Defeat at Glenrothes is all my fault, admits Salmond
first minister says he did not have his finger on constituency’s pulse
Published:
First Minister Alex Salmond yesterday took personal responsibility for the SNP’s shock defeat in the Glenrothes by-election, saying: “It is my fault.”
The SNP and other opposition parties are now privately bracing for an early general election, fearing the prime minister will cash-in on the “Brown bounce” which helped steer Labour to a comfortable victory in the early hours of yesterday.
Political pundits had predicted a win for the Nationalists following the “earthquake” which saw them overturn a massive Labour majority to snatch Glasgow East just four months ago.
And although Mr Salmond accused Labour of running a “negative, scaremongering” campaign in Glenrothes, he said he said he had got it wrong by not making sure the SNP had an effective response to attacks on the local council’s home-care policy.
Labour say they discovered on the doorsteps that people had been angered by SNP-controlled Fife Council’s decisions to increase home-care charges for the elderly from £4 a week to £11 an hour, charge £7 for home shopping, which had been free, and impose a new charge of £51 a year for emergency alarms for the elderly.
The first minister dismissed the idea that the ballot was a test between him and Gordon Brown.
At a press conference at SNP headquarters in Edinburgh, he said: “The failure is of the campaign leadership, which is me effectively, for not recognising that we should have changed our campaign to face down a scaremongering campaign.
“It is my fault for not having my finger on the political temperature in the constituency, not the candidate’s.”
Mr Salmond said that early in the three-month election campaign, the party drew up a list of what it thought would be the issues, but failed to anticipate that Labour would concentrate and be “misleading” on home-care charges.
“The home-care issue is something which applies to 30 out of 32 councils in Scotland, and virtually every Labour one, but they were successful in portraying this as something unique to Fife,” said Mr Salmond.
“This is not a tactic that will be effective in other elections in other areas. We will be back to take these seats in other contests.”
Lindsay Roy won the by-election with a majority of 6,737. The head of Gordon Brown’s old school polled 19,946 votes (55.1%) while the SNP’s Peter Grant got 13,209 (36.5%).
The Tories, third with 1,381 (3.8%), and the Lib Dems, fourth with 947 (2.6%), lost their deposits.
Mr Salmond had been supremely confident that his party would win.
And despite the bloody nose, he was upbeat yesterday, claiming the election was decided by the home-care charges issue, not the SNP’s record or Mr Brown’s handling of the economic crisis.
The Gordon MSP went on: “I wish we had been able to make this by-election a contrast between the records of the SNP government and the Labour government . . . I think we would have had a very different result. The Labour Party were successful in changing the issue of the by-election into something quite different.”
During the campaign, Mr Brown broke with tradition by visiting Glenrothes, as did his wife, Sarah.
A Glenrothes-type result in a general election would split Scottish seats 47 for Labour and 12 for the SNP, with the Liberal Democrats and the Tories facing a wipe-out, according to the Electoral Calculus prediction machine.
Readers' Comments