And another thing…

GIVEN how few votes separated Labour and the SNP at the Glasgow East by-election last summer, I’ve always believed this was a seat that we could win back at the next election.

It seems the leading nationalist blog SNP Tactical Voting agrees, particularly after Margaret Curran was reselected as Labour’s standard bearer:

Good luck to her of course though I don’t think she’ll need it as, despite John Mason’s heroics in last year’s by-election, this seat should go back to Labour if national trends are anything to go by.

You read it there first.

GLASGOW East has a new MP, and I suppose the first silver lining I can think of is that he’ll only be there until the next general election.

Also, last night’s result says almost nothing about Scots’ support for, or opposition to, independence. In this respect, the Glasgow East result was no different from other contests that have taken place throughout the UK from time to time. Voters chose the SNP, not because they’ve had a sudden conversion to independence, but because they wanted to give Labour a kicking and they opted for the party best placed to do that. That’s what happens when governments are (temporarily, I hope) unpopular.

Councillor Mason and Nicola Sturgeon both described the result as “off the Richter scale” (a remarkable coincidence that they should choose the same phrase completely independent of each other even before the result was announced). So has the Richter scale been re-scaled? The swing against us last night was substantial – 22.5 per cent. But it was still significantly less than the swing achieved by the SNP in Govan in 1988 (33 per cent) – the last time we lost a by-election to the SNP (and we won that back at the subsequent general election). It was even less than the swing the nats secured in 1999 at the Hamilton by-election (27 per cent) – two years before our second landslide general election victory in 2001.

Having said all that, the SNP and my new parliamentary colleague, John Mason, won a very hard-fought campaign. They should be congratulated for that (I hope you could hear that through my gritted teeth…).

COUNTING and numbers and stuff have never been a strong point for the SNP. Just look at their claims for 1000 extra police, the so-called fiscal surplus and the fairyland numbers behind their “local” income tax.

And when it comes to polling, they are past masters at thinking of a number and then doubling it. No doubt they will be at it again with polling numbers in the next few days of the by-election campaign.

But it’s not the first time in the campaign they’ve shown a less than rigorous approach to number crunching.

Last weekend they claimed they had 500 supporters at a rally in Glasgow East in support of hard-line nationalist John Mason (the man who takes the fun out of “fundamentalist” then bores it to death). But a careful study of pictures of the event reveals just 147, with perhaps three behind a poster, trying not to be seen (and who can blame them?).

There’s really no excuse for this level of innumeracy (I blame the “government”). The problem, of course, is that the media eat it up every time, so you can hardly expect the nats to be more honest with their figures when they know they’ll get away with it every time.

* According to a calculator nicked from SNP headquarters