Baillieston By-Election

The By-Election to replace John Mason MP on Glasgow City Council took place yesterday, and the seat has been held by the SNP. This ought to be something of a surprise as Labour were the largest party in Baillieston ward last year, but the Glasgow East result meant that the SNP were arguably in a stronger position. It was a close one: David Turner was a mere 151 votes ahead of Labour's Andy (Who?) Muir, though this lead had increased to 198 votes by Stage 8 of the count, at which point Muir was eliminated leaving Turner as the only remaining candidate.

The SSP's progress at the Westminster By-Election appears to have stalled, as the party ended up in seventh place, behind the BNP and Solidarity - suggesting that their own demise may be, somewhat exaggerated as yet.

But for now, forward momentum appears to remain with the SNP, and Labour have lost another election in their heartland. Now comes Glenrothes...

Even better - 365

Well the SNP got over the line! It was, as everyone suspected, a close-run thing. But to turn a Labour majority of 13,507 into an SNP majority of 365 in one By-Election, and end an 86-year Labour grip on the area is no mean feat.

There's no doubt that the momentum is now in one place in Scotland: with the SNP. Now as the LibDems will testify - they branded themselves the party of real momentum after 2005 - momentum is fickle, but for now, the signs are good. With a likely By-Election for John Mason MP's seat on Glasgow City Council in the offing, after last night, you would expect the SNP candidate to hold it. There's a By-Election likely in Motherwell & Wishaw in a few months - this sort of swing would make it very winnable for the SNP. And first place in the European Elections looks like a very real possibility.

Basically, this is the first major electoral test for the SNP since May 2007, and the party passed it with flying colours. And if John Mason isn't able to hold it in 2010, the local SNP finds itself with one hell of a candidate for one of the redrawn seats in the 2011 Holyrood election. So that election, in Glasgow East at least, is a potential win-win scenario.

The one note of caution I'd sound is that after Crewe & Nantwich and Henley, it looks like there more of an anti-Labour development in the offing than a pro-SNP one (or, in England, a pro-Tory one). However, this result shows that the growing anti-Labour brigade see the SNP as their best bet in Scotland. And in turn, the result will present the SNP as a strong choice for other voters fed up with Labour. As long as the SNP continue to offer something alongside not being Labour - and the very nature of the SNP means that it will.

Labour, meanwhile, have handled this badly. Unless Margaret Curran wins this seat in 2010, they now face a divisive selection battle for Holyrood in this part of Glasgow (though if she stands and loses again, she does make that easier: she'll have become a proven electoral liability and it'll be easier to ditch her in favour of Frank McAveety in South East Glasgow). And holding a quick By-Election has proved disastrous for two reasons: firstly, by not delaying this and holding the Labour Leadership Election quickly, that contest is held under a cloud. Iain Gray, as Brown's apparently favoured candidate, is probably doomed if Brown is blamed for the result, so this becomes a potential Jamieson/Gordon battle. This won't do anything to challenge the view of Labour as a West Central Scotland party, and the Glasgow East result shows they're vulnerable even in this heartland. And the idea of Labour dominated by, but not dominating, the West Coast has the potential to be a massive turn-off for them.

The second reason a quick By-Election was daft is that now there's two sets of fall-out: the start of the summer recess is dominated by the result, which will send Labour into a spell of in-fighting over the Summer. And even if they get it together at Conference (doubtful), one of the first things to happen when Parliament meets again in the Autumn will be the swearing in of John Mason MP. This will be a painful reminder of what happened at the start of the Summer, and could even re-open old wounds.

What of the Tories? Well, this shows that there has to be a reason for people to vote Tory, that the "Cameron effect" on its own isn't enough: in Crewe, there was a reason to vote Tory: they were the challenger to Labour, while in Henley they were the incumbent party fielding a local candidate. In Glasgow East they managed to move up to third simply by not losing as many votes as the LibDems. This shows that the Tory advance as a whole is only relative: it's like that feeling that the train you're on is moving when it's actually still standing at the platform but the train next to you is pulling off: Labour and the LibDems are going down so it seems like the Tories are going up, but as the next Election draws near, it won't be enough just to be a change, and they will have to set out just what sort of change they represent. The next Westminster election is theirs to lose (and I don't see that happening), but it would be nice if between now and then, we got some sort of feel as to what an incoming Tory government would actually want to do.

