Who won Glenrothes?

The obvious answer is Labour. Or, more specifically, Labour’s candidate Lindsay Roy. And this is undeniably true... Roy not only won the seat, he managed to increase his party’s share of the vote from 51.9% at the 2005 election to 55.1%. And this wasn’t achieved on a particularly low turnout... the proportion of the electorate who made it to the polling stations was only a little down on the 2005 total. A resoundingly unambiguous win then?

Well, no. Politics is seldom that straightforward. A closer examination of the details reveals something less heartening for the Labour party. They were lucky... very, very lucky.

The win was secured on the back of a collapse in votes cast for the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. In 2005, the two parties secured 7,379 of the votes cast which represented almost twenty per cent of the total. Yesterday, those two parties won just 2,328 votes which is just six and a half per cent of the total.

The Liberal Democrat vote was decimated. It fell from 4,728 to 947 which is a quite astonishing collapse... roughly four out of five people who voted for the Liberal Democrats three years ago decided not to do so this time around.

What’s the significance of all of this? It’s hard to be absolutely certain but when people opt to switch from supporting minority parties in this fashion, it usually indicates a high level of tactical voting. Many commentators seem to think that tactical voting demonstrates the electorate's sophistication... but they vastly overestimate it. All that tactical voting really signals is a willingness to cast a vote for whichever party is most likely to prevent the least desired outcome. It is an inherently negative act. Most of the five thousand or so voters who abandoned the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats must have done so in the hope that they would prevent either Labour or the SNP from winning the election.

Unfortunately for the SNP, even though they won around eighty per cent of the votes of these dissatisfied souls, it wasn’t quite enough to give them a win.

Even though Labour won a small proportion of the votes made available by this “third-party squeeze”, it was not only enough to secure an unlikely by-election win, it ensured that the raw mathematics of an increased share of the vote would stop most commentators from realising it was a lucky escape.

Much of the analysis has suggested that the voters of Glenrothes used the by-election to offer a damning verdict on the policies of Fife Council which is run by the SNP and includes Glenrothes in its hinterland. But this doesn’t really add up. How can a party which increased its vote by over fifty per cent be said to have received a bloody nose from the electorate?

Perception is everything in politics however and Labour has been allowed to portray the Glenrothes result as a huge triumph and as a vindication for Gordon Brown who, unusually, campaigned personally in the constituency which borders his own. The Sun has devoted special attention to the idea that Brown’s wife Sarah played a special part in the success. By going along with the idea that this by-election win represents a change in fortune for Labour, the media have overlooked the quirkiness of the result.

But momentum is momentum and the broad interpretation of Glenrothes as a Labour triumph makes it just that... and it simply doesn’t matter that it’s based on a false premise.