This is what politics has become

George Galloway’s victory last night is a reminder of a wider problem in British politics: the low regard in which all main political parties are held. By-elections can throw up quirky victories, usually ironed out in the general election. There won’t be an army of Galloway’s marching on parliament at the next election. It’s like Glasgow East: a classic Labour safe seat-cum-‘rotten borough’ taken for granted (and ignored) for so long that the ruling party’s apparatus had atrophied. Like John Mason in Glasgow East, Galloway won’t last long.
  
But the same phenomenon which took Galloway to victory last night, and humbled the main parties, is also at work in Scotland. The unionist parties are on their knees; polls suggest the Lib Dems will lose all of their mainland seats. And this is not because of a surge in support for independence. The SNP, for all its ills, has mass support (and no donor problems) for a simple reason: it is a cause, a movement.