And this was, for the LibDems, a total disaster. Falling to fourth is one thing, but losing the deposit? The leadership vacuum in Scotland doesn't help, but it's telling that Nick Clegg, the Federal leader, didn't seem to fill that vacuum. I said at the start of his tenure in charge that his lack of a distinctive personality or distinctive policies would hurt the LibDems and that looks to be the case: there's just no reason to vote LibDem anymore, least of all in Scotland where they're the third largest opposition party, overshadowed by Labour and the Tories, and not carrying the profile of being even the junior partner in Government.

The SSP, on the other hand, have a huge amount to cheer about, and it seems that they are not dead yet as a political force. Now their fifth place may owe more to people not looking where they put their cross (and I don't agree that it's calling the voters stupid to assume that this has happened: you're not telling me that every voter gives 100% concentration if, for example, they're rushing in on their way to or from work; mistakes happen, though having said that, I don't think that the SSP got two thirds of their vote through people not paying attention), but fifth place is fifth place and they've overtaken Solidarity in Glasgow. Which is what they wanted to do more than anything.

Soldiarity, meanwhile, are looking even more doomed. Their leaders are under investigation for perjury, their only Councillor defected to Labour of all parties and now they've fallen behind the party they flounced out of in the first major electoral test since last year, when Tommy Sheridan missed out on a Regional seat in Glasgow by a whisker.

Finally, the Greens have some cause for disappointment, but this isn't their strongest area in Glasgow. The problem is that I see the Greens as a 'middle-class guilt' sort of party and middle-class guilt just won't play in the East End of Glasgow. And I've been holding off on a post about why I don't think environmentalists are the best people to guide us through these troubled economic times so for now I'll confine myself to suggesting that celebrating events that make getting from A to B or heating your home more difficult isn't going to convince people that you have the solutions the problems that people seem worried about.

354

That is apparently the margin by which John Mason beat Margaret Curran on the first count of votes.

There appears to be a recount.

I have to be up at 7 tomorrow and I'm in charge of the urgent payment run so an all-nighter is not an option.

Nevertheless, I go to sleep reasonably happy.

A little suggestion for the Labour Party

Now, I'm sure there are a number of people in the SNP who will have a fit at me for offering what I intend as constructive criticism to the Labour Party. But as I'm offering this a little bit too late for them, I'm going to offer a suggestion in the spirit of the new politics:

When you're being attacked by your opponent for resembling the Tories, when you're criticising your opponent for doing that, and when your response is to publish a leaflet detailing how nasty the Tories were, it's a really bad idea to produce a benefit policy that the Tories will not just support, but claim was theirs in the first place. It merely proves John Mason's point.

And when you're even going so far as to suggest that one By-Election gain by the SNP will mean that a 60-seat Labour majority suddenly ushers in a David Cameron Premiership, by complaining that a win for John Mason will "let the Tories in", it's maybe wise to destroy all copies of this picture first:



Just a thought.

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.

Can we believe anything this woman says?

Much has already been made of Margaret Curran's attempt to pass a 67-year-old Labour activist off as a 93-year-old war veteran. Much has already been made of the MSP for Glasgow Baillieston's amnesia regarding where she lives.

But I want to take a look at this other gem:

"I voted in the Scottish Parliament for us to have a second resolution at the... em... United Nations, um, em, and that's what I'll be doing. Thank you."

Well, aside from the sheer absurdity of supporting a second UN resolution on possible action in Iraq five years after that action happened, is that actually true?

This is what Margaret Curran backed in January 2003:

That the Parliament endorses notes the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 as unanimously adopted by the Security Council; agrees that the Government of Iraq must comply fully with all the provisions of that resolution and that, if it fails to do so, the Security Council should meet in order to consider the situation and the need for full compliance; notes that a further material breach of Iraq's obligations under resolution 1441 will be reported to the Security Council for assessment; further notes that responsibility for policy on this matter lies with Her Majesty's Government, and also notes the current support given to the Middle East peace process by Her Majesty's Government, and extends its full support to our armed forces if, as a consequence of an Iraqi failure to comply, military action should prove necessary.

