Party of Scotland. This new party contested the Dundee East by-election of 1973, and the number of votes they captured was more than the Labour candidate's margin of victory over the SNP candidate, Gordon Wilson. However, in the long-run, this new party folded and most of its members returned to the SNP. They were bolstered by their capture of the Glasgow Govan seat with Margo MacDonald as their candidate from the Labour Party in a by-election in 1973. This again signalled to Labour that the SNP posed an electoral threat to them and in the February 1974 General Election they returned 7 MPs. The failure of the Labour Party to secure an overall majority prompted them to quickly return to the polls to secure such and in the October 1974 General Election the SNP performed even better than they had done earlier in the year, winning 11 MPs and managing to get over 30% of the vote across Scotland. The main driving force behind the growth of the SNP in the 1970s was the discovery of oil in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland. The SNP ran a hugely successful It's Scotland's oil campaign, emphasising the way in which they believed the discovery of oil could benefit all of Scotland's citizens. While Scottish Labour's electoral dominance had been well-established at this point, owing to the fact that Labour – as the party that created the National Health Service galvanised support for its vision of the welfare state and working class solidarity across the nations of the UK; the discovery of North Sea oil offered nationalists an equally compelling vision – where oil wealth would provide Scotland an escape from the stagflation the British economy was experiencing and the social unrest it led to. Former SNP leader William Wolfe has argued that along with this campaign, the SNP was aided by their support for the workers in the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Work-in, being led by Jimmy Reid, as well as supporting the workers at the Scottish Daily Express when they attempted to run the paper themselves and other such campaigns. 1979 United Kingdom general election The SNP continued to ride high in the opinion polls throughout the 1970s, and many members are convinced that if the Liberals, led by David Steel hadn't maintained the Labour Government of the time in power, the SNP might have made further electoral gains