Three in a row!

Last night - this morning - saw the best election results for Scottish Labour for some time. Obviously there was Glenrothes, but also the local by-elections in both Glasgow and Edinburgh where Labour held seats. The Edinbugh election was for the Forth Ward, and was caused by the sad death of Elizabeth Maginnis (see below).

This one was particularly important for me as the vast majority of the Forth Ward is in the Edinburgh North & Leith constituency, so I spent a lot of time campaigning in that ward (although I did visit Glenrothes as well). It wasn't the easiest election to campaign in - many of the people who might normally have helped in a byelection were off to Glenrothes as well, so it was a pretty small team at times. And by the end of the campaign, it was getting pretty dark by the time people were back home from work - so the 'window of opportunity' for actually meeting voters (which I prefer to the more anonymous telephone canvassing) was fairly limited during the week.

But we stuck at it - and got a good result, with Labour's candidate Cammy Day winning, with even a slight increase in our vote. The full figures are here.

The SNP were in a good second place, which wasn't surprising, but the real revelation was the plunge in support for the LibDems, who dropped from fourth place to a poor fourth. They had run a massive campaign (presumably because they weren't that bothered by Glenrothes); one friend of mine who lives in Forth Ward had actually received 11 LibDem leaflets! And yet their vote went down significantly. Perhaps this is partly because more and more people are seeing through the bogus byelection campaigns produced by the LibDems - which included in the Forth ward misleading claims such as that the election was a "two horse race" - when it clearly wasn't; misleading graphs; and demanding action by the Council on various issues while seeming to forget that the Council Leader for the last year and a half has actually been a LibDem. And another friend got a phone call urging a LibDem vote as a way of demanding lower food prices! (On enquiring as to how one more LibDem Edinburgh councillor could do anything about that, he was told the Council could pass a resolution calling for lower food prices......

Good comments on the election from Cammy Day and Andrew Burns.