Two months later, she voted for this:

That the Parliament believes that the authority of the United Nations is crucial to resolving conflicts in the Middle East, that Saddam Hussein is a danger to the international community, the region and his own people and that Saddam Hussein should co-operate fully with the implementation of UN resolution 1441 and notes the objective of Her Majesty's Government to secure a further resolution in the UN Security Council before any military intervention, registers its concern that the report published by the International Development Committee of the House of Commons concludes that insufficient emphasis has been placed on the humanitarian implications of military action in Iraq and urges Her Majesty's Government, in co-operation with the United Nations, aid agencies and other governments, to address this as a matter of priority.

At no point did she ever vote in favour of a second resolution. She merely voted to note that there were attempts to get one. So, she's lied. Again.

Margaret Curran's campaign is so far based on two things: the first appears to be crime, which she is (mercifully) against, but is a devolved issue so something she could have dealt with having been an MSP for nine years and sitting round the Cabinet table for five of them - is she saying that it's only now become a problem, or does she have a reason why she needs to get elected to the wrong parliament to do anything about it?.

But the second pillar of her campaign is this: lies. Lie after lie afer lie, whether it's about the identity who she's photographed with, her voting record at Holyrood, or even where she lives.

At this rate, if she gets to the Commons, her nose will reach all the way to the Lords.

Maths with Margaret Curran

47% (Poll rating in Glasgow East) - 61% (Vote Share in 2005) = -14%.

-14% = progress.

Of course, not withstanding that bizarre grasp of mathematics - where losing more than a quarter of your party's support equals forward movement - Margaret Curran is in between a rock and a hard place on economic policy.

Now, her first tough choice is, does she endorse or attack Government policy? If she endorses it, she risks looking out of touch with voters, who are having a tough time of it. If she attacks it, she's criticising her own party.

The "I'm going to meet with the Chancellor" is an implicit attack - it suggests that there's something to meet about: a problem that needs to be solved. But then there's another problem: what if she's actually elected, and either no or too few improvements are put forward? How does she vote?

If she votes with the Government, after claiming she'll make representations, she'll look like just another weak, ineffectual party hack. If she votes against, she'll be effectively cut off from her own party, and there should be questions as to why she was a Labour candidate in the first place, let alone a Labour MSP and a Minister in a Labour-led Executive.

Politically, it's a tough call. But it's one she'll have to make.

So, Margaret, what's it to be?

The Tories are Coming, awooooogah!

Flicking through the early edition of today's Record (soft, strong and thoroughly absorbent - buy yours today!), I discovered the headline on the Leader column:

Hdhdhddd dhdhdhdhd

Now, this could be a template, or it could be someone falling asleep at their keyboard. But I think it's something more sinister. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the sound of key Labour backers' cybernetic implants being activated at HQ, turning anyone with a valid Labour membership card into members of the Labour Drone Army. I say this as some of the lines being uttered carry an air of programmability on the part of the speakers, as anyone thinking about them for a minute would realise the flaws in them.

So Margaret Curran says:

I'm in politics to stand up for the East End of Glasgow.

Well, she's been Baillieston MSP since 1999, and been an Executive Minister for a fair part of the time she's been at Holyrood. But with such an abysmal life expectancy in the area, and so many people without qualifications, she hasn't really been standing up for them all that well. And her actions as a Minister don't seem to have benfitted Glasgow East all that much. Or at all, for that matter. And the only reason she's standing up for them is because Gordon Brown begged her to stand, on the grounds that three other people weren't available. Oh, and wasn't she in the running for the Govan constituency in the run-up to the 1997 election? Is Govan in the East End? No. So Curran has provided us with more bullshit which can be countered just by looking at the figures showing the difficulties people in Glasgow East face. And the fact that if she'd had her way, she'd be saying "All I want is to stand up for Govan" now.

Then this from the Record:

In a By-Election that is crucial to Gordon Brown's future as Prime Minister, let's never forget that the alternative is David Cameron and the Tories.

