A Tory victory in Aberdeen's by-election would be a humbling for Swinney - and offer hope to the Granite City

Published: 19:06, 16 June 2026 | Updated: 19:17, 16 June 2026 Anas Sarwar must be wondering what he has to do to kick off a rebellion. The Scottish Labour boss last month led his party to its worst-ever Holyrood election result, and polls confirm his deep unpopularity with voters but, still, the men in grey suits refuse to act. There are no secret plots to topple him, nor have there been attempts by colleagues to persuade him to resign. Instead, Mr Sarwar is forced to endure the support of colleagues who, right now, simply haven’t the energy to get rid of him. What a stark contrast with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who has spent the past few weeks watching his own political assassination play out in excruciating slow motion. The decision by Labour MP Josh Simons to quit his Makerfield seat opened the door for a return to Westminster by Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, who is, by a nose, favourite to retain the constituency for his party in a by-election to be held tomorrow. Should he win, Mr Burnham will act promptly to challenge Sir Keir, and the chances of the PM surviving in post are vanishingly small. Anas Sarwar faces no such jeopardy. Scottish Labour has already been written off in two by-elections sparked after Nationalist MPs won seats at Holyrood last month. Douglas Lumsden is the Tory candidate in this week's Aberdeen South by-election The SNP is expected, comfortably, to retain Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, which was previously held by Stephen Gethins, while the fight for Aberdeen South, given up last month by Stephen Flynn, is a two-horse race between the SNP and the Scottish Conservatives. After the Tories dropped from second to fifth place at Holyrood last month, leader Russell Findlay had even less to smile about than Anas Sarwar. Labour may have tied with Reform behind the Nationalists but at least they beat the Scottish Greens. The Aberdeen South by-election represents a glimmer of light for Mr Findlay who, despite last month’s election result and to his great credit, has lost none of his pugnacity when challenging the First Minister at Holyrood. The issues affecting Aberdeen and the wider North-East are well rehearsed. After decades of plenty during the North Sea oil boom, the Granite City is in decline. The rush to move away from fossil fuels has decimated an oil and gas industry that once made Aberdeen one of the most affluent cities in the UK. The knock-on effects of the cull of offshore jobs have included a sharp decline in house prices and the shuttering of a number of local businesses. Of course, there is broad political and scientific consensus on the need to move away from traditional energy sources but, make no mistake, the way in which the SNP has addressed this issue has been damagingly ideological. MSP Stephen Flynn with the SNP's candidate for Aberdeen South, Richard Thomson  In 2014, as campaigning in the independence referendum was ramping up, the late Alex Salmond promised an independent nation would set sail on a sea of oil; unimaginable riches would flow from North Sea pipelines directly into the bank accounts of proud Scots. But within less than a year, under the First Ministership of Mr Salmond’s successor Nicola Sturgeon, North Sea oil had become Scotland’s shame. Desperate to burnish her credentials as a progressive stateswoman, Ms Sturgeon rushed headlong towards switching off supplies. Speaking during the United Nations Climate Change Conference – COP 26 – in Glasgow in 2021, Ms Sturgeon boasted that Scotland would lead by example in making the transition to a ‘Net Zero future’. The then First Minister, now living in self-imposed exile in London, said: ‘For countries like Scotland – with a significant and long-established oil and gas industry – this is undoubtedly one of the most difficult issues we face as we tackle the climate emergency. ‘Tens of thousands of jobs are dependent, currently, on oil and gas production. Those jobs and the people in them matter.’ But they did not matter enough to Ms Sturgeon who went on to say that, despite the temptation ‘to tell ourselves that for both economic and energy reasons, we must keep exploring for and extracting oil and gas until the last possible moment’, that would be ‘fundamentally wrong’. Sure, there might be a terrible cost to the people whose livelihoods depended upon the oil and gas industry, but Nicola Sturgeon had TV cameras in front of which to perform. When Stephen Flynn won the Aberdeen Deeside and North Kincardine Holyrood constituency for the SNP last month – triggering tomorrow’s Westminster by-election in Aberdeen South – he sounded like a time traveller from the SNP’s past. The oil and gas industry, he said, would have no bigger champion in the Scottish parliament. I suspect Mr Flynn, a pragmatist with an increasingly rare interest among SNP politicians in trying to understand the priorities of his constituents, was sincere when he spoke but his position makes him an outlier in his party. The SNP’s position on oil and gas is typically incoherent. While the party’s Aberdeen South candidate Richard Thomson attempts to paint himself as a protector of traditional energy jobs – it makes no sense, he said recently, to import oil and gas from abroad when it could be extracted from the North Sea at a lower environmental cost – the SNP government remains weak and unfocused on the issue. John Swinney may have dropped the ‘presumption against new drilling’ position adopted by Ms Sturgeon, preferring to support further extractions on a ‘case by case’ basis, but this is too little, too late. The damage caused by the SNP’s PR-driven rush to become champions of Net Zero (and, who knows, maybe get Nicola Sturgeon some swanky gig with the UN, along the way) has been done, and the reconstruction of Aberdeen’s economy will take more than the First Minister’s ‘mibbes aye, mibbes naw’ approach. The Conservative candidate in Aberdeen South Douglas Lumsden – currently an MSP for the North East region – should be the runaway favourite for victory tomorrow. Not only has the SNP betrayed oil and gas workers who, for years, it exploited during campaigning, the party is still bogged down in scandal over former chief executive Peter Murrell’s embezzlement of more than £400,000 from party accounts. The First Minister continues angrily, and arrogantly, to reject calls for a necessary inquiry into how Murrell was able to steal from Scotland’s party of government for more than a decade. Mr Swinney also insists there are no more questions to answer about the £600,000-plus which the SNP spent despite promising donors it would be held in a ring-fenced account. The feeling that the First Minister is a man desperately in need of a lesson grows stronger each day. Defeat for the Nationalists in Aberdeen South tomorrow would come as a necessary humbling for John Swinney but, more importantly than that, it might give some hope to a city dependent on an oil and gas industry abandoned and left to die by Scotland’s SNP government. The comments below have not been moderated. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. 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