The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity.

This is a global player original podcast.

Michael Shanks, Scottish Labour Party, 17,840,000.

I declare that Michael Shanks is elected to serve in the United Kingdom Parliament as a member for Rutherland and Hamilton West constituency.

The sound you're hearing there is the cheer, the din of revival, of what looked like an old political corpse given new life.

Since 2015, when the SMP delivered a body blow to the Labour Party in becoming the Party of Scotland,

sweeping away all of its old fortresses across the central bells,

the sort of seats in which the

Labour Party was quite literally born. Labor has lived the daily humiliation of being little more

than irrelevance in Scottish politics. The SMP, aside from a brief wobble in the 2017 general

election, have looked invincible. They spoke not only for independence, but almost the whole

of the social democratic left, the poll star of Scottish politics. After the Rutherglen and Hamilton

West result last night, they have started, once again, to look vulnerable. It could make the task

of a Labour majority government all the easier.

We're going to be discussing that on today's show, what it means for Scotland, the Union and

the general election. But before we do, there's something else. Sometimes in journalism,

in the media, in the Westminster Hot House, there is a tendency to just move from one thing

to the other, to not internalise what has just passed to miss the real story.

This week, Rishi Sunak tore up a 45 billion pound project that had enjoyed cross-party support for 15 years.

It was supposed to transform our economic geography, a staple of our national strategic direction for that time. And just like that,

with a stroke of a pen, it was gone for the arbitrary timetable of a conference speech. In the days since,

we've seen what it's been replaced with unravel. You could argue it's the biggest government

...