The skies are grey over Glasgow East today and Scotland's morning papers do not provide a much cheerier prospect for Gordon Brown's hopes of saving next week's byelection.
The Scotsman and the Scottish Daily Mirror are both concerned with knife crime, the Mirror with the rising cost of living too. The Herald reports that abortion may become a big campaign issue among the constituency's many Catholic voters, one in three on some estimates.
None of which is good news for a Labour government defending what has long been a heartlands seat. In 2005 the sitting MP, David Marshall, now stepping down over ill-health, took 60% of the votes cast. An ICM snapshot poll this week put Labour ahead by 47% to 33%.
On the long Shettleston Road this morning the SNP candidate, John Mason, skilfully chaperoned by John Swinney, the finance minister in Alex Salmond's government at Holyrood, was tempting voters with that thought. It will take "only a 7% swing" to defeat Labour's Margaret Curran and "send a message to Westminster" that Glasgow East feels let down by Labour, he told voters scurrying to and from the shops.
Curran may have been Labour's "fifth choice" candidate, as her opponents gleefully proclaim, but all sides call her "feisty", a tough politician and local MSP who grew up here - but made a slip last week in saying she had lived in the East End "all my life". Like many ambitious residents she worked here but actually moved away to live. But her energetic presence may yet stave off the SNP tide.
As many reporters have underlined since the July 24 byelection was announced, some Glasgow East neighbourhoods such as Easterhouse - an unloved 60s housing scheme - and Shettlestone itself - Victorian tenements mixed with modern houses and flats - suffer among the highest levels of social deprivation in Britain.
But the constituency is hardly Grozny. For every battered, probably unemployed, man with fierce dogs heading towards the pub there is a cheerful woman or granny with grandson, and gardens full of roses and lilies sit alongside neglected ones.
The result of this election is still wide open. But something may be happening in Glasgow East despite the hype that claims - wrongly - that defeat may bring Brown down as prime minister. The Scottish economy is suffering a downturn, jobs lost, projects scrapped, just like the rest of Britain. The deaths of Scottish soldiers on active service are reported with greater prominence than their counterparts receive south of the border.
The difference for some voters on Shettleston Road is that they already have an alternative to Brown's government in distant Westminster. Alex Salmond has played a deft hand since taking power at Holyrood in May 2007 and is still enjoying a honeymoon with voters.
"My business rates went down from £1,800 last year to £300 this year. Was that you?" the lively owner of the "5 a Day" fruit and veg shop asks Swinney. "It was."
"You have my vote," she replies.
Extra police to tackle knife crime, a bigger share of the extra £6bn that Alistair Darling is getting at the Treasury in London from higher oil prices, more emphasis on education for young people ... the SNP government still has answers - and sounds fresher.
There is also the overriding issue, difficult for hard-pressed voters to ignore, of the rising cost of fuel, heating and food. At 18% the "true rise in cost of living is five times the official rate", the Mirror's analysis claims under the headline "Crunch time". Former chancellor Ken Clarke put it at 10% the other day.
It is not that Labour, nationally or locally, simply took the East End of Glasgow's votes and then ignored it. Evidence of renewal is everywhere: schools, housing, health, community and sports centres, private-sector developments - homes and shops - as well as public ones. The old steel works site that provided so many jobs in the industrial age, now gone, is a major retail centre, naturally called the Forge.
What seems to be missing are jobs and hope. Cabbies from outside who ply a useful trade from teenage mothers and their special-needs kids speak scornfully of the lack of experience and leadership. "I grew up in the East End but got out at 17. My contemporaries are dead or in jail," says one.
At McPhie's Craft Bakery on Shettlestone Road - fighting off competition from 11 supermarkets within a five-minute drive - Jim McPhie, a convert from the Tories, greeted this morning's SNP party - plus posse of cameras - with complaints about fuel costs and business taxes.
But McPhie also confided that half his 20 staff are foreigners because local people won't work for the jobs he offers (at around £10 an hour); "they're not interested." What do they want? £15 an hour to make it worth coming off benefits, says McPhie. They may not like a baker's early hours either.
The ex-East End cabbie says the kids have no role models. They have kids of their own young and know that getting to know how to work the system is more important than an education. The candidates stress education as the way forward, but the challenge to politics - local, Holyrood and UK - is to reach the people left behind.
