PROFESSOR John Curtice has issued a warning to both Labour and the SNP after the "surprise" results of the by-election in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse.
The polling expert was appearing on the BBC after it was announced that Davy Russell had won the by-election for Scottish Labour, becoming the party’s 23rd MSP with 31.5% of the total vote.
The SNP were second, with their candidate Katy Loudon picking up 29.4% of the vote, while Reform UK’s Ross Lambie was a close third with 26.2%.
Speaking to the BBC, Professor Curtice said that the result had confirmed the “evidence of the opinion polls”, but that Reform's level of support was "a bit of a surprise".
He explained: “The revival of the Labour Party that took place in the two years running up to the General Election has indeed disappeared, the party is indeed more or less back to where it was in 2021.
“But at the same time, with the SNP vote down by 17 points, here is more than ample evidence that indeed the SNP, while it might have steadied the ship psychologically, has still made very little progress in advancing on where it was at last summer.”
Curtice said that the vote result showed that there was a “chunk” of pro-Yes voters who had backed Labour in the 2024 General Election and “have not returned to the SNP fold”.
He added: “This election confirms very, very clearly that the SNP still have an awful lot of work to do to get those voters back on side, and it does illustrate that indeed, although, given, if this kind of result were to be reflected across the whole of Scotland, we'd still bet about the SNP being the largest party, they are still on relatively fragile ground.”
The University of Strathclyde expert further said that Reform UK’s vote share had been a “bit of a surprise given the national polls”.
“It certainly is very bad news for the Conservative Party, who are frankly being had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner by Reform at the moment, so far as the public is concerned. They're at 18% in the GB-wide polls, they're down to 12% in the Scotland polls. The Conservative Party cannot afford for Reform to gain momentum north of the Border.”
However, he went on to issue a warning to the SNP and Labour, saying both parties “need to think about how are they going to effectively deal with Reform”.
Curtice said: “For all the complaints about Nigel Farage's ad [attacking Anas Sarwar], it is not clear from this result that it did any damage.
“I think I would point out to both the SNP and the Labour Party that what they ended up doing in this by-election campaign was giving an awful lot of publicity to a message that they thought was not a very good idea.
“One of the first rules in politics is to avoid scratching the itch of things you do not like because you simply end up potentially giving them airtime.
“And the truth is that evidently Mr Farage's message was not sufficiently unacceptable for at least a body of people in Hamilton for Reform to record a quite notable share of the vote, and certainly the highest share of the vote won in a parliamentary contest by any anti-EU party in Scotland.”
Asked where Reform’s vote had come from, Curtice said: “Around one in four of the people who voted Conservative last year, diminished in number as they were, in Scotland are switching to Reform.
“But Labour also are losing somewhere between one in six and one in five of their voters to Reform of the ones they had last year.”
He added that Scottish voters who backed Labour in 2024 are more likely to switch to Reform than English voters, saying that south of the Border Labour “are losing about 10% of their vote to Reform”.
