Latest news with #HamiltonByElection
The Independent
09-06-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
SNP came ‘frustratingly close' to victory in Hamilton, says Swinney
The SNP came 'frustratingly close' to winning the Hamilton by-election, First Minister John Swinney has said. Scottish Labour's Davy Russell won a surprise victory on Thursday, with the SNP coming second and Reform in third. The by-election had been sparked by the death of Scottish Government minister and SNP MSP, Christina McKelvie, who had held the seat since 2011, with the party hoping to keep it in the fold. Despite the First Minister's claim that the contest was a straight fight between the SNP and Nigel Farage's surging Reform UK, the Labour candidate won with 8,559 votes to the 7,957 of the SNP's Katy Loudon. Speaking to the PA news agency in Glasgow, the First Minister said the party had made 'modest progress' since its collapse at last year's general election – when it dropped from 48 MPs to just nine – but had further to go. 'We had a very strong campaign in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse,' he said. 'We had hundreds of members of the party that came to make their contribution to the by-election campaign – we've got to build on that. 'We've got to learn the lessons of the by-election. 'We came very close, it was frustratingly close.' Coming second in the vote, the First Minister said, is an 'indication that we are still able to perform strongly electorally'. The First Minister added that his party lost the overlapping seat at Westminster – Hamilton and Clyde Valley – by 9,000 votes last year and by just 600 on Thursday. 'So, we are quite clearly in a position where we can achieve electoral success, but we have got to build on that and make sure we're stronger for 2026,' he said. In the final weeks of the campaign, the First Minister predicted the contest would be between his party and Reform UK but, asked if such an assertion – which turned out to be wrong – cast doubt on the data used by the SNP, he appeared to suggest it was based on his own perception. 'I'm just making two points about the by-election, two observations,' he said. 'One was that Labour support was collapsing, and from last year to Thursday, Labour support collapsed by 20%, came down from 50% to 30%. 'And I observed, secondly, that Reform support was surging and it was, so my analysis of the by-election was absolutely correct. 'I simply said to people if you want to stop Reform, vote for the SNP.' Despite the by-election loss, the party continues to lead in the polls ahead of next year, with Mr Swinney saying the Government must 'deliver on the priorities of the people of Scotland'.
The Independent
08-06-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Swinney promises no ‘deal or co-operation' with Farage after by-election defeat
Scotland's First Minister John Swinney has vowed he would not 'do any sort of deal or co-operation' with Nigel Farage after losing the Hamilton by-election. Scottish Labour took the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse seat in South Lanarkshire from the SNP but Mr Farage's Reform UK party also made gains in the Scottish Parliament ballot on Thursday. Speaking on the Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips programme on Sky News, SNP leader Mr Swinney said that if it was necessary to form a coalition to keep Reform out of government, he would 'pursue the policy priorities of my party', and pledged never to work with Clacton MP Mr Farage. The First Minister said he intended to win the 2026 Holyrood election, adding his party would 'get stronger' after losing the Hamilton seat, which it had taken in the 2021 Scottish Parliament election with 46% of all ballots cast, compared with its vote share of 29.35% in Thursday's by-election. Newly elected Scottish Labour MSP Davy Russell won with 8,559 votes while SNP candidate Katy Loudon took 7,957 votes. Reform's Ross Lambie secured 7,088 votes. Mr Swinney said: 'We've got to give people hope of what the future lies for Scotland, and that's as a country that can use our enormous energy wealth for the benefit of our people who are paying extraordinarily high fuel prices at the moment.' When asked if he would consider a coalition between the SNP, Labour and the Greens to keep Reform out of government, Mr Swinney said: 'We'll be going into that with the aim of winning that election. 'If you look at the result on Thursday, all the pollsters say that if that was applied across the wider electorate in Scotland, the SNP would remain by a country mile the largest political party in the Scottish Parliament. 'Now that's not good enough. I want to get stronger in that election, but I'll tell you one thing I will not do under any circumstances, is do any form of deal or co-operation with Farage. 'I just won't do it, and people need to understand that.'
