Many people will be shocked and disappointed at this result - it was a real scare but when you analyse it, the BNP in fact still got very few votes - 1,013 out of 20,595 who voted yesterday. It was in near perfect circumstances for them and they still didn’t make any major breakthrough.

The BNP did run the Tories close for 3rd place ( I have never seen so many socialists shake the hands of Tory activists) but in the end they still lost their deposit and only got 4.9%. The only major advance the BNP can claim is that they beat the far-left as the anti-establishment vote in Springburn. Tommy Sheridan of Solidarity-Scotland's Socialist Movement came 5th with 794 votes easily beating the Lib-Dems on 474 and the Greens on 332 as well as the Scottish Socialist Party on 152 and the Socialist Labour Party on 47 votes.  

We are still able to say that BNP support in Scotland is much lower than in England and Wales with Glasgow their highest showing ever but it means we can no longer be complacent about racism and Islamophobia and the issues associated with it in Scotland. The main parties have failed miserably to inspire people to vote for their policies in what is the lowest ever turnout for a UK by-election at 33%.

Labour won easily because it successfully campaigned as an opposition party on the SNP Scottish Government's recent record despite the fact this was a Westminster by-election. Gordon Brown was let off the hook totally.  The fact that "Lord" Michael Martin's record of corruption over expenses was almost not mentioned as the cause of the by-election meant Labour's record in office also went unchallenged. The other parties maintained a polite silence over attacking him during the campaign.

Willie Bain (now MP) was Martin's bag-carrier in the 2005 election and is a long-standing student union hack - and parliamentary research for a Westminster Labour MP who lives a lot of the time in London already. Certainly not the naive non-politician his campaign painted him to be. Indeed his election literature almost failed to mention that he actually was the Labour candidate - the party's logo did not appear on them. Instead a paper called the Local Voice portrayed Bain almost as an independent on-party candidate fighting opportunistically against SNP Holyrood cuts.

Holyrood stuff dominated in a very negative anti-SNP campaign by Labour accusing them (falsely as it turns out) of 'Ripping Off Glasgow'; when in fact the city does get a disproportionately higher percentage of Scottish Government money (16% of spending for 13% of the population) for the obvious reasons of poverty and greater need.

Labour won so easily with the SNP a poor second partly because their candidate was simply too middle class and unapproachable for the working class voters of Springburn. The SNP in response failed miserably to run a suitably anti-Westminster, pro-working class campaign and with the candidate being a supporter of SNP mainstream pro-market ideology - they did not fight the election as a left-wing, pro-public services campaign as they had in Glasgow East in 2008.

The highlights of the campaign for me was seeing Tommy Sheridan and George Galloway doing four public meetings in a day on Tuesday speaking to over 300 people in Sighthill, North Glasgow College, Royston, and Dennistoun. I chaired the meeting in Sighthill and I must say with two left-wing firebrands either side of me - the volume did damage my hearing a little!  Plenty of locals agreed with our message and joined Solidarity. I also organised a Tenants Question Time on Monday night in Sighthill (my estate) and it was the four main parties plus John Smeaton and Tommy Sheridan and Mikey Hughes from Big Brother - with me playing Dimbleby in the chair. They all said it was the best actual debate of the campaign and the only one within a local community with Tommy wiping the floor with the other in terms of arguments for socialism.

Ruth Davidson, the Tory candidate also did well in that debate and this may be the reason for her 3rd place in that she acknowledged the the Tories had been wrong in separating earnings linked to pensions and pledged Cameron government would restore this link. She presented a moderate reasonable face of caring Conservatism so in some ways this represents a partial rehabilitation of the Scottish Conservatives in easily beating the Lib-Dems in a seat they came nowhere in during 2003 and 2007.

So Why did the BNP do so well? There was virtually no BNP campaign in Springburn until the BBC Question Time appearance of BNP fuehrer Nick Griffin. So we can all thank David Dimbleby for the renewed confidence which saw the BNP drive its 'lie-lorry' advertising truck around the area the very next day and there afterwards. As I said to the press at the count – Dimbleby’s free speech for Nazis has consequences in the renewed confidence of racists to walk to street racially abusing Black people in Springburn. This in fact occurred during the campaign when Alex Salmond and SNP candidate David Kerr hosted a ceilidh dance in Sighthill, some of the Black SNP activists present were racially abused by drunk passers-by at the off-licence.

One clear thing to emerge from the polling evidence was that in integrated areas like Sighthill, Royston and Edgefauld the BNP vote was very small and once again they didn't really bother campaigning there. However they instead won big support in the strongly Unionist areas of Dennistoun and Riddrie -where they campaigned heavily - and in nearly all white areas like Balornock and Barmulloch neighbouring the more integrated ones. 

It is also obviously some kind of protest vote by a section of white voters disenchanted with politicians and bankers over the recent scandals but who've fallen for the BNP's claptrap. However it would be wrong to say that they weren't voting for fascists knowingly. Unite Against Fascism leafleted around 50% of the constituency warning people about the Nazi core and statements made by BNP leaders. No these 1,013 voters backed the BNP precisely because they were fascists and therefore consistent racists and Islamophobes.

But it is also an indictment of the alternative opposition parties that none of them were seen as any credible alternative to Labour. Another partial reason for the left's defeat was the presence of independent candidate John Smeaton who gained only 254 votes but it was enough to offset the left's challenge. While Tommy gained four times as many as the other 2 left parties combined - the far-left between on 993 votes between them still failed to outpoll the BNP for the first time ever in a Scottish election.

To put this result into perspective - when I stood as Socialist candidate against Michael Martin in 2005 getting 1405 votes (4.8%) and again in 2007 as Solidarity candidate gaining (4.9%) just as in previous elections many of these socialist votes came from people who didn't agree with me about revolution. They backed me standing on a socialist programme of working class demands because these were consistently pro-working class and human rights. Similarly a voter may not be an out-and-out fascist but if they want to express their racism they'll vote for the most consistently anti-immigrant party - that was the BNP.

It shows that mainstream parties attempts to tackle the BNP on its territory by pandering to their agenda - always fail miserably and only serve to legitimise their arguments. Even worse still when these are legitimised by appearances on prime-time TV.

These BNP voters had the option of voting for Tommy Sheridan - a well-known working class fighter, ex-councillor and ex- MSP - but instead chose to support the party blaming Black people, asylum seekers and immigrants from Eastern Europe for their poverty rather then the UK and Scottish governments who have created the conditions of poverty and inequality in which they are forced to live.

What this election shows is that the far-left cannot play around anymore when it comes to left unity and when it comes to being anti-establishment. We cannot construct yet another failed left-reformist party or coalition - people have already tried that. We must instead construct a united left anti-capitalist alternative to capture the imagination of working class people seeking answers to the crisis of working class political representation.

Graham Campbell

(Springburn Solidarity - Glasgow North East)