What Glasgow East really means

The turnout. What matters about Glasgow East is the turnout.

I don't usually take by-election results all that seriously. By-elections rarely add more than you already know from opinion polls. And in so far as they differ from the polls, it is the polls that tell you more and more accurately.

In most ways, Glasgow East does not depart from this norm. Labour is doing very, very, very badly, but in a General Election it would not lost Glasgow East. The polls differ a bit from this result and the polls are right.

But in one way the by-election result is informative. Labour has done badly in previous contests between elections. It even managed to meet disaster in a national election - the 1999 European Parliament election - and still win by miles the next time.

Yet what characterised these previous defeats was base Labour voters staying at home, unwilling to go out and cast a positive vote for Labour.

Glasgow East was different. In Glasgow East, voters in pretty large numbers did turn out. They rushed out to vote for anyone who could beat the Labour candidate.

In a recent discussion I had on Newsnight, my friend the former Blair adviser Peter Hyman said Labour was "sleepwalking to a massacre".

So they are.