East Renfrewshire Council 2022

Whereas most of historic Renfrewshire is made up of well-established, urbanised and formerly industrial areas, East Renfrewshire mostly grew as a Glasgow suburb. Areas such as Giffnock, Netherlee and Clarkston are obvious urban extensions of the city, whilst Newton Mearns owes most of its population to post-war growth. Alongside the more distant Eaglesham, these areas made up the Eastwood district under the previous local government structures. East Renfrewshire was created by adding the Barrhead and Neilston section of the old Renfrew district – a particularly egregious example of administrative gerrymandering, given these areas are barely connected.

In any case, the suburban nature of the Eastwood core here historically gave East Renfrewshire a very different flavour to the rest of the county. The Westminster seat was firmly Conservative right up until their 1997 wipeout, when it went Labour, with whom it’d remain in both parliaments for nearly two decades. In 2015 the SNP won the Westminster seat, followed by the Conservatives winning the Holyrood seat in 2016. They also gained the Westminster seat in 2