“1967 Hamilton by-election”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

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 at the 1966 general election held the previous year, and gained the seat from the Labour Party 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.^[1] The constituency had been a safe seat for Labour, who had taken over two-thirds of the vote there in every general election from 1945-1966, 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 five 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 at the 1945 Motherwell by-election. In the years before Ewing's victory, 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.^[2]

The SNP's leadership merely told Ewing to: "try to come a good second in order to encourage the members".^[3] "As ever," Ewing later wrote, "I overdid it, and as a result my life changed for ever."^[4] After her victory was declared, Ewing famously said to the crowd outside "Stop the World, Scotland wants to get on."^[5]

Historian Tom Devine describes the 1967 Hamilton by-election as "the most sensational by-election result in Scotland since 1945"^[6] and Isobel Lindsay called a "watershed" moment in Scottish political history.^[7] Gerry Hassan similarly describes it as being a pivotal moment in Scottish politics.^[8]

References

1. ^Winnie Ewing, Stop the World, edited by Michael Russell, Birlinn: Edinburgh, 2004, p. 10
2. ^Christopher Harvie and Peter Jones, The road to home rule: images of Scotland's cause, p.84
3. ^Winnie Ewing, Stop the World, edited by Michael Russell, Birlinn: Edinburgh, 2004, p. 15
4. ^Winnie Ewing, Stop the World, edited by Michael Russell, Birlinn: Edinburgh, 2004, p. 15
5. ^Winnie Ewing, Stop the World, edited by Michael Russell, Birlinn: Edinburgh, 2004, p. 11
6. ^{{cite book|last1=Devine|first1=T. M.|title=The Scottish nation, 1700-2007|date=2006|publisher=Penguin|location=London|isbn=978-0-141-02769-2|pages=574|edition=Reissued with new material.}}
7. ^Isobel Lindsay, "The SNP and Westminster", pp. 93 - 104, in The Modern SNP: From Protest to Power, edited by Gerry Hassan, Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, p. 94
8. ^Gerry Hassan, "The Making of the Modern SNP: From Protest to Power", pp. 1 - 18, in The Modern SNP: From Protest to Power, edited by Gerry Hassan, Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, p. 1
9. ^{{cite web|url=http://by-elections.co.uk/67.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120329035318/http://by-elections.co.uk/67.html|title=1967 By Election Results|archive-date=2012-03-29|dead-url=yes|access-date=2015-08-21}}

References

See also