GE24: Ballot Box Battlegrounds 17-14

Don’t be fooled by the fact East Renfrewshire doesn’t have any boundary changes, because we’re starting off with an absolute corker of a seat here. In all honesty, as much as this may be the least marginal of the marginals, it’s probably the most interesting constituency in this entry.

You see, in a Scottish context East Renfrewshire is a real rarity. Rural Conservative seats are very widespread across Britain, and indeed all six they won in Scotland in 2019 were rural constituencies. In England, there are also plenty of affluent urban or suburban constituencies with Conservative MPs, or at least a recent history of them. Those have been much rarer in Scotland, basically confined to East Renfrewshire in 2017, and in Holyrood the equivalent Eastwood seat, plus Ayr and, until 2011, Edinburgh Pentlands.

Whilst all constituencies and all voter groups are diverse, and we shouldn’t be too broad brush in our statements, these are the kinds of areas where the general political sentiment would be positive on the one hand towards the Union, tax cuts, and business. In other words, traditional Conservative positions. On the other hand, those same voters also quite like the European Union, LGBTI+ people, and immigrants, which the Conservatives have very notably not been particularly keen on recently.

That being the rough shape of local opinion would explain why in 2019, an election defined by Brexit, the vehemently anti-Brexit SNP not only had a much bigger swing than they saw nationally, but actually had an even higher vote share than their 2015 landslide, despite a lower vote nationally. It can similarly be seen in how Jackson Carlaw, MSP for Eastwood, was one of just three Conservative MSPs to vote for the Gender Recognition Reform Bill.

So what do those kind of voters do this time? Brexit, whether you like it or not, has happened and is no longer a defining issue. People supportive of the Union may be much less inclined to lend a Pro-Independence party their vote this time around, especially if they’re scunnered with the SNP after 17 years in government. At the same time, expect a similar degree of distaste for the Conservatives after 14 years at the top and seemingly going heavy on the culture wars that leave a lot of affluent but socially liberal voters cold.

Presumably, the only game in town then would be Labour, who languished in a very distant third place by 2019. That was a dramatic fall for the party that had held it from 1997 up to 2015. In 2017, having seen the Conservatives win Eastwood the year before on a “Party of the Union” ticket, Labour tried to emphasise their own Pro-Union cred by standing Blair McDougall, who’d been a senior figure in the successful Better Together campaign. That wasn’t sufficient that year, and they barely even tried in 2019, but he’s back this time, and could it be that now it’s Labour best placed to beat the SNP locally? Add in the fact that the Greens are standing here for the first time and did relatively well in the 2022 locals, which will most impact the SNP, and this is definitely one to watch.