Can Scotland help Labour form Britain’s next government?
The stakes in a by-election are unusually high
“I DON’T KNOW—it’s all mince,” (Scottish slang for rubbish) says a retired cleaner in Rutherglen, when asked how she would vote in an upcoming by-election. The last time voters in that suburb south of Glasgow went to the polls she backed the Scottish National Party (snp); this time she might plump for Labour. Her ambivalence, apparently shared by many former snp voters, reflects the party’s dramatic decline. Since the beginning of the year, and in particular following the arrest in June of Nicola Sturgeon, the former first minister and the most powerful advocate of the independence dream that brought the snp to power, the party has slipped in the polls in a once unimaginable way.
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “A straw in the wind”
Britain September 2nd 2023
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