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YESTERDAY, as the birds flew home across a chilly Scottish sunset, Lindsay Roy, the Labour candidate in the Glenrothes by-election, found himself in an unyielding council estate where all the streets are named after trees and bushes. From almost every branch, the voters were singing a Labour tune.
"I'm right with you, pal," they'd say. Or, "Good luck, mind!" Or, "I'm an old miner and I've always been Labour." Or, "Yes, I'll take a poster - it's a pleasure, keeps the other crowd away!"
For sure, this place, Methilhill, is perhaps Labour's best area in the whole constituency - Mr Roy's minders didn't bring us here for nothing. And for sure, this is Central Fife, perhaps Britain's last outpost of old-style class politics. It's a faintly Forties kind of place, with its schoolchildren in blazers with piping on the lapels and the smell of coal fires at dusk. The entire constituency was essentially built by the state, with almost everything in it either a new town or a council housing scheme. There is no middle class to speak of. Just down the road, they still elect two communist councillors (sitting as independent communists now their party has sadly collapsed).
But until very recently, it looked like that other Soviet-style Fife politician, Gordon Brown, would fall apart here, too. The Scottish National Party has been making long-term inroads to Glenrothes. Last year, on a handsome swing, it took the Edinburgh parliament seat that covers most of the area. And that was before the 10p tax row and the election that never was: before Gordon Brown's troubles even started.
Three months ago, the SNP won a stunning by-election in Glasgow East. Next week, ran the script, its near-certain Glenrothes victory overturning a Labour majority of more than 10,000 would deal the death-blow to Mr Brown's leadership, and further damage Labour's chances of keeping power.
Today, things look rather different. Thanks to the financial crisis, Mr Brown's leadership is no longer immediately threatened. And though Labour is still very far from certain to win in Glenrothes, it is back in the game. Its recovery is exemplified by the story of an acquaintance of mine from Methilhill, a former regimental sergeant-major in the Black Watch called Rob Scott.
Two years ago, for Channel 4's Dispatches, I went to Methilhill to film Mr Scott and his son, also a soldier, with a long record of active service in New Labour's stupidest wars. If you boiled the essence of Britain down into two people, you would get something like them.
Rob had actually been a Labour councillor but was in the process of leaving the party altogether in protest at the merger of his beloved Black Watch and the general horror of its foreign policy. He struck me at the time as a perfect example of how Labour was comprehensively alienating the kind of solid, bedrock supporters without whom no party can survive. Yesterday, however, I walked by Rob Scott's house and there were three Lindsay Roy posters up. "I stayed in, they never accepted my resignation," he confessed. "I've come round to the party again. I think Lindsay Roy is the best candidate we've had in Fife for 40 years."
A YouGov poll at the weekend confirms Labour's revival in Scotland. In the past month, it has put on six points to 38 per cent, with the SNP on 29. And though the Nationalists won the Scottish parliament seat, they often do worse in Westminster elections.
In Glenrothes, Labour is starting to draw level in the bookmakers' odds. In about 30 conversations with voters yesterday, I found three people who hadn't voted Labour at the last election intending to do so now. A series of ministers, including Brown himself, have visited, a sign of their growing hope about the result.
Is that local hope down to Gordon's superhero act during the financial crisis? Is it due to the fact that, as he was not slow to say, it would have been harder for an independent Scotland to bail out its banks? Only partly. Not a word about Brown, or the crisis, appears on Labour's campaign literature. What the party really has here is what any by-election candidate most desires the ability to bash the government.
But Labour is the government, you may object. Not in Scotland, it's not. The SNP controls both the Edinburgh executive and the local council. Indeed, its candidate, Peter Grant, is the council leader. A party born in the easy choices of opposition now has a record to defend, and not a very popular one. Labour leaflets have headlines such as "SNP council sends in debt squad after disabled woman" and "SNP to free 4000 jailbirds".
At most hustings so far, Mr Grant has been angrily heckled by a group called the Campaign Against Charges, furious at his council's decision to dramatically increase home-care charges for some residents and bill elderly people £1 a week for a "community alarm", a radio-controlled device to summon help in an emergency. It's being used by Labour as a "wedge issue" to stand for all manner of SNP tyranny. Mr Grant is starting to look a little nervous.
