Labour crushed in council votes

LABOUR has been annihilated by the SNP in a series of local by-elections in its former heartlands.

The Nationalists swept to victory in five contests in Glasgow and South Lanarkshire with double-digit swings, following the party’s General Election success.

The results came as one of Labour’s deputy leadership contenders, Ben Bradshaw, revealed he had been shocked by the party’s poor organisation when he joined local election campaign teams last week.

One insider also told the Scottish Daily Mail that a Labour MP, convinced he would win, refused to do any door-knocking before May’s General Election – and then lost massively to the SNP.

The new Scottish Labour leader will be announced a week today, with MSP Kezia Dugdale the frontrunner. But party chairman Jamie Glackin said the by-election results ‘underline the fact that the new Scottish Labour leader is in this for the long haul. We have a mountain to climb’.

The only consolation for Labour is that voter turnout in the by-elections was very low, reaching just 14.5 per cent in Glasgow’s Anderston/City ward where council leader Gordon Matheson sits.

Across Glasgow, the SNP vote increased to 52 per cent with a near-20 per cent swing from Labour.

In the Hamilton South ward of South Lanarkshire, John Ross was elected for the SNP with 48 per cent of the vote.

Nationalist business convener Derek Mackay said: ‘These by-elections show that people across Scotland continue to put their trust in SNP representatives to stand up for their community.

‘With polls showing strong support for the SNP for next year’s Scottish Parliament elections, the SNP is in a strong position to build on our record in government.’

Writing for the New Statesman magazine, Ben Bradshaw was scathing of his party’s organisational structure in Scotland.

He said: ‘As we went door to door, street to street, it was soon clear to me we had almost no data.

‘When I raised this gently with the excellent young volunteer running our team, he nodded and said that until 2012 our contact rate in this constituency had been zero. Zero! Just for comparison, the contact rate in my own constituency, Exeter, is 75 per cent.

‘How was this ever allowed to happen?’