Wings Over Scotland | A Fishy Tale

It is, if you’re a bit dim, almost possible to believe this.

But not for very long.

Because while the Labour vote collapsed by a staggering 87% in Aberdeen South last night, the Tory vote only went up by about a third of that. Labour lost 10,000 votes but the SNP also lost 7,000 and other parties also lost about 3,000 so even if the Tories hadn’t gained a single vote they’d have won comfortably by simply holding on to what they got while coming THIRD in 2024, as everyone else collapsed.

(2024, remember, was an absolute catastrophe of an election for the Tories, to the extent that officially Labour was the challenger in Aberdeen South, having come 2nd to Stephen Flynn two years ago. And UK by-election wins for the Scottish Tories are so rare that last night’s was the first of my life, and I’m pretty darn old.)

Turnout, like the SNP vote, was almost cut in half, from 60% in 2024 to 31% as voters declared a plague on all houses, something shared with the night’s other Scottish result.

The turnout drop in Arbroath and Broughty Ferry was actually marginally smaller – 58% falling to 31% – and while the SNP held the seat its performance was only marginally better, shedding close to 40% of the votes it got in 2024.

That’s almost as many as the number of names the party’s rather posh candidate Pyla Lara Bird-Leakey dropped on her way to becoming the somewhat more ned-friendly local lass “Lara Bird”.

And the number of consonants she dropped from her pronunciation on the way to very swiftly switching to a Scottish accent, almost as quickly as she switched her focus from independence for Palestine to independence for Scotland.

?

?

(Her LinkedIn page is now rather entertaining, as “Lara Bird” posts exciting life news and all her friends inexplicably congratulate someone called “Pyla”.)

But in fact the real story of last night is the complete disintegration of the Scottish Labour vote, on a night when the party’s supporters ought to have actually been pretty upbeat, given that Andy Burnham was widely predicted to (and did) win the Makerfield by-election, paving the way for the ousting of the stratospherically unpopular Keir Starmer.

Anas Sarwar called for Starmer to stand down last year, so logically Scottish Labour should have felt the benefit of that moving towards realisation. It only had to hang onto 67% of its 2024 vote in Arbroath to capture the seat as the SNP vote plummeted, but in the end could only manage less than 25% and plunged to fourth place.

There was no tactical voting here. Only Reform gained any votes, and only 541, as more than 20,000 voters from two years ago simply walked away. The SNP’s vote has now fallen by two-thirds in just seven years, but was still enough to more than double the nearest challenger as Reform and the Tories split the right-wing vote almost exactly between them (though their combined total would still have fallen a thousand short).

So what did we learn last night? That Scotland loathes all of its politicians, but that Labour’s failure to change after its Scottish branch manager led it to its two worst election results of all time in a row appears to have finally exhausted the patience of its supporters, and that the SNP are now so despised (particularly but not solely in the North-East) that they’re capable of reviving even the Scottish Tories – just a matter of weeks after Russell Findlay’s party also recorded its worst ever Holyrood performance, seeing its vote cut in half.

But as long as the divided opposition means that the SNP can still push even the most ludicrous candidates into seats on a fraction of its old vote, the party will have no reason to change, though the stench from its rotting carcass overwhelms even a fishing town in a summer heatwave.

After all, Stephen Flynn’s personal ambitions might be responsible for the SNP losing Aberdeen South, but he’s not going hungry on an MSP’s salary.

And while the SNP still has enough votes to limp into power as the least hated, it doesn’t care how much the country stinks.