But the truth, as in many by-elections, is that no one really knows what's happening. Everyone thought Labour would win Glasgow East until tea-time on polling day. Gauging the mood is even harder here, for Glenrothes, a typical Sixties new town, lacks anything so reactionary as a high street.
Instead there are about 200 roundabouts (the local taxi drivers moan about "Glenrothes tyre syndrome", excessive wear on the inside edge from going round them all) along with a massive, privatised indoor mall, the Kingdom Centre, from which all politicians were until this week banned.
It's said that if you wait long enough at Piccadilly Circus, you'll meet everyone you've ever known. In Glenrothes, so limited are the options for finding voters that if you sit in the Kingdom Centre's Cafe Al Fresco (which is, naturally, indoors) for, say, a quarter of an hour, you'll meet more politicians than you could ever want to know.
There, yesterday, was Sarah Brown, Gordon's wife, on the latest of her heavily-publicised "private" visits. There was Nicola Sturgeon, SNP deputy leader, who entered within minutes of the Kingdom Centre ban being lifted and stayed for the next five hours. There was Liam Fox, the Tory defence spokesman. William Hague, Charles Kennedy, David Cameron they've all been down. "You know the politicians because they're the only ones wearing their Remembrance Day poppies two weeks early," I heard one matron tell her companion.
In the Kingdom Centre, the harsh reality that may soon erase memories of Gordon's heroics is already becoming visible. The centre's a busy place, and not run-down but there are no fewer than 18 vacant shops, and the anchor tenant, the old Co-op department store, is now a tacky temporary bazaar called the Nickel'*'Dime. Business at the mall's sweet stall, says its owner, is down 60 per cent in a year. The rush hour in Glenrothes yesterday lasted 15 minutes. The bus station was empty of people by 6.10pm.
And the SNP is very far from finished. Just like Labour's, its block vote is also holding up. Last year, at the Scottish parliament election, I went round Glenrothes' Pitteuchar estate with the SNP candidate, Tricia Marwick, to witness droves of voters defecting from Labour.
Yesterday, on my own, I called on those same people. To a man and a woman, they were staying with the Nats.
The business community, too, seems to have remained loyal. At John Cook's magnificently retro café in Methilhill, its wooden counters stocked with sweets not seen down south for years (remember Parma Violets?), the old Forties Fife lives on in the furnishings. But politically, Mr Cook wants to move forward. "This whole area is based on subsidies but we need real employment here," he says. "We need a change."
Labour may have come back since the credit crisis but has it come back enough? The SNP doesn't need as big a swing here as it did in Glasgow East. The swing implied in the latest YouGov puts it on the cusp of victory or defeat.
"There's a hair in it. It could go either way," says Gail Milne, editor of the Glenrothes Gazette. "But something has changed since the weekend. The SNP had momentum at the start, and I'm not sure it still does."
That word, momentum, is the key to it all. Objectively, Labour is still in a terrible mess. As Liam Fox puts it: "This is one of their safest seats. They should be home and dry. The fact that we're talking about just holding it by a hair's breadth shows the trouble they're in."
But the game of politics is not about how you perform, it's about how you perform against expectations. And if Brown does win Glenrothes, he will be able to claim that the political momentum is back with him. No matter that a victory may well be for local reasons. Never mind that it's not a win against his main UK opponent (the Tories are nowhere in this seat).
Instead of ending Mr Brown's leadership, Glenrothes now poses a different, equally interesting test for the Prime Minister. If he wins, it shows his recovery is real. If he loses, it shows his recovery has been exaggerated by the media.
Reader views (2)
Our PM deserves a break. Let's hope you troune the Nationalists, Gordon
- Keith Price, Luton, England, 30/10/2008 12:49
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Oh dear! Andy has fallen for the Labour spin (and the claptrap spouted by the new editor of the local rag who's not a Fifer and knows nothing re local issues).
At hustings events Lindsay Roy has consistently shown himself to be a hopelessly inadequate candidate, either incompetently briefed or incapable of reading and assimilating the contents of one. Locals are laughing their socks off about the cack-handed handling of Sarah Brown's visits and the Keystone Cop-style television coverage of her not-allowed-to-speak Hello!-magazine sort of patronising appearances(she and Lindsay Roy can compete over which of them looks the more uncomfortable).
Labour has no troops on the ground other than truanting MSPs. Andrew Gilligan really shouldn't be so gullible.
- Silver Shred, Buckhaven Fife, 29/10/2008 17:41
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