SNP finish second in Fort William & Ardnamurchan by-election

The fourth and final by-election result for this week was released a few hours ago, and it's impossible to deny that it's a very good one for the Liberal Democrats.  By the same token, it can't be denied that the Lib Dems have been polling fairly poorly in many other recent by-elections, which speaks to the factor that is both their greatest strength and their most serious weakness - ie. they're becoming ever more ghettoised in specific geographical pockets, which pays handsome dividends in first-past-the-post elections and even in STV by-elections, but which will make it very hard for them to get back to the type of broad national strength they had in the days of Jim Wallace, before they made hardline British Nationalism such a key part of their identity and branding.

Fort William & Ardnamurchan by-election result on first preference votes (21st November 2024):

Liberal Democrats 58.9% (+21.4)
SNP 25.5% (-8.0)
Greens 6.0% (-3.6)
Labour 4.5% (n/a)
Conservatives 4.4% (-5.7)
Scottish Libertarian Party 0.6% (n/a)

It's impossible to calculate a swing from SNP to Labour in this ward, because Labour didn't put up a candidate last time around.  So the average swing to Labour in this week's round of by-elections remains at a modest 3.9%, which if extrapolated to the national picture would leave them around 4.5 percentage points behind the SNP, very much in line with recent opinion polls.

Although the eight-point drop in the SNP's vote is obviously not great, it's actually a smaller decrease than they suffered in any of the three Glasgow by-elections yesterday.  The Tories have had another appalling result, although in fairness the reason may be different in this case.  In the Glasgow results they were probably losing votes to Reform, but in Fort William there was no Reform candidate, so the Tories may have suffered from a more conventional anti-SNP squeeze as unionist voters coalesced behind the Lib Dem candidate.