GOVAN ‘88
Thirty years on... inside story of the Jim Sillars by-election victory that changed the face of Scottish politics forever
The SNP’s 1988 Govan by-election victory dethroned Labour in its heartland and marked the first tremor of an earthquake still being felt today.
Thirty years ago this week, voters went to the polls in Glasgow’s Govan. It was supposed to be one of then Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s safest seats – impregnable thanks to a visceral hatred of the Tories that would ensure instant victory for anyone wearing a red rosette.
Margaret Thatcher was in the process of privatising and selling off the shipyards that had proudly supported the Clydeside community for generations, and rage was mounting that Scotland would be used as a guinea pig for the poll tax.
On TV, while Harry Enf ield’s “Loadsamoney” character perfectly summed up the wealth pouring into the south-east of England, the west of Scotland was, for many, more aptly depicted through the eyes of Rab C Nesbitt.
In July the Piper Alpha oil rig explosion, that took the lives of 167 North Sea workers, had only added to the air of
doom around heavy industry. It was against this backdrop that a November by-election was triggered when Labour’s Bruce Millan resigned to become an EU Commissioner in Brussels.
It saw the SNP select Jim Sillars as its candidate – a hardened political campaigner and former Labour MP whose wife Margo MacDonald became the darling of the Nationalists by winning the same constituency 15 years earlier.
Sillars was pitted against tub-thumping trade unionist Bob Gillespie – father of Primal Scream rock star Bobby Gillespie. Bob was seen as a safe pair of hands for Labour.
What went wrong for Labour – or what went right for the SNP – is still hotly debated.
In the end, Sillars romped to victory with a gobsmacking 33 per cent swing and sealed his place in SNP history.
Among the other candidates were future STV star Bernard Ponsonby for the LibDems, the late Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Pary, Communist Douglas Chalmers, Graeme Hamilton for the Tories, George Campbell for the Greens and the independent Fraser Clark
Here political editor John Ferguson speaks to some of the main characters about their part in one of Scotland’s greatest political battles.