Hamilton by-election, 1967
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
The Hamilton by-election in Hamilton, Lanarkshire, Scotland, was held on 2 November 1967. It saw a surprise victory for the Scottish National Party candidate Winnie Ewing. The SNP took 46% of the vote in a constituency which they had not even contested in the 1966 general election, gaining the seat from Labour with a swing of nearly 38%. Ewing did not retain the seat at the following general election, but the SNP have been continuously represented in the House of Commons ever since.
A by-election was called after the former Labour MP, Tom Fraser, resigned in order to take up the position as head of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board. The constituency had been a safe seat for Labour, who had taken over two-thirds of the vote there in every election from 1945 to 1966, when only the Conservatives had stood against them.
In that time, the SNP had been a peripheral movement in Scottish politics. They had taken only 5% of the vote across Scotland in 1966, having stood candidates in 23 out of 71 seats. In the 1950s they had never stood more than 5 candidates or taken more than 1% of the Scottish vote in general elections. However, Hamilton was not the first Westminster seat to be won by the SNP; the party had won a short-lived victory in the 1945 Motherwell by-election. In the years before Ewing's win, there had been other breakthroughs by nationalist parties in Britain - including Gwynfor Evans' similarly groundbreaking victory for Plaid Cymru at the Carmarthen by-election, 1966, a big advance for the SNP at the Pollok by-election, and SNP gains in local elections, including becoming the largest party in local government in Stirling.
...
Wikipedia