Nats’ victory finally breaks Labour’s nullifying stranglehold on West Coast

Aug 1 2008 by Pete Wishart, MP

WELL, what can you say about that by-election win in Glasgow last week? It sometimes seems like all the superlatives have been used up. Spectacular, stupendous, a political earthquake, etc, etc, and all these descriptions are right. After Glasgow East, things will never be the same again. You can almost feel Labour’s nullifying West Coast stranglehold and suffocating hegemony slipping away. It has happened before and it can happen again. In the 1950s the Conservatives became the only party to secure over 50% of the vote in Scotland, yet were totally wiped out in 1997. Labour’s ongoing denial about their precarious position in Scotland could see the same thing happen to them.

Labour lost because they took the voters of Glasgow East for granted. I mean, the previous MP never even had a constituency office to service his constituents! They took for granted the voters for so long they didn’t know where their support lived or how to canvas them. The people of Glasgow East deserve better and by voting for John Mason they will get just that. They knew that they could either vote to change their current predicament or accept it. No wonder the vote was pretty decisive.

I never accepted the patronising or insulting metropolitan press take that suggested that this constituency was like some sort of war-torn outer Bosnian suburb.

Yes, the east end of Glasgow is hard pressed, with some appalling social statistics, but I spent many an evening in some very nice new estates that you see in every town and city throughout the country.

What there was though, was a real poverty of hope. The people I spoke to just believed things were going to get worse and they were being ignored. There was a real sense that little could be done to challenge the dreadful health statistics or urban squalor. It was this view that had to be taken on.

We put forward a positive message about being on the people’s side. We pointed to the Scottish Government’s freeze on the Council Tax and cut in prescription charges.

We also reiterated our proposal of a fuel tax regulator to help with fuel prices.

Labour twittered on about our candidate being a “hard-line nationalist” and standing up for the East End, a slogan that begged the question – “well what have you been doing for the past 50 years then?”

Glasgow East was an old fashioned political contest that pitted an old time, complacent incumbent against a hungry young challenger. It of course ended up with a decisive knock-out blow.