Ward Profile
Cause of By-Election
It’s a relatively rapid return to Stirling East, having already had a by-election there last December. Fortunately unlike some other rapid returns, this hasn’t arisen due to ill health or death, nor to freshly elected councillors immediately resigning or being disqualified. Instead Bryan Flannagan, Conservative councillor since 2017, has resigned for work reasons. Given the feeble Labour minority was reliant on the much larger Conservative group for power, this could be a locally consequential resignation.
As we’ve already had a by-election here, much of the below content is lifted directly from the previous preview.
Ward Details
Stirling East is one of 7 wards in Stirling, and elects 3 councillors at a full election. As you’d assume from the name, it covers the eastern portion of the city itself, effectively covering all the areas south of the railway station and east of the main road. That includes the Braehead, Broomridge and Whins of Milton areas. Prior to 2017 it had everything south of the Forth that was east of the station, but it lost the quite substantial chunk of the Riverside area to Stirling North in the boundary changes. That was traded for a very sparse tract of fields to the south.
For elections to the Scottish Parliament, the ward is entirely within the Stirling constituency which has been held by the SNP since gaining from Labour in 2007. At the UK Parliament it’s within the Stirling and Strathallan seat, which including the prior Stirling form had changed hands at every election starting in 2015: going from Labour to SNP, to Conservative in 2017, back to SNP in 2019, then ultimately looping round again to Labour in 2024.
Electoral History
In its original 2007 form, the ward elected one apiece from Labour, the SNP and Lib Dems; this was the era in which the Lib Dems had a presence in most councils thanks to the STV system they had pressed for. When they collapsed in 2012, it was Labour that benefitted here to gain a second seat. The SNP’s original 2007 councillor Steven Paterson would go on to be elected MP for Stirling in 2015, and his party held the resulting by-election.
The slightly redrawn ward in 2017 saw one of the Labour councillors move to the new Stirling North with the Riverside chunk, whilst the other and the SNP’s both lost out to the alphabet effect, as party colleagues with earlier surnames pipped them to the post. They were joined for the first time by a Conservative councillor, and the same pattern held in 2022 though the SNP’s 2015 by-election winner was able to sweep back in following a retirement. When Labour councillor Chris Kane became MP in 2024 and duly resigned his seat, the SNP emerged victorious at the resulting by-election.
In voting terms, the changes in this ward feel very typical of a big settlement sitting within a historically Conservative area. That means Labour starting out in front when they were still mighty in 2007, albeit with the SNP not too far behind. That year was an effective tie between the second Labour candidate, the Lib Dems and Conservatives on first preferences, leaving it to the SNP’s surplus transfers to swing it for the Lib Dems. Although the Lib Dem vote held up surprisingly well in 2012, it was nowhere near enough to hold on in the face of strong gains for Labour.
After that however it was all downhill. The SNP unsurprisingly pulled ahead in the 2015 by-election, followed by the Conservatives making obviously big gains in their 2017 revival. Despite a national swing in their favour in 2022, Labour continued to wither here, falling into third place behind the Conservatives for the first time. The Lib Dems suffered so badly since 2012 that they didn’t even stand in the 2015 by-election, though I reckon the loss of the Riverside area will have taken a lot of their residual vote out of the ward anyway: ditto the Greens. Riverside was 5% Lib Dem and 20% Green in 2022, well above each party’s share in this version of the ward.
Although Labour regained first preference ground in December, the new bloc of Reform UK voters proved unwilling to give them the transfers they needed to win.
Councillors and Key Stats
1 Councillor Elected:
SNP: Willie Ferguson
Change vs 2022 (notional): SNP Hold
Change vs vacating: SNP Gain from Labour
Turnout: 21.7% (-23.7)
Electorate: 8754
Valid: 1881 (98.8%)
Spoiled: 22 (1.2%)
Quota: 941
2 Continuing Councillors:SNP: Gerry McLaughlan
Conservative: Bryan Flannagan
Candidates
Green: Andrew Adam
Reform UK: William DochertySNP: Willie Ferguson
Labour: Anne Kane
Independent: Gary McGrow
Lib Dem: Christopher SpreadboroughConservative: Jennifer Ure
First Preferences
Swing vs 2022
Note: The Family Party won 1.4% here in 2022.
Transfers
Two-Candidate Preferred
By-Election
Candidates
It’s just the six current major parties on the ballot here, no Independents nor fringe parties to spice anything up. Of these, only the Conservative and SNP candidates are new faces this cycle. All of the other candidates also stood in January’s Bannockburn by-election, the Green also having stood there at the full election, whilst the Reform candidate contested the previous Stirling East by-election too.
🔵Conservative: James Corbett
🔴Labour: Yvonne Dickson
🟣Reform UK: William Docherty
🟡SNP: Josh Fyvie
🟠Lib Dem: William Galloway
🟢Green: Marie Stadtler
Analysis
The fact the SNP won the December by-election does not bode well for Labour, to say the least. If we look at the basic trend in Scottish polling since then (specifically the regional vote, though it’s much of a muchness) the SNP are in roughly the same place as they were in December. By contrast, Labour are down about 4% and Reform up by almost 6%.
Stranger things have happened, and council by-elections are always somewhat more responsive to candidate quality and campaign effort, but it’s unlikely Labour will pull off a win here at the moment. If the SNP do indeed win, they’ll have all three councillors in the ward. As always, I’m now going to wave my “but that defeats the whole bloody point of STV!” flag.
Yes, I know, you are conditioned to instinctively think having a vote to replace an outgoing representative is Maximum Democracy, but it really isn’t when you’re shifting from a proportional election of multiple councillors to a majoritarian election of one! If the SNP do about as well again as they did in December, they’ll actually have three councillors but only one third of the recent vote. That’s not proportional, non-SNP voters will have been robbed of their representation not because they’ve been reduced to a small minority by a triumphant yellow wave, but because the goalposts for representation are shifted. I don’t think that’s good!
Here’s another democratic peculiarity of by-elections: Stirling Council has 23 seats in total. At the moment, Labour are continuing to maintain a ridiculous charade that they are in sole power, despite only having 4 councillors and having been clearly reliant on the 8 Conservatives to remain in office. With that number dropping to 7, until this by-election resolves that de-facto Labour-Conservative administration is tied with the sum of the 9 SNP councillors, 1 Green and 1 formerly-SNP Independent, Alasdair MacPherson.
If the SNP do indeed win this by-election, going up to 10 seats, they would be able to form an administration with the support of those two other councillors. There may be bad blood between MacPherson and his former party that prevents that – I’m not up on the detail – but it at least becomes mathematically possible. Again, there’s an interesting democratic point here: should the local administration change due to votes in one ward?
In this instance, voters might consider it rather more reasonable that a party with 10 councillors leads the administration than one with 4, but it’s still an odd circumstance if you really think about it. It’s not that Labour shouldn’t be involved in the administration, to be clear: it would be an entirely reasonable outcome of a proportional system that they were. It’s just that you’d really have expected them to be a junior partner, not pretending the council is definitely, honestly, totally only run by them with 17% of the votes in the chamber.
Prediction
Likely SNP.
2024 By-Election Results (Detailed Data)
Results by Polling District
Second Preferences
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