Firstly, no one can deny that Tory policies did shaft Glasgow in the 1980s, but Labour have not managed to repair the damage and make things better. Can they really get any worse under a Tory Government?

Secondly, this By-Election won't put the Tories in power. It might end Brown's premiership but his replacement will be another Labour man. Trying to beat Glasgow with the Tory stick is trying to take the voters for fools.

Thirdly, Labour preach about how horrendous the Tories are, but when the likely situation arises where the UK ends up with a Tory Government based on the fact that England has voted Tory even though Scotland has voted agianst them by four to one, Labour's dogmatic obsession with the Union means that they're actually happy to see Scotland stuck with a Tory government it doesn't want than seeing more progressive forces taking an independent Scotland forward.

So when the next Tory Government comes along, expect Labour to be telling you why it's OK to be ruled by them - despite their policies being apparently so abhorrent at election time - rather than have an independent Scottish government doing the things that Labour claim to want to see happen.

But for now, Labour will play the "aren't the Tories nasty?" card, and to do so at such an early stage smacks of panic.

Miaow

Having found herself in a tight rhetorical spot, from which backs out gracefully, Kez makes a good point:

It's the kind of playground bully boy tactics that you can expect from by-elections -and the kind I'd usually try to rise above - but this campaign is tribal and the beat of the drums brings out the worst in us all.

Now, I made a point that given the apparent "two-horse race" nature of the campaign, combined with the venom exchanged between Labour and the SNP exchanged over more than seven decades and compressed into three weeks, as well as the high stakes for both parties, egg-throwing is inevitable. And so it has proven. Between Solidarity and the SSP anyway.

From the Daily Record:

"A bizarre fight has broken out between rival socialist candidates in the Glasgow East by-election. Solidarity claimed their candidate Tricia McLeish was 'disciplined' by SSP hopeful and former MSP Frances Curran when they were at school together.

"A Solidarity source said: 'Tricia went to the same school as the SSP candidate. Tricia was younger and was a rebellious mod who was often disciplined by the blazer-clad prefect Frances Curran. Frances clearly showed early signs of collusion with authority. However, maybe the class rebel will win the final victory.'

Curran said: 'I'm not even going to dignify that with a comment.'

Time, it seems, heals no wounds, and perhaps Ms McLeish's defection to Tommy Sheridan's new endeavour has less to do with personal loyalty to the Tanned One and more to do with a grudge against Prefect Frances.

On U-turns and Bloc Votes

It seems that Margaret Curran is a cert for the Labour selection in Glasgow East, and it also seems that she'll be quite happy to serve a dual mandate if she wins. Of course, Labour have often criticised Alex Salmond for this (forgetting that George Foulkes already does it, of course) but rather than be accused of double standards, Labour have gone down a slightly Stalinist path.

As Richard Thomson has noted, articles slating the First Minister for serving in two parliaments have vanished. Except they haven't, as they're still kicking around on Google Cache. This is what happened to Gavin Yates's blog, if you remember. If things that you've put on your website now put you in an uncomfortable position, the Labour solution is just to delete the page and hope everything will be fine. Except it won't, as 1) people will remember what you've written, and 2) it's still out there somewhere. So Labour have demonstrated that they don't actualy get the Internet. They've also demonstrated that they wish to pretend that they never said something and hope they get away with it, displaying a level of contempt for the voters. Well, I hate to break it to them but if treating the voters like braindead idiots actually worked, Labour would still be in charge in Scotland.

And I was tickled by Clairwil's point:

I must say I'm at a loss as to why anyone is concerned about how she'll handle being an MP and an MSP at the same time. Doing bugger all for her constituents in two jobs can't be any harder than doing it in one.

However, that's not the most disturbing U-turn in Labour. One of the few things that Jack McConnell did was try to tackle sectarianism. But as Alwyn ap Huw notes, news of this hasn't spread to Wales Labour, or at least not to Paul Flynn, MP for Newport West, who is trying to exploit religious divisions in the community:

"Religion may be a factor with a Baptist SNP candidate and a Labour one with an Irish name."

