Glasgow East
I don't normally post on election results, I'm a bit of purist about it - as Danny Finkelstein posted more lengthily back before the local elections, local elections, by-elections and so on aren't representative so don't actually tell us much we don't know.
The 24 news channels today are full of graphics showing the sorry few Labour MPs who would remain should the swing last night be replicated across the country. I remember Peter Snow used to do similar things at by-elections during the Major government, which normally showed something along the lines of only two Conservative MPs surviving and Charles Wardle and Sir Norman Fowler fighting out for the leadership.
It was, of course, all a bit of fun. In this case especially you can't project the 22.5% swing to the SNP across the whole country, since it would mean the SNP getting 22.5% of the vote in every English seat. (For a bit of fun, if there was a 22.5% swing from Labour to their nearest challenger in every seat in Great Britain Labour would be left with about 20 or so seats, with Yvette Cooper the only cabinet member to survive the purge). Technically there was a 9.2% swing from Labour to the Conservatives in the Glasgow East by-election, which co-incidentally is pretty much in line with the national polls.
The real importance of by-elections to national politics (obviously they are important for the constituency itself) is the impact they make in terms of publicity, media coverage and the public's perception. Gordon Brown and Labour are presently enduring almost back-to-back news coverage about how unpopular and moribund they are, that's not going to do them any favours.
It's also worth commenting on the two opinion poll conducted in Glasgow East over the campaign. They weren't very good were they? Both showed Labour with a lead in the teens. I think there is a limited value in trying to tease out what went wrong though, while I remain dubious about whether ICM should use their normal re-allocation of don't knows in by-election polling, in this case I am really not surprised at all that polling in a constituency which such extreme social deprivation went wrong. I tend to assume that the most excluded, the people on the very margins of socity, tend not to show up in polls. Those same people make up a very large proportion of the electorate in East Glasgow. In fairness, ICM's poll was also done realitively early in the campaign and opinions could have switched.
Later on this evening we should get the final YouGov poll before summer, most if not all of the fieldwork for which would have been done before the result was know. It's probably lucky that Populus's monthly poll isn't due this weekend (they may not even do one this month, they skipped the August poll in the past), that could have produced a truly frightening figure for Labour.
