Could Glasgow North East offer Brown hope?

Former Speaker Martin, now Lord Martin of Springburn, had a 10,000 majority over the Scottish National Party in 2005 in a seat that he had held since 1979.

Mr Brown himself, conscious that the loss of Glasgow North East would be an utter disaster for both him and his party, campaigned in the constituency at the end of last week — a sure sign, say some, that Labour is increasingly confident of victory.

The by-election has been a long time in coming — Mr Martin stepped down as MP in June. Labour did not want a repeat of the short summer campaign last year in which they went down to a stunning defeat at the hands of the SNP in the neighbouring seat of Glasgow East.

This is the third by-election to take place in Scotland in the past 16 months. Labour redeemed themselves for the defeat in Glasgow East when they created their own surprise last November by comfortably holding off a Nationalist challenge in Glenrothes.

Both Glasgow East and Glenrothes attracted huge attention because they were both viewed through the prism of the threat to Mr Brown’s survival as Labour leader and Prime Minister.

But, although defeat on Thursday would cause every Labour MP in the country to look over his or her shoulder with alarm, Glasgow North East has not generated the same frenzy. The reason is that with an election so close, replacing Mr Brown as leader is no longer an option for Labour.

Once a thriving industrialised seat where they built locomotives, Glasgow North East, despite millions spent in urban regeneration, is now an inner-city monument to decay. The constituency still vies for the title of “the poorest in Britain”: unemployment is at 12 per cent; about one in three of the 60,000 voters are on benefits; it has some of the highest rates of child poverty in Scotland; one in four of the working population has a life-limiting illness; 30 per cent of the population is economically inactive; and more than half of school-leavers come out of education without a qualification.

The seat is made up of 20 or more individual communities with unenticing names such as Balornock and Haghill, but in the busy Duke Street thoroughfare to the east you can still sense just a hint of the community spirit that was once so strong.

Labour’s candidate is Willie Bain, 38, an articulate and confident lecturer in public law and a long-time ally of Mr Martin’s who emphasises that he was born and bred in the area and still has his home there — a factor that may be important come polling day.

He has made much of the decision by the SNP government in Edinburgh to cancel a £170 million rail link between the city centre and Glasgow airport, a move which he says was “a dagger to the heart of Glasgow”. Although many voters in the seat would not habitually use such a rail link, the issue has played to a Glaswegian sense of grievance — 1,300 jobs would have come to the city if the link had gone ahead.

However, Mr Bain has been on the defensive for a good part of the campaign in the face of the constant message from the SNP that voters have been electing Labour representatives for 74 years but have yet to see much change to their blighted lives.

The SNP hopeful is David Kerr, a former BBC journalist, also 38, to whom the adjective “smooth-talking” is easily applied. Mr Kerr’s campaign has been blown off course by him being his party’s third choice to fight the seat and by the doubts cast over his claim that he “started life” in Glasgow North East.

The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrat candidates have been going through the motions, both hoping for rather than expecting third place. Unlike the SNP, neither party stood in 2005 out of obedience to the Westminster custom of not opposing the Speaker. However, the Tories have paraded a string of shadow Cabinet heavyweights, including David Cameron and George Osborne, who have ventured bravely into what is forbidding territory for the party.

They have also found a decent candidate in Ruth Davidson, another former BBC journalist, for whom this by-election experience will be invaluable. Eileen Baxendale, the Liberal Democrat candidate, has been earnest but accident-prone.

As well as the Tories and the Lib Dems there are a host of independent candidates standing, but most attention among the also-rans has been focused on the British National Party, which polled 4.4 per cent in this constituency in the European Parliament election in June. Glasgow North East is the only Scottish constituency with an influx of asylum-seekers and if the party saves its deposit by achieving 5 per cent of the vote, it will regard that as an advance in Scottish terms and could blow apart Scots’ claims that the BNP is irrelevant here.

Another talking point on the campaign trail has been the relativley low profile of Alex Salmond, the SNP leader and First Minister. Mr Salmond’s campaigning skills were said to have been vital to victory in Glasgow East, but a drawback in Glenrothes where it was felt that he overshadowed the party candidate, thus helping him to lose that contest.

He has rationed his appearances in Glasgow North East, leading observers to conclude that he believes his party’s best chance is to eat into the natural Labour majority.

Mr Martin’s embarrassments over the Commons expenses system have not featured prominently in the campaign. The other parties simply don’t want to talk about expenses, although the subject is still uppermost in many voters’ minds.

The key to the outcome could be turnout and it will be a surprise if it reaches 40 per cent. Labour has run a much more professional campaign than in Glasgow East, but has to convince its core vote to come out on the day and pay no attention to the by-election being held so close to the general election.

If they succeed, Labour should be home and dry. But if enough voters decide that they can vote for Mr Kerr as a kind of probationary MP for six months or so, Labour could be in trouble and the recent raft of bad news for Mr Brown will just have got worse.