Yahoo
08-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Swinney promises no ‘deal or co-operation' with Farage after by-election defeat
Scotland's First Minister John Swinney has vowed he would not 'do any sort of deal or co-operation' with Nigel Farage after losing the Hamilton by-election. Scottish Labour took the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse seat in South Lanarkshire from the SNP but Mr Farage's Reform UK party also made gains in the Scottish Parliament ballot on Thursday. Speaking on the Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips programme on Sky News, SNP leader Mr Swinney said that if it was necessary to form a coalition to keep Reform out of government, he would 'pursue the policy priorities of my party', and pledged never to work with Clacton MP Mr Farage. The First Minister said he intended to win the 2026 Holyrood election, adding his party would 'get stronger' after losing the Hamilton seat, which it had taken in the 2021 Scottish Parliament election with 46% of all ballots cast, compared with its vote share of 29.35% in Thursday's by-election. Newly elected Scottish Labour MSP Davy Russell won with 8,559 votes while SNP candidate Katy Loudon took 7,957 votes. Reform's Ross Lambie secured 7,088 votes. Mr Swinney said: 'We've got to give people hope of what the future lies for Scotland, and that's as a country that can use our enormous energy wealth for the benefit of our people who are paying extraordinarily high fuel prices at the moment.' When asked if he would consider a coalition between the SNP, Labour and the Greens to keep Reform out of government, Mr Swinney said: 'We'll be going into that with the aim of winning that election. 'If you look at the result on Thursday, all the pollsters say that if that was applied across the wider electorate in Scotland, the SNP would remain by a country mile the largest political party in the Scottish Parliament. 'Now that's not good enough. I want to get stronger in that election, but I'll tell you one thing I will not do under any circumstances, is do any form of deal or co-operation with Farage. 'I just won't do it, and people need to understand that.'
Yahoo
07-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Without a Badenoch/Farage pact, the Left will rule Scotland for decades to come
Did Zia Yusuf's dramatic (and as it turns out, temporary) resignation on the day of the Hamilton by-election cost Reform the seat? Of course not. The idea that chaos in Reform puts off its voters is based on a misunderstanding of what motivates those voters. Reform exists because the older parties failed. You might argue that not all of that failure was their fault. Some of the issues that enrage the electorate – poor public services, high taxes, rising prices, dwindling social capital – are the products of a lockdown that 93 per cent of the country demanded. Others are products of our demographic decline: nations with elderly populations are bound to be less dynamic. Equally, though, there have been unforced errors and broken promises, above all on immigration. Reform is a howl of protest against those betrayals. It is an essentially negative vote, and I say that in no slighting spirit. Every party attracts negative votes. I used to get lots of them as a Conservative MEP when people wanted to punish Labour governments. Negative votes can take you, Trump-like, to the very top. I simply make the point that Reform's supporters show scant interest in their party's policies, let alone its personnel. Reform came from nowhere in the Hamilton by-election despite not having a leader in Scotland. It is hard to imagine the famously resilient electors of Lanarkshire determining their vote on the basis of an unelected party official resigning in London. If we want to play 'what if', the thing that might have given Reform the extra 1,471 votes it needed was the backing of the local Conservatives. Not every Tory would vote for Reform in the absence of a Conservative candidate, of course. Still, the electoral system used for Holyrood argues strongly for a deal at next year's Scottish Parliament election. Just as the SNP and the Scottish Greens used to maximise their representation by focusing respectively on the constituencies and the top-up list, so Reform and the Tories should do the same in 11 months' time. In Scotland, as in England and Wales, the parties have similar policies but different electorates. The Scottish Conservatives are strong in the Borders and the north-east, Reform in the more populous Central Belt. An understanding between them would leave both with more MSPs next May. Such a deal in Wales might have put Reform into office had the principality not just ditched that voting system and adopted EU-style proportional representation, but that's another story. How many Tory and Reform voters would co-operate? Although the two manifestos are compatible – lower taxes, strong defence, less wokery, secure borders, growth over greenery – tonal and aesthetic differences remain. Some Reform supporters will never vote Conservative, either because they can't forgive the tax rises and immigration failures of the last administration or, conversely, because they are former Labour voters who would never back the party of Margaret Thatcher. Some Conservatives – a smaller number – recoil from a party they see as a Trumpian personality cult. One way to express the difference is this. The Tories, after three and a half centuries, have a sense of the trade-offs and complexities involved in holding office. Reform is in the happy position of being able to claim that it is simply a question of willpower. Consider the issue of immigration. On Friday, Kemi Badenoch embarked on a major overhaul of the Blairite juridical state. She asked her shadow law officers to look at all treaties and domestic laws that hinder elected ministers from fulfilling their promises, and set five tests by which to measure success. Will we be able to deport people who should not be here, protect our veterans from 'lawfare', prioritise British citizens in housing and welfare, keep malefactors in prison, and get things built? Meeting all five tests is hard, but not impossible. Badenoch wants to take her time and get it right. But, to some, it will come across as equivocation. 