Labour hails ‘incredible’ by-election victory – but can it see off Reform to win Holyrood in 2026?

Against expectations, Labour won the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election for the Scottish parliament. Anas Sarwar, its leader in Scotland, hailed the result as an “incredible victory” and declared that voters are “tired of SNP failure” but have “rejected Reform’s poison”.

However, with a little less than a year before the next elections at Holyrood, it’s by no means clear who the next first minister will be.

The by-election was held following the death earlier this year of Scottish government minister, Christina McKelvie. Labour's Davy Russell won after a swing of more than 7 per cent from the SNP to Labour, with 8,559 votes, beating SNP candidate Katy Loudon on 7,957 and Reform's Ross Lambie on 7,088.

Mr Sarwar said: “The choice is stark next year ... it is about choosing a government here in Scotland. The choice is stark – a third decade of the SNP with John Swinney as first minister or a new direction for Scotland with me as first minister.”

Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice insisted his party was “delighted” with coming third. “We've come from nowhere to being in a three-way marginal, and we're within 750 votes of winning that by-election and just a few hundred votes of defeating the SNP, so it's an incredible result,” he said.

No. Labour did far worse than in a 2023 by-election for Westminster, and in last year’s election. It even did a little worse here than it did in the 2021 Holyrood elections. What’s more, it was hardly ahead of the SNP or, more shockingly, Reform UK.

A shift of a few hundred votes out of the total of 27,155 cast could have swung it for any of three main contenders. It was really a three-way fight, and could easily have been won by either of the other two, with Labour possibly finishing a close third. The outstanding features were the collapse in SNP and Conservative support, plus a Reform UK surge in unpromising territory.

This took place in the central belt, where Labour staged a remarkable revival last year but has since suffered a steep decline, so the result was broadly in line with what opinion polls are telling us.

Nobody, in the sense that the SNP will suffer heavy losses and Labour may do scarcely better than it did in 2021. On the current showing, the SNP will most likely emerge as the largest party unless Labour can stage a recovery and take voters away from the SNP, who've been in power since 2007.

On the basis of this by-election and the opinion polls, no one will get anywhere near an overall majority, and it will be difficult for any realistic majority to be cobbled together. The Scottish election system has a good deal of proportionality in it which means that, unlike the first-past-the-post arrangement for the House of Commons, many more parties will gain a larger representation. Thus it seems likely that the SNP, Labour, Reform, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and possibly the Scottish Greens and Alba will be represented to some extent.

The SNP, despite its slump since 2021, may well still be the largest single party, on about 32 per cent of the vote, ahead of Labour. But the SNP would need the support of other, mostly unionist, parties if it wanted to govern on a truly stable basis – at the moment, an unlikely scenario.

Alternatively, the SNP, possibly under new leadership, could follow the example of Alex Salmond in his first term as first minister from 2007 to 2011, and govern on a “policy by policy” basis as a minority administration. Either way, the relative weakness of the SNP would stymie any further push for independence. But Labour, who beat the SNP in Scotland at last year’s Westminster election, will be disappointed in 2026 if they fail to retake Holyrood, which they once dominated so effortlessly.