John Swinney said he got the SNP “back in contention” for Thursday’s Hamilton, Larkhall, and Stonehouse by-election, but the progress was “not nearly enough”.
The First Minister’s party narrowly missed out on holding the Holyrood seat after confidently declaring the contest to be a two-horse race between the SNP and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in the run-up.
Scottish Labour stunned the SNP to win the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election by just 602 votes early Friday morning.
When the votes were counted, Russell polled 8,559, with the SNP’s Katy Loudon coming second on 7,957, ahead of Reform’s Ross Lambie, who secured 7,088 votes.
Speaking about his defeat on Friday morning, Swinney insisted that the SNP had “made progress” in the area compared to the UK general election last July, but admitted it was not “nearly enough”.
“We narrowly missed out on election, but if you go back 12 months I don’t think many people would have said the SNP would be in contention to win a by-election in Hamilton,” the First Minister said.
“So I‘ve got us back into contention, I’ve got us into a position where we can contend for leadership in Scotland. We’ve made some progress, but not enough. We’ll need to build on that for the period ahead.”
Swinney emphasised that SNP candidate Katy Loudon was only 600 votes away from winning the seat on Thursday. He compared that to the regions 9,000 vote defeat at the UK general election last year.
Swinney also doubled down on calling the election a “two-horse race” between the SNP and Reform.
He said he “called it the way he saw it”, and he said he had seen the Labour vote collapsing in Hamilton compared to the general election last summer while the Reform UK vote surged.
“In that context, I thought the SNP was best placed to see off Reform because of the scale of collapse in the Labour vote,” Swinney said.
The First Minister said the Labour vote is down 20% from where it was last summer.
“I don’t want Farage’s poisonous politics in Scotland,” Swinney said.
“So we positioned ourselves to stop Farage, recognising the Labour vote was collapsing, which it has.”
The First Minister reaffirmed his commitment to leading the SNP party through the Scottish Parliament elections next May, and said there was more work to do to rebuild trust and engagement with the people of Scotland.
He cited his government’s cost of living focus and his plans to scrap peak rail fares in September.
Swinney also said the SNP must take forward progress on NHS improvements.
“I’ve got to improve wait lists. I’ve got to make sure I improve access to GP services. These lie at the heart of the Government’s programme,” Swinney said.
“What people can be assured of is that we will take forward the building of public services, and the building of an agenda to tackle the cost of living crisis, and we want to make sure we address the real concerns of the people of Scotland.”
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