The Scottish Conservatives have won a Westminster by-election for the first time in more than 50 years, taking Aberdeen South from the SNP in a result that party leader Kemi Badenoch called “significant”. Tory MSP Douglas Lumsden, a former oil and gas worker, defeated SNP candidate Richard Thomson by a margin of more than 6,000 votes, with the Conservatives taking almost half of all ballots cast.
The by-election was triggered after the sitting MP, the SNP’s Stephen Flynn, resigned from the House of Commons when he was elected to Holyrood earlier this year. His colleague Stephen Gethins did the same, prompting a second by-election in Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, where the SNP’s Lara Bird held the seat with a majority of more than 5,000 over the Conservatives.
“Scottish Conservatives win first Westminster by-election in 50 years, taking Aberdeen South from SNP; SNP holds Arbroath and Broughty Ferry.”
Lumsden, who cannot sit in both parliaments because of a Holyrood ban on dual mandates, will now resign from the Scottish Parliament just six weeks after winning re-election as a North East MSP. He said his constituents had sent a message that “the destruction of the oil and gas industry must stop now”, with Aberdeen at the centre of the UK’s energy debate and home to the government’s fledgling publicly-owned energy company, GB Energy.
Badenoch praised the result as “particularly significant” because of support from people who had “never voted Conservative before”. She added: “Makerfield was about one man’s job. Aberdeen South was about thousands of jobs in oil and gas across our country and the future of an entire city.”
But Amy Cameron, from Greenpeace UK, said “false promises” from the Tories would not deliver a prosperous economic future for Aberdeen. “A just transition has to be strong enough for people to let go of the industry that built their community and trust that the new economy will be ready to catch them,” she said.
In Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, Bird – a qualified lawyer who has worked as an SNP researcher and adviser at Westminster – held the seat for the SNP. The result means both parties can claim a victory as the by-elections reshuffle the political map, with Lumsden’s imminent departure from Holyrood likely to prompt another contest north of the border.