Local Government By-elections since 1995

'The finance of local government has staggered from one crisis to the next as its responsibilities have grown. Reforms have been at best tinkering; at worst disastrous - as in the cases of the poll tax and reorganisation. Labour has no more idea of how to deal with the problem than the Government and is coming under increasing criticism for its lack of a policy response.'
Herald Editorial, 12 th December 1996.

By-election Analysis

An analysis of the local government by-election results since April 1995 appeared in the Scots Independent of February 1997

By-election Bandwagon Rolling

By Dr John Hulbert, Councillor for Carse of Gowrie in Perthshire & Kinross

Elections are what politics is all about. Winning them is our objective. Furthermore, winning at local level is closely related to winning at Parliamentary level, and so gives an accurate pointer of a Party's progress especially at this late stage in the Parliamentary cycle.

Since the Unitary elections in April 1995, there have been 21 local by-elections. Two of them were held because there had been no election in the particular ward for technical reasons (I believe that in each case one of the candidates died during the campaign) leaving 20 in which the trend can be examined. The SNP contested all 20 of these by-elections, but in two wards (one in Dundee and one in Argyll & Bute) did not contest in April 1995, leaving 18 with comparable elections. The Labour Party contested 19. It missed out one ward (in the Borders) on both occasions. The Tories and Lib Dems tend to fight only in areas of their strength, and there were only 9 and 10 wards respectively which were contested both times.

The crude results are shown in the table below.

These show a modest gain of 3.3 percentage points in the SNP vote and, for Labour, a worrying drop of 6.9 points. The Tory and Lib Dem results involve only half the seats, and are not meaningful.

What the figures miss however is the surge in support for the SNP since May last year. The period from April '95 to April '96 was a thin time for us, with our support in the five by-elections held dropping by 2.2 points to 22%. Since then however it has been a different story, with the average SNP vote in 13 wards contested up a fifth from 25.3% to 30.7%, and some spectacular individual results in Edinburgh Harbour and W. Dunbartonshire (Old Kilpatrick).

By contrast the Blair effect on Labour has really begun to bite and its effect has been catastrophic. The average Labour vote in 14 wards contested since May 1996 dropped by a quarter from 48.2% to 36.5%.

Roll on the General Election.

Average Vote (%)			No. of wards	Seats
	6.4.95	Byelect	No. of wards	Held	Won	Lost
	25.0	28.3	18	1	3	0
	43.4	36.5	19	6	1	3	(1 to SNP; 2 to LD)
	34.7	36.0	9	6	0	1	(to Labour)
	15.4	20.4	10	0	2	0
Independent	-	-	3	1	0	2	(Both to SNP)

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