‘Dig for victory’: How Labour dug deep to win the Hamilton by-election, and what it means for Scottish politics
7 June 2025, 01:13
Dig for victory. The WWII slogan might as well have been painted on the windows of Scottish Labour’s HQ in Hamilton town centre. It’s certainly how the party won the Lanarkshire seat of Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse in Thursday’s by-election.
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The party pulled off a win that no-one except their troops on the ground thought was possible. Not the media, not the opposition, not even the bookies.
It dug deep. It poured hundreds of activists into the campaign trenches. It canvassed the electorate to within an inch of their lives. On polling day around 250 party members knocked at somewhere between 8000 and 9000 doors to ensure their vote went out and actually put an X on the lilac ballot paper.
And then there was their secret weapon - the candidate Davy Russell. Who you may well ask? And you’d be right to. Russell is not a man who has ever stood for election before. He is not a media performer - he refused to take part in a TV debate, he did few television interviews - one saw him asked the same question about winter fuel payment cuts over and over again without any real answer. He was roundly mocked by his opponents for his “invisibility” and apparent inability to perform as a politician.
The SNP candidate, Cllr Katy Loudon, accused Russell of being unable to defend Keir Starmer’s record in government and running scared of debate. The Reform UK candidate Cllr Ross Lambie produced a social media video asking “where’s Davy?” as if he was some kind of anorak-wearing Scarlet Pimpernel of the Lanarkshire lawn bowls scene. Little wonder then as he stood on the stage making his winners’ speech Russell triumphantly asked “do you see me now Ross?”
He is an old school candidate; well known in his community - not on social media. A 63-year-old grandad from the small mining village of Quarter, he has lived his whole life in and around Hamilton - even repairing its roads during his working life. And playing bowls. As some long-in-the-tooth activists told me, they’d never been in a campaign before where everyone seemed to know who they were campaigning for. In this age of TikToks and Instagram and selfies, he has eschewed it all, and proved perhaps that what counts is community rather than slick answers under the studio lights of the BBC or STV.
In the wake of his win he told me that the issues people raised with him were NHS waiting lists and the need to keep the local football club Hamilton Academicals in the town. Since 1874 the Accies have been at the heart of the town but they are being forced to move to Cumbernauld after a dispute with the owners of their home stadium. This it seems was the final straw for many voters who believe their town has suffered decline in the last two decades under the SNP.
Certainly there are empty and boarded up shop fronts everywhere you look. A multi-storey car park yards from the Labour campaign HQ leads into a ghostly shopping centre which could be the location for the next Hollywood zombie movie. Your footsteps echo on tiles in a mall haunted by abandoned fashion stores and nail salons. “It’s up to me to deliver now,” he told me.
But this election wasn’t just won by Labour - it was lost by the SNP. John Swinney and his team needed a win after last year’s appalling General Election results. And if Labour was pushed into third, then for the SNP that would bode incredibly well for next year’s Holyrood elections.
So they focused on the threat of Reform UK - which had a real bounce in Scotland since its successes in the English local elections, and the Runcorn by-election - and took their eye off Labour. They believed too much in their own smaller canvas returns that the Labour vote was nowhere. Clearly they and Labour were working very different areas of the constituency and getting very different results.
And while they threw all they had at this campaign, in terms of numbers and resource they were outgunned by Labour. Their internal issues in the last few years have affected membership numbers and therefore money. The big donations have also dried up. It’s another problem to resolve before next year.
Hamilton is a racecourse town - so to draw from the turf accountants’ vernacular, the SNP was so blinkered by its belief this was a two horse race that the nag with the red rosette overtook on the outside. They so wanted to believe that voters would think - as they do - that Keir Starmer was making so many mistakes on winter fuel payments, on Waspi women compensation, on keeping the two child cap, that voters would be so sickened they just wouldn’t be able to bring themselves to vote Labour. They worried that the vote might go to Nigel Farage’s party rather than come to them. They under-estimated how good Labour’s campaign was - and how their own election winning juggernaut had developed a flat tyre. The morning after the night before saw John Swinney talk about a “calamitous fall” in Labour’s vote share and the “progress” of his party. The blinkers clearly still on.
And what of Reform UK? A party which has come from nowhere in Scotland won 26 per cent of the vote share. A party with few activists managed to convince people in this seat who had never cast a vote before, to back them. The turnout was high for a by-election at 44 per cent - some of that quite possible the Farage effect.
Reform were just 800 or so votes behind the SNP - and 1400 behind Labour. Clearly they swallowed the Conservative vote - that party was lucky to keep its deposit. Indeed if the 1621 folk who voted Tory had transferred to Reform, the party would have its first MSP in Holyrood. It’s little wonder then that they think come next year’s Holyrood elections they will pick up MSPs on the regional list. If the Tories don’t improve on the six per cent vote share they won in Hamilton, then they could return none.
But all parties - including Labour which will struggle to throw similar resources at every seat it wants to win next year in the way it has in this by-election - now have to think deeply about strategy for those 2026 elections. Labour won by fighting a ground war while its opposition fought an air war - those mistakes won’t be repeated. The SNP has to acknowledge that its domestic record could be more of an issue than mistakes made by UK Labour. And all parties have to acknowledge that Reform UK, is as Richard Tice told me “here to stay in Scottish politics”.
It’s going to be a very interesting 11 months. We will all need to dig deep to get through it.
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Gina Davidson is LBC's Scotland Political Editor.
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