Of the many defeats Labour has suffered in recent years, the loss of Scotland is the most traumatic. The Labour Party was founded by Keir Hardie, a Lanarkshire trade unionist after whom the present leader is named, and Scotland was for so long its heartland and stronghold.

How Labour hegemony came to be supplanted by the SNP north of the border is a parable of entitlement and misrule and of what happens when a party pursues its own sectarian interests at the expense of those of the voters.

Yet even when Gordon Brown was defeated in 2010, creating the conditions for a long period of Conservative rule, Labour still won 41 of the 59 Scottish Westminster seats. At the 2015 general election, eight months after the independence referendum in which Labour had formed a unionist alliance with the Conservatives, the party, under the hapless leadership of Ed Miliband, won only one seat. The referendum had fired nationalist ambitions and hardened support for the SNP.
Labour’s catastrophic collapse in Scotland gave the Conservatives an unexpected majority. David Cameron was compelled to honour the pledge he had made to hold a referendum about British membership of the European Union. We know what happened next. We had entered an era of extraordinarily turbulent politics.

As the Brexit wars raged at Westminster, the SNP consolidated its hold on power as well as its influence over civil society in Scotland. Under the indomitable command of Nicola Sturgeon, a serial election winner before she abruptly quit as first minister in February, and her husband Peter Murrell, who resigned a month later after 22 years as the SNP’s chief executive, because of obfuscation about membership figures, Scotland became a one-party state. Or perhaps more accurately a “party state”: brooking no opposition, the SNP believed that its interests and those of the Scottish people were coterminous. They were not, but that was how the SNP presented it, fanatically supported by an army of often anonymous online belligerents, the so-called cybernats.

Labour lost Scotland because it deserved to. It neither understood the deeper forces powering the rise of Scottish nationalism — the decline of the trade unions, the weakening of cross-border working-class solidarity, a botched devolution settlement, mistrust of institutions and contempt for the Westminster jamboree, the fragility of the post-imperial multinational British state — nor knew what to do about them.

After the creation of the Scottish parliament in 1999, Labour continued to send its brightest talents to London and complacently assumed that most left-leaning Scottish voters would never abandon the party. Until one day they did, in their hundreds of thousands.

But is something big happening again in Scotland? Voters are “coming home” to Labour, as an adviser to Sir Keir Starmer claimed to me last week. We’ll discover how true this is at the Rutherglen & Hamilton West (SNP majority: 5,230) by-election on October 5.

Labour has never won a seat from the SNP at a by-election, and this one is no ordinary seat. It was in Hamilton, in 1967, when the SNP was a peripheral party of romantics, anti-Catholic cranks and “tartan Tories”, that Winnie Ewing won a sensational by-election victory over Labour. Alex Salmond, the former first minister, calls Hamilton “the birthplace of the modern SNP”.

The Starmer aide told me: “The by-election in Scotland is seminal for us. We’re sending every shadow cabinet member there at least twice. Our aim is to build a big coalition in Scotland again. We want this by-election to be a pivotal moment in Scottish politics like in 1967.”
For Salmond, the SNP was always “more than a party”, as he once said to me. “It is also a cause and a movement. That is the source of our great strength.”

That strength of unity has gone. Ravaged by scandal and a police investigation into its finances (Sturgeon and Murrell have been arrested and released), the SNP is factionalised and losing support. It has fragmented across several parties, including the ultra-liberal Greens, who back the SNP at Holyrood, and Salmond’s Alba, a party of independence fundamentalists founded in 2021.
Salmond and Sturgeon, once allies, despise each other. Humza Yousaf, the first minister, backed by the Sturgeonites, struggles to command respect and authority. His poll ratings are dire. Kate Forbes, traduced in the leadership campaign because of her Christianity and social conservatism, remains a leader-in-waiting.

Labour is benefiting from SNP chaos and the consequences of Sturgeon’s failure to deliver the long-promised second independence referendum. From the beginning of Starmer’s leadership, Scotland was a priority for him and his campaigns director, Morgan McSweeney, whose wife, Imogen Walker, is the Labour parliamentary candidate in Hamilton & Clyde Valley.
The plan was this. First, Richard Leonard, the Corbynite leader of Scottish Labour, had to be replaced, as he eventually was by Anas Sarwar, a former MP who is close to Starmer. Next, Labour had to rebuild an effective campaigning operation and replace the Tories as the main opposition to the SNP, as it has, in the polls at least. Then, at a general election, it had to win seats from the SNP before ultimately reclaiming power at Holyrood.

Labour believes it is the only truly national British party, one capable of winning in the towns and cities of England, as well as in Wales and Scotland. That was in large part why the loss of Scotland was so painful. It was also a warning of what lay ahead for the demoralised party in its “red wall” heartlands in England.