; but many more of their own making. For a while, noble aspirations - on poverty, education, children in care - were enough to keep morale buoyed. But at some point, you have to turn the vision you have sold into reality.

All I hear these days from former third sector evangelists is disappointment. “As we all know, the SNP were good at coming up with worthy plans, less good at seeing them through,” one told me recently when we were discussing Getting It Right For Every Child (GIRFEC).

And, of course, if you have bought into a party’s proposition that independence is the only route to a more equitable society, you are likely to be less motivated to vote for that party once independence is off the table.

That’s before we start talking about lack of transparency, internecine fighting, camper vans and the police investigation which - whether it leads to charges or not - has left the party looking as sullied and stagnant as Scottish Labour of yore.

A by-election may be just a by-election. It’s unclear, for example, if those Tories who voted Labour yesterday would be prepared to repeat the exercise in a General Election when their own party’s time in power was under threat. But even if we accept it signifies a more enduring shift, it’s a stretch to see it as “seismic” as Starmer described it; or as a sign that “politics in Scotland has fundamentally changed” as Anas Sarwar suggested. It’s more a case of forward into the past; or of the ceaseless cycle which sees parties gain and then lose the faith of voters.

Today, arguably, the SNP stands where Scottish Labour stood a decade ago: past its sell-by-date and pilloried for taking its followers for granted. But - with a by-election turn-out of just 37.9% and the party securing fewer votes than it did when it lost to the SNP in the 2019 General Election - Scottish Labour is a long way from capitalising on that electoral disaffection the way the SNP did in 2014.

Perhaps this is the product of a more general malaise; but it could also be because some of those “betrayed” by the party last time round can still feel the sting of the slap on their faces.

Scottish Labour has too much baggage to present itself as a bright new force. If it is to break the cycle of electoral boom and bust, it needs to demonstrate it has learned from past mistakes.

It needs to resolve difficult conundrums, such as demonstrating it is more than a “branch office,” and bringing left-leaning independence supporters into its fold. If it regains the upper hand, it needs to rise to the challenges it sets itself: to reduce poverty and improve people’s lives.

Scottish voters have made it clear they are done with politicians who talk big and act small. They are done with visions of a halcyon future that never materialises. They want concrete results. Delivering on them quickly is the only way to stop the electoral merry-go-round from turning.