'Why can't you just say now that you would leave the European Convention on Human Rights?', they ask. I have no doubt that that is where she will end up. But we need policies, not slogans. Leaving the ECHR is not a skeleton key that unlocks every door. Our problems go far deeper. Outside the ECHR, we would be constrained by numerous other international accords: the UN Refugee Convention; the Paris Agreement on climate change (under which our Australia Free Trade Agreement is being challenged in court); the Aarhus Convention, which caps costs for activist groups bringing eco-challenges. Even the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has been used both to challenge deportation orders and to block welfare reforms. All these things need to be looked at, calmly and thoroughly. Nor is it just foreign treaties. The last Labour government passed a series of domestic statutes that constrained its successors: the Human Rights Act, the Climate Change Act, the Equality Act and a dozen more. We need to tackle these, too. What, if anything, should replace the ECHR? Do we update our own 1689 Bill of Rights? Do we offer a CANZUK version? Do we rely on pure majoritarianism? Even if all the obnoxious laws were swept away, what would we do about Left-wing activists who become judges rather than go to the bother of getting themselves elected to anything, and who legislate from the bench? Can we return to the pre-Blair arrangements where the lord chancellor is in charge? My point is that all this requires patience, detail and nuance. But a lot of voters are understandably impatient, and regard nuance as the sign of a havering milksop – a nuancy-boy, so to speak. They see not a Conservative Party determined to repair the broken state machine so that it can deliver on its manifesto, but a bunch of vacillating wets shying away from simple solutions. This worries me. Suppose that Nigel Farage were to form the next government and leave the ECHR, only to find that illegal immigrants continued to arrive, that judges continued to apply the rules asymmetrically, and that every one of his statutes ended up being snarled up in the courts? What would be the impact on our democracy? I pick the example of immigration because it is the most salient, but much the same applies across government. Reducing spending involves trade-offs, and anyone who pretends that there are huge savings to be made by scrapping DEI programmes or cutting waste has not looked at the figures. The same is true of reducing welfare claims, scrapping quangos, reforming the NHS and raising school standards. The diagnosis may be easy, but the treatment will be long and difficult, and will require more than willpower. In his response to Yusuf's resignation, Farage reminded us why he is a successful politician. He blamed Islamophobic trolls for making his party chairman's life impossible, thereby both anticipating the 'no one can work with Nigel' charge and reinforcing his non-racist credentials. The same calculation led him to condemn Tommy Robinson, and played a part in his falling-out with Rupert Lowe. Farage knows that there are hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised Muslims, many of whom, like his white supporters, are former Labour voters in decaying northern towns. Unnoticed by the national media, Farage has been reaching out to these communities. Imagine Farage's political nous and personal energy allied to the detailed policy work that the Tories are undertaking. Imagine his reach, whether in Hamilton or in some of those Muslim-dominated old industrial towns, complementing the traditional Conservative appeal to property-owners. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. Next year's Scottish elections will be the first test of whether figures on the British Right are prepared to put country before party. A possible by-election in Jacob Rees-Mogg's old seat may be another. But one thing is already clear. If the two parties are taking lumps out of each other all the way to the next general election, they will lose – and they will deserve to. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
07-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Without a Badenoch/Farage pact, the Left will rule Scotland for decades to come
Did Zia Yusuf's dramatic (and as it turns out, temporary) resignation on the day of the Hamilton by-election cost Reform the seat? Of course not. The idea that chaos in Reform puts off its voters is based on a misunderstanding of what motivates those voters. Reform exists because the older parties failed. You might argue that not all of that failure was their fault. Some of the issues that enrage the electorate – poor public services, high taxes, rising prices, dwindling social capital – are the products of a lockdown that 93 per cent of the country demanded. Others are products of our demographic decline: nations with elderly populations are bound to be less dynamic. Equally, though, there have been unforced errors and broken promises, above all on immigration. Reform is a howl of protest against those betrayals. It is an essentially negative vote, and I say that in no slighting spirit. Every party attracts negative votes. I used to get lots of them as a Conservative MEP when people wanted to punish Labour governments. Negative votes can take you, Trump-like, to the very top. I simply make the point that Reform's supporters show scant interest in their party's policies, let alone its personnel. Reform came from nowhere in the Hamilton by-election despite not having a leader in Scotland. It is hard to imagine the famously resilient electors of Lanarkshire determining their vote on the basis of an unelected party official resigning in London. If we want to play 'what if', the thing that might have given Reform the extra 1,471 votes it needed was the backing of the local Conservatives. Not every Tory would vote for Reform in the absence of a Conservative candidate, of course. Still, the electoral system used for Holyrood argues strongly for a deal at next year's Scottish Parliament election. Just as the SNP and the Scottish Greens used to maximise their representation by focusing respectively on the constituencies and the top-up list, so Reform and the Tories should do the same in 11 months' time. In Scotland, as in England and Wales, the parties have similar policies but different electorates. The Scottish Conservatives are strong in the Borders and the north-east, Reform in the more populous Central Belt. An understanding between them would leave both with more MSPs next May. Such a deal in Wales might have put Reform into office had the principality not just ditched that voting system and adopted EU-style proportional representation, but that's another story. How many Tory and Reform voters would co-operate? Although the two manifestos are compatible – lower taxes, strong defence, less wokery, secure borders, growth over greenery – tonal and aesthetic differences remain. Some Reform supporters will never vote Conservative, either because they can't forgive the tax rises and immigration failures of the last administration or, conversely, because they are former Labour voters who would never back the party of Margaret Thatcher. Some Conservatives – a smaller number – recoil from a party they see as a Trumpian personality cult. One way to express the difference is this. The Tories, after three and a half centuries, have a sense of the trade-offs and complexities involved in holding office. Reform is in the happy position of being able to claim that it is simply a question of willpower. Consider the issue of immigration. On Friday, Kemi Badenoch embarked on a major overhaul of the Blairite juridical state. She asked her shadow law officers to look at all treaties and domestic laws that hinder elected ministers from fulfilling their promises, and set five tests by which to measure success. Will we be able to deport people who should not be here, protect our veterans from 'lawfare', prioritise British citizens in housing and welfare, keep malefactors in prison, and get things built? Meeting all five tests is hard, but not impossible. Badenoch wants to take her time and get it right. But, to some, it will come across as equivocation. 'Why can't you just say now that you would leave the European Convention on Human Rights?', they ask. I have no doubt that that is where she will end up. But we need policies, not slogans. Leaving the ECHR is not a skeleton key that unlocks every door. Our problems go far deeper. Outside the ECHR, we would be constrained by numerous other international accords: the UN Refugee Convention; the Paris Agreement on climate change (under which our Australia Free Trade Agreement is being challenged in court); the Aarhus Convention, which caps costs for activist groups bringing eco-challenges. Even the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has been used both to challenge deportation orders and to block welfare reforms. All these things need to be looked at, calmly and thoroughly. Nor is it just foreign treaties. The last Labour government passed a series of domestic statutes that constrained its successors: the Human Rights Act, the Climate Change Act, the Equality Act and a dozen more. We need to tackle these, too. What, if anything, should replace the ECHR? Do we update our own 1689 Bill of Rights? Do we offer a CANZUK version? Do we rely on pure majoritarianism? Even if all the obnoxious laws were swept away, what would we do about Left-wing activists who become judges rather than go to the bother of getting themselves elected to anything, and who legislate from the bench? Can we return to the pre-Blair arrangements where the lord chancellor is in charge? My point is that all this requires patience, detail and nuance. But a lot of voters are understandably impatient, and regard nuance as the sign of a havering milksop – a nuancy-boy, so to speak. They see not a Conservative Party determined to repair the broken state machine so that it can deliver on its manifesto, but a bunch of vacillating wets shying away from simple solutions. This worries me. Suppose that Nigel Farage were to form the next government and leave the ECHR, only to find that illegal immigrants continued to arrive, that judges continued to apply the rules asymmetrically, and that every one of his statutes ended up being snarled up in the courts? What would be the impact on our democracy? I pick the example of immigration because it is the most salient, but much the same applies across government. Reducing spending involves trade-offs, and anyone who pretends that there are huge savings to be made by scrapping DEI programmes or cutting waste has not looked at the figures. The same is true of reducing welfare claims, scrapping quangos, reforming the NHS and raising school standards. The diagnosis may be easy, but the treatment will be long and difficult, and will require more than willpower. In his response to Yusuf's resignation, Farage reminded us why he is a successful politician. He blamed Islamophobic trolls for making his party chairman's life impossible, thereby both anticipating the 'no one can work with Nigel' charge and reinforcing his non-racist credentials. The same calculation led him to condemn Tommy Robinson, and played a part in his falling-out with Rupert Lowe. Farage knows that there are hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised Muslims, many of whom, like his white supporters, are former Labour voters in decaying northern towns. Unnoticed by the national media, Farage has been reaching out to these communities. Imagine Farage's political nous and personal energy allied to the detailed policy work that the Tories are undertaking. Imagine his reach, whether in Hamilton or in some of those Muslim-dominated old industrial towns, complementing the traditional Conservative appeal to property-owners. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. Next year's Scottish elections will be the first test of whether figures on the British Right are prepared to put country before party. A possible by-election in Jacob Rees-Mogg's old seat may be another. But one thing is already clear. If the two parties are taking lumps out of each other all the way to the next general election, they will lose – and they will deserve to.
