Are the SNP due a Dunfermline drubbing?

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly. Bill Walker is clearly no devotee of Shakespeare, and in resigning his Dunfermline seat a few days ago, he didn't heed Macbeth's advice about the charms of celerity.  But resign the villain finally has, and under the Scotland Act, we'll have a by-election in his Fife constituency within the next three months.  

So what are the chances? Who's in with a shout? And from the SNP perspective, critically, are we going to get stuffed? Let's take a look at the data.

Riding on the coattails of the national party, in 2011, Bill Walker won the seat with 37.6% of the vote, beating the Labour candidate Alex Rowley by 590 votes. Reflecting the mood in much of the rest of the country, the notional incumbent's support went through the floor, Liberal Democrat Jim Tolson polling just 5,776 votes to the winning 11,010 secured by the SNP.  So much we know, but it is also instructive to look forward and backwards from 2011. The party is still polling rather well nationally against Lamont's Labour. But, but...

In the Council elections of 2012, after the accusations against Walker first surfaced but before his trial and conviction, SNP candidates won 5,814 first preferences votes compared Labour's 9,524 in the four Dunfermline wards which the constituency completely covers. The Liberal Democrats trundled in next, with just 3,341 first preferences.  The constituency also takes in parts of The Lochs ward on Fife Council - but Labour won that too, comfortably, snaring 1,729 first preferences to the Nats' 708.  Obviously, the dynamics of the local elections are different from national elections, and different again from a by-election.  For all that, however, these can only be promising figures for the Labour Party in the area. 

Putting the 2011 result in broader context, between 1999 and before 2011, Dunfermline was bifurcated into two distinct constituencies, East and West.  The new seat takes in the the old West constituency, and part of the East, the result of which is now represented by Helen Eadie, as Cowdenbeath.  Going into the 2011 Holyrood election, the Liberal Democrat, Jim Tolson, sat for the western constituency.  As we all now know, in 2011 the SNP came from a notion third place in the seat, behind the Labour party, to take it. To add another layer of complexity to proceedings, the Liberal actually snatched the seat from Labour in 2007, who had held it since 1999. 

Now, I'm no Fifer, and don't know this territory well, but figures lead me to conclude that - at the best of times, in a favourable national election with a tolerably popular SNP government and a suitably incompetent Labour opposition - defending and retaining Dunfermline might prove a tall order for the Nationalists.  Liberal Democrat fortunes have not, and may never, fully revive in the area. The Labour Party may not have the springy vitality of an excitable Cocker spaniel, but if I was a Scottish strategist in John Smith House, Dunfermline would already be circled on the electoral map, as low-hanging fruit.  Even without the scandal of a Nationalist parliamentarian being revealed as a domestic tyrant and unlawfully handy with his fists.

Arguably, the party's poor showing in the area in 2012 is as nothing to the reception we can hope to receive in this by-election.  At that time, Bill Walker was suspected, but innocent until proven guilty. Today, the luckless and brave SNP candidate will have to contend with press hostility, and most likely, an electorate none-too-enamoured with the party which nominated such a goon for election in their constituency.  You needn't subscribe to the idea that there was any jiggery-pokery in the way the party dealt with the Walker case to see that he will hang around the neck of the Nationalist candidate like the Old Man of the Sea, however vigorously or acidly they denounce him in public.  This is one for Nationalists to take on the chin.  Anything short of a drubbing would be a relief. 

As the erstwhile Labour blogger Stuart MacLellan noted a few years back, Labour has never actually won a seat back from the SNP, having lost it. If they can't heave themselves over the finish line first in this Dunfermline by-election, a disgraced Nationalist incumbent having been forcibly pitchforked from party and office after twenty-four criminal convictions and an outrageous display of contempt for his constituents, Scottish Labour really are jiggered.

Thanks, Bill.