And of course, there's a wider assumption in that sentence: he's assuming that Catholics, or at least anyone of Irish Catholic descent, will dutifully troop out en masse to vote Labour. That's actually more bigoted towards the Catholic community of Glasgow than anyone else: it suggests that Labour own them, that they can do anything, say anything, and the Catholics are theirs for life. They are forgetting that Catholics are in fact individuals with free will, able to make up their own minds and judge for themselves who's in a better position to represent them. Personally, I would suggest that if Flynn is an example of a Labour Party will to treat Catholics like sheeple, then maybe, just maybe, Labour is not the best party to speak on their behalf.

Labour, though, have a habit of this. Maybe it's a holdover from the old Trade Union bloc vote, that has turned into an assumption of how things work in wider society, but Labour seems to target particular groups (I'm thinking of my own group, the LGBT Community) and just assume that we'll march to the polling place and put our X in the Labour box without thinking. And as people like Terry Kelly prove, they view any member of the community who wants to think for themselves as an ungrateful, treacherous bastard. Well, the fact is that we don't live in a bubble where the only concern facing us is whether or not we can get married. Yes, any move towards equality is to be welcomed, and yes, things have got better since 1997. But we're still a part of the wider world.

So in my case, if I were still at school, I could get more advice and information about sexual health. But my school building would be owned by the bank and if I wanted to study in England, I'd have to pay through the nose and get into about £21,000 of debt to do so.

If I wanted to, I could serve in the military. But then I could get sent to the mess the USA and UK created in Iraq.

I could get a civil partnership with a hypothetical boyfriend. But we still wouldn't be able to set up a home together as house prices have spent the last few years overheating, putting a house beyond our hypothetical means, and now that prices are starting to come down, the much-vaunted insulation we appeared to have against global financial strife appears to have failed and the chances of our getting a mortgage would be remote.

Basically, the idea that different groups in society - for example women, Catholics, the Asian community, the LGBT community, the working class - are both completely unified and at the same time completely separate from the rest of the people is one that permeates throughtout Labour, as Paul Flynn has demonstrated in one throwaway sentence. They are very, very wrong, and sooner or later, they're going to learn it the hard way.

A Hand-y Alternative

In 1999, a crack Labour activist was sent to the Scottish Parliament to represent Glasgow Baillieston. This woman is attempting to escape from the Scottish Labour leadership battle to the Glasgow East candidate selection process. Today, not wanted by the electorate, her party survives as a lame-duck government. If you need a candidate, if no one else will stand, maybe you can hire... Margaret Curran.

Seems she has waltzed to the top of the Labour shortlist, killing off her Leadership bid and confirming Doug Maughan and Irene Graham's status as paper candidates.

Assuming she is the Labour candidate, what if she wins? Now, we know that Labour don't like Alex Salmond sitting in two parliaments - though they complain whichever one he goes to so we can only conclude that they don't want him sitting in any of them - but that George Foulkes can go to the unelected House of Lords and nothing gets said. Now, it's been argued in the past that the two situations are different - and I agree, as Alex Salmond has an elected mandate whereas Foulkes does not, so has no excuse to be heading down to London when that involves neglecting his elected mandate - but if Curran stands and wins, her situation and Alex Salmond's will be completely analogous. So given Labour's criticism, I'm sure we can expect a By-Election in Glasgow Baillieston to take place in August, as to do anything else would be an act of hypocrisy on the part of Labour. And they wouldn't do anything hypocritical, would they? Surely not!

Of course, that argument is predicated on her winning, which given that Labour have lost a whole weekend of campaigning, is far from set in stone. And there's another factor. If she wins, we'll have two Currans on the ballot paper. All it takes is for enough people not to be paying attention, and we have a surprisingly high vote for the SSP Candidate - former West of Scotland MSP Frances Curran, who if I remember rightly wanted to stand down from Holyrood, so her candidacy must be about 1) reminding people that her party still exists and 2) showing off the fact that she's now its joint leader - and John Mason elected to represent Glasgow East.

