 | 'The SNP came a strong second as Labour trailed badly in 3 rd.' Iain MacWhirter, BBC Scotland, 17 th March 2000. |  |
| 'The SNP came a strong second as Labour trailed badly in 3 rd.' Iain MacWhirter, BBC Scotland, 17 th March 2000. | |
Labour's slide from their General Election victory in the seat three years ago and narrow win in last May's Scottish Election saw them trail in a poor third.
With the Liberal Democrats beaten into fifth place by the Scottish Socialist Party, it was a night of humiliation for the Scottish Executive coalition. Between them, the coalition parties took less than a quarter of the vote.
It was the first parliamentary by-election the Tories had won in Scotland since Esmond Wright took Glasgow Pollok in 1967, and after years of agony on such nights, the faces in the Conservative camp said it all.
Their candidate, John Scott, notched up a thumping majority of 3344 to become his party's first Holyrood representative to be elected on a first-past-the-post basis rather than through proportional representation, and indeed the Tories' first constituency parliamentarian in Scotland since their General Election wipe-out in 1997.
He said: "This is a stunning endorsement of the Scottish Conservatives' performance in the Parliament, where we have been seen to make devolution work.
"Blair and Dewar are talking the language of devolution but don't understand a word of it and they have been exposed as taking the people for granted."
SNP campaign manager John Swinney insisted: "This is a stunning result for the SNP. It is now immaterial whether the political territory is rock-solid Labour, as in Hamilton, or marginal Labour-Tory, as in Ayr. The SNP is now the principal challenger throughout Scotland."
There will now be recriminations and investigations into what happened inside Labour.
Campaign manager Andy Kerr said last night: "We fought this on the real issues but it was difficult timing on difficult territory for us. The seat has seen a meagre resurgence in the Tory vote and we are confident that this will return to us at the next election, when it will become once again a two-horse race between Labour and the Tories.
"The mood in our camp is good. We hid from no one and we will return to the people of Ayr with a stronger message."
Scottish Socialist Party candidate James Stewart said of his placing, ahead of the Liberal Democrats: "This confirms that we are now officially the fourth party in Central Scotland politics."
Three years ago, aided by boundary changes, Labour took 48.4% of the vote at the General Election in Ayr and a majority over the long-incumbent Tories of more than 6500.
By the Scottish Election last May, that contest was a 38% dead heat and Labour won by just 25 votes. The SNP made decent but modest headway, gaining seven points to stand at 19.5%, almost exactly half the share of the other two main parties.
Curiously, there had never been a Nationalist tradition in the seat most associated with the Bard. Last night has certainly changed that.
It was the decision of Ian Welsh to resign as MSP just a few months into his four-year term that prompted the by-election, putting Labour on the back foot from day one.
He cited family reasons at the time of his resignation but later admitted that he had found it "stultifying" to be a back bencher rather than a mover and shaker in the Cabinet. As a former council leader and as the high-profile chief executive of Kilmarnock Football Club, the impression given was that simply being an MSP was not good enough for him.
The Tories faced their own difficulty, with former Ayr stalwart Phil Gallie having to decide between taking the risk of resigning his list seat as MSP to fight the by-election on first-past-the-post or sitting tight. Choosing the latter seemed unusually faint-hearted.
The campaign got under way against a backdrop of hideous headlines for the Scottish Executive nationally and South Ayrshire Council locally. The Keep the Clause campaign sought to make the repeal of Section 28 a key issue, which hurt Labour more than any other party.
There was also a general malaise emanating from the Parliament, following months of negative stories, not least the spiralling cost of the new building.
But above all, there was terrible damage to Labour locally from the way details of the local government spending round emerged, producing a pattern of council tax increases and cuts in services, not least the cause célèbre of the Carrick Street Halls, the threatened day-care centre for the elderly which assumed Bastille-like symbolic importance.
Some within the Labour hierarchy will be keen to single out Section 28 as an all-encompassing scapegoat, but others have told The Herald that this is not an option and a deeper, underlying malaise must be addressed.
Result
J Scott (C) 12580
J Mather (SNP) 9236
R Miller (Lab) 7054
J Stewart (SSP) 1345
S Ritchie (LD) 800
G Corbett (Green) 460
W Botcherby (Ind Vet) 186
A McConnachie (UK Ind) 113
R Graham (ProLife) 111
K Dillon (Ind AC) 15
Electorate 56,008
Turnout: 57%
1999 Scottish Parliament Election Lab maj 25 (0.07%) - Turnout 37,454 (66.48%). Welsh (Lab) 14,263 (38.08%); Gallie (C) 14,238 (38.01%); Mullin (SNP) 7291 (19.47%); Morris (LD) 1662 (4.44%)
March 17 th 2000
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