Let’s face it, on their current record, the SNP deserved to lose Hamilton

And with just a turn of the wheel, it is game back on for Scottish Labour –  if indeed it was really ever off, other than in the minds of fevered psephologists spooked by the rise of Reform and fuelled by a media banging that drum. But regardless, the 2026 election suddenly looks all the more interesting for it. 

It is the endless fascination of politics that while we spend many serious hours cerebrally debating the ins and outs of political strategy, critiquing tactics, exploring motives and examining campaigns, it is the ever-shifting winds of change that reveal that electoral support is ultimately ephemeral. It waxes and wanes and public opinion can change direction on a whim or even a whisper – which goes some way to explain why Reform came from literally nowhere and managed to dictate the parameters of a local contest, their profile amplified by the constant calculations of commentators, pollsters and bookies.

Russell is the antithesis of the party careerists who go from university to party comms, to candidate, to MSP. He is raw, and he’s real.

Ironically, only Farage had the honesty to admit that his party would not win the by-election and yet every other party leader was talking him up. John Swinney orchestrated a high-profile summit designed to halt him. He framed his whole campaign around him. And then went on to deny that he had ever done such a thing even when broadcast utterings spoke otherwise, and front-page news, evidenced in black and white his disingenuous claim that the SNP was the only party that could beat Reform. 

It might have been a strategy thought up in some smart adviser’s head but in doing so, Swinney not only lost an election, he tarnished his ‘Honest John’ credentials, splintered yet another tranche of independence support and alienated a group of voters who were disillusioned enough already but then took umbrage at being lazily framed as right-wing bigots. It is perhaps unsurprising then that there are rumoured calls from within the party for him to resign.
But regardless of all that, with the election of Davy Russell as the new MSP for Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, politics in Scotland – which, prior to, had looked predictably stale going into an election next year, with the SNP all but certain to win – has just got so much more absorbing and put Anas Sarwar and Scottish Labour firmly back in the game. 

It was perhaps prophetic then that the week before the Hamilton by-election, Michael Marra, now shadow finance secretary, was expressing quiet confidence to me about what the result would be as he talked me through how electoral fortunes can turn on a dime. And he should know. He was there in 2011 in what became known as the ‘Subway moment’ when then Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray revealed an unseemly cowardice by ducking into a sandwich shop at Central Station to avoid protesters calling for public sector cuts to be reversed. That was bad enough for Gray’s image but when the same activists, including the perennial Sean Clerkin, had been seen earlier placated by Tory leader Annabel Goldie, it only reinforced the idea that the party of the people had lost its touch.

And if the leader of Scottish Labour couldn’t stand up to Scots angry about spending cuts, how could he stand up for Scotland? Having led the way in the polls with a 15-point lead, Labour went on to suffer its worst defeat since the UK general election of October 1931 whilst the SNP secured the first majority of the Scottish Parliament in an electoral system explicitly designed to prevent it.

And until the Hamilton by-election, it felt like the SNP at Holyrood were an unstoppable force. But then came Davy Russell. His SNP opponent called him the “invisible man”, she mocked him for refusing to take part in media debates, took to social media to ask, “Where are ye’ Davy” and ran a campaign bolstered by paid staffers, MSPs and the whole ministerial team. Well, as events have now proved, Russell wasn’t out getting his photo taken with party apparatchiks, he was out on the doorsteps.

Labour secured signed promises from 8,000 voters ahead of the ballot and then clocked up 8,559 votes on the day that mattered, gaining the seat from the SNP. That is an extraordinary ‘get out the vote’ campaign and one at which the SNP used to excel, not criticise.

The SNP was wrong about their campaign, wrong about Labour’s strategy, wrong about Reform, and wrong about Russell. Russell is the antithesis of the party careerists who go from university to party comms, to candidate, to MSP. He is raw, and he’s real. A local candidate campaigning on local issues supported by a ground force of committed activists. 

In the end, the Hamilton by-election played out for Scottish Labour and the SNP like 2011 in reverse. And arguably, Swinney’s equivalent Subway moment was claiming that only the SNP could beat Reform. A claim so absurdly untrue that even the dogs on the street knew it. 
Let’s face it, on their current record, the SNP deserved a bloody nose, and this Scottish Labour Party is the best its been for some considerable time. A powerful leadership duo in Sarwar and the formidable Jackie Baillie, a general secretary absolutely driven by the conviction that the country can only thrive with Labour in power, a ground force of activists, and money. A formula that reminds me of the SNP of yesteryear.

But, and here’s a salutary thought – Sarwar went into a by-election with an SNP that has an 18-year record in government that is hard to defend, backed by a party machine that has not had its troubles to seek, with tranches of its own support ignored over Brexit, gender reforms and even independence, and led by a leader who says he has healed his party when schisms are already apparent. This was a by-election in an area that was once a Labour stronghold that the party has, as one of its key target seats, to win in 2026. In all those circumstances, Labour should have been predicted to win and not just by the slim margin that they did and not with Reform snapping at their heels. 

The party should rightly celebrate this success and ride what Angus Robertson once ascribed to his own party as the ‘Big Mo’ – that all-important momentum – but it still has a mountain to climb if ‘First Minister Sarwar’ is to become more than just a pipe dream. That work starts now and identifying what the Davy Russell-type magic is in future parliamentary candidates would be a good start, along with persuading their UK Government colleagues to keep on dripping in some more good news for Scotland and making U-turns on the bad.