Labour's no-choice candidate in Glasgow East

Don't you just love it? Well, if you're a Labour supporter, you won't. Before the selection meeting, all sorts of rumours abounded about who was in the running to be SNP Candidate in Glasgow East. These rumours - Elaine C. Smith, Lachie McNeill, Duncan Hamilton - were all presented as established truth: the subject would absolutely be the SNP candidate. They weren't established truth; they weren't any form of truth: just idle speculation or wishful thinking, turning into a rumour, turning into what was absolutely going to happen. Thing is, none of the "candidates" were even on the short leet. They weren't anyone's choice. Well, a couple have people might have really wanted them to be the candidate, but either their name didn't go forward, or the people who had an influence over the short leet thought that the alternatives were better.

Of course, that didn't stop Labour crowing about John Mason being the "fourth-choice" candidate. The fact that no-one was annointed as presumptive candidate for the By-Election, and he was the one selected at the first time of asking, making him the first-choice candidate in reality, doesn't seem to matter.

And, incidentally, it didn't stop Labour from saying that sitting in the Lord Provost's Chair to stage a protest is an equivalent or worse thing than actually breaking the law on donations to your campaign, being caught doing so, then only bothering to ask whether or not you should have put the donations on your Register of Interests after you should have done it. Apparently, in Labour's world, being banned from the Council Chamber for nine months for intentionally sitting in the wrong chair (when SSP MSPs only got a one month from Holyrood for bringing FMQs to a halt) shows that Councillor Mason and the entire SNP are plain evil while being banned from Holyrood for one day after taking illegal donations and not following proper, open, Parliamentary procedure to declare even the legit ones shows that Wendy Alexander is the victim of a cruel witch-hunt and that she and Scottish Labour are as pure as the driven snow. Which is why I'm re-naming Labour's world Planet Bullshit.

So my delight at most forms of irony kicked in last night, when the man who was certain to be candidate, who was being publicised as the candidate in the press, George Ryan, pulled out of the selection contest for family reasons. Turns out his partner wasn't overly thrilled with him standing, and there are rumours of a very large, ugly skeleton hanging around in a closet somewhere. Not sure what entirely the skeleton is, or even if it actualy exists, but the chatter has started.

Nevertheless, with the man they wanted to stand now out of the race, the whole process has been deferred until Monday night, by which point they'll have less than 48 hours to find someone. Labour opted not to choose at that point from the two remaining candidates: Irene Graham and Doug Maughan.

This puts Labour in a no-win situation: if they go for one of those two, it'll be seen as picking one of them only because they have to, because there's no time to find anyone else. It'll be suggested that George Ryan was going to gub them so heavily - and they knew it - that they must only have been paper candidates, there to present the illusion of a contest, willing to defer the process rather than insist that it continue and one of them be selected. I know that this will be suggested because I'm suggesting it now.

And if it's someone else - even Steven Purcell - they too will be seen as an emergency candidate, filling the void left by George Ryan. They'll be seen as either someone so unenthusiastic about standing that they didn't even bother to put their name forward the first time, or so untalented that they didn't even make the first shortlist. Again, I know that this will be suggested because I'm suggesting it now.

Meanwhile, it's alleged that Gordon Brown is ordering every Scottish Labour MP and MSP to Glasgow East to campaign. To campaign for nobody.

Glasgow East looks set to be without an MP

The rumour mill is now at maximum: David Marshall is said to be standing down for health reasons. The 67-year-old was first elected to the House of Commons back in 1979, as the MP for Glasgow Shettleston. Before that, Marshall was a Glasgow City Councillor, and Strathclyde Regional Councillor.

Glasgow Shettleston, which overlaps with his current seat, has been held by Labour (or the ILP) since 1922 (for the first four years of its life, it was Tory). Glasgow Baillieston has been Labour since it was established in 1997.

I'm not, at this stage, going to make any comments about the prospects in this seat: I'll wait until there is a formal vacancy. But if the story is correct, then Marshall has done the right thing - his health is more important and it takes guts to say "I'm no longer able to do this job, it's time to go", especially when the decision will horrify Gordon Brown, who will now face another By-Election, after losing Crewe, after coming fifth in Henley - behind the Greens and the BNP - and while chickening out of the Haltemprice & Howden poll.

And whatever the outcome, there's been no major Scottish electoral test since May 2007. Marshall's health will have a massive impact on the health of the Government.