In Answer to Blagger1

Blagger1 left this (rather flattering!) comment on my last post and after giving it a lot of thought, I've opted to put my answer in a separate post as this could turn out to be a long one:

J, you're a political anorak par excellene. How much of a comparison is there here, with the Glasgow Garscadden by-election of 1978. Superficially there are similarities - doomed-looking Labour government, SNP on a roll, combative candidate parachuted in to defend rock-solid Labour seat - will we see Curran feted like Dewar in years to come for "holding the line", as Labour would put it?

In terms of the similarities: yes, Brown's Government is in trouble; yes, the SNP is in a strong position right now; yes, it does seem like Curran was parachuted in; yes, abortion has become an issue and yes, Labour appear to be on the opposite side of it to local voters if you assume that the largest faith community in the area is in agreement with Catholic Church bigwigs.

However, the differences are striking. The current weakness of the Brown Government is not the same as the weakness of the Callaghan Government of the time: its weakness at that point was mostly Parliamentary, and the event that killed it off for sure (the Winter of Discontent) was still a few months away, but it was some way short of a majority in the Commons and so had real trouble in Parliament. Brown, by contrast, has a Commons majority of 59 but is on the wrong end of political hit after political hit.

Nor was SNP strength quite what it appeared now, particularly when measured against the present. The SNP could have been seen as the principal challengers to Labour's first place in Scotland at a time of a Unitary parliament (albeit one with the prospect of devolution) where the Callaghan/Thatcher battle was all. Today, devolution has been established, adding a new dimension to the political landscape so that the Salmond/[insert Labour Leader's name here] dynamic is as important as the Brown/Cameron contest.

And at the most recent electoral test, the SNP overtook Labour both at Holyrood and in the local elections, taking the most votes, the most MSPs and the most Councillors, not to mention seeing Alex Salmond form the first SNP Government. The previous electoral test to Garscadden was the 1977 District Council elections, where the SNP did achieve a 9% swing from Labour, but were still third in terms of votes (behind Labour and the Tories), and fourth in terms of seats (behind Independents, Labour and the Conservatives).

Similarly, a recent YouGov opinion poll put the SNP on 33%, 4 points ahead of Labour in Westminster voting intention; a March 1978 System 3 poll had the SNP in third place on 27% - eleven points behind Labour and two points behind the Tories.

In terms of the constitutional issue, Labour were moving on the idea of a Scottish Assembly at the time of Garscadden, although this was a reluctant move and its primary objective was to spike the SNP's guns. Now, the Scottish Parliament is an established fact and far from neutralising the SNP, it's served to re-energise it, as last year's results plainly bear out.

And the parallels between Dewar and Curran aren't that great: Donald Dewar was born and raised in Glasgow, and worked as a lawyer in Glasgow. If anything, he was parachuted into Aberdeen South back in 1966 - and the suggestion that he benfitted from this again in 1978 isn't overly convincing. Margaret Curran is of Glasgow (though not necessarily of the East End) and has been a Glasgow MSP for nine years, though the very public farce that was the Labour selection process makes clear that it wasn't going to be her, and the reason her name is on the ballot paper is that no one else would do it. Conversely, the SNP candidate is stronger: Keith Bovey was an Edinburgh lawyer with very little political experience; John Mason has been a Glasgow SNP Councillor for a decade.

So it's my belief that Labour start from an even weaker position than they did in 1978, while the SNP start from a stronger one. And while there are the superficial similarities that Blagger1 considers, I believe that the underlying political landscape is radically different to what it was then, not least because Garscadden was a pre-devolution contest rather than a post-devolution one. That is why you can't talk about echoes of Garscadden in Glasgow East. Or indeed, why you can't hark back to Govan either, but that's another post for another day.

Finally, I want to question the legacy of the Garscadden By-Election. Dewar's win was symbolic - the outcome was always going to be symbolic - and the Glasgow East result may turn out to be as time progresses, but that will depend on future results. And while the SNP did collapse in 1979 (albeit from largely self-inflicted wounds), Jim Callghan was still voted out of office in favour of Margaret Thatcher, and Labour even came second to the Tories in the 1979 European Elections. Similary, while you can argue that Dewar did stop the rot, the actual direction of the parties was influenced by other factors - the devolution fiasco, the SNP MPs' disastrous decision to ignore their own party's NEC and vote to bring down the Government, even the 1978 World Cup! Dewar's significance was what he did as an MP, not how he became one for a second time. As for what this result will mean, that depends entirely on what the result is. And that until we know that (and all we seem to know today is that it will be close), we can't know what Margaret Curran and John Mason's respective places in the political history books will be.

But in summary, you can't compare either the background or the impact of the Garscadden By-Election with this one. They are two totally different animals, and in any case, as the cliché goes, "The past is a different country: they do things differently there."

Glasgow Garscadden might not be that far from Glasgow East, but the thirty years that have passed, and all the things that have happend in those thirty years, mean that they may as well be on different planets.