Glasgow East

I know - it's a week late. But I picked up a snippet the other day that tells you why Labour lost in Glasgow East...

Apparently voter contact had been absolutely zero for years. David Marshall had done virtually nothing for years (apart from perhaps collecting money from us for his carefully chosen constituency staff). He supposedly didn't even venture into the constituency much and held few if any surgeries. When they started the by-election campaign they were starting voter identification from scratch with no reliable previous data at all.

Utter bonkers. They absolutely deserve to have lost with the level of contempt towards the constituents that smug inactivity over the years demonstrates.

On the other hand, it puts the SNP victory in some context - were they any better than, say, the IWCA in Oxford whose only reason for existing as a force on the council was Labour's contemptuous attitude in their "safest" wards.

UPDATE: And I see from Dan Paskins that there is a motion in to conference saying much the same .

They've been talking about poverty in Glasgow for a long time. They've been into land reform as well. Not just the work of Mary Barbour and the Glasgow Women's Housing Association and rent strikes during the first war, but at the turn of the twentieth century Glasgow was also the de facto HQ in Britain of the Single Tax movement, those followers of Henry George's idea of taxing land values. The poverty in the city was legendary, and it was it seems often used as an example by either side in the land tax debates almost exactly a century ago.

Here's a response from Winston Churchill in the House of Commons to the leader of the opposition, Arthur Balfour's attempts to rubbish the idea:

One hundred years ago, the Liberal Party could have begun to eradicate Glasgow's poverty once and for all. How sad that a hundred years later Glasgow East continues to shine mostly as an example of those same problems we could have solved all those years ago. What benefit has the political game been to them in all those years? What good the franchise? What good socialism? Or the vested interests of the Tories' friends? BBC News tonight suggested that this might be the most important by-election in thirty years. Maybe for the first time in a century someone could once again explain how they are going to make life really better for the constituency's long suffering inhabitants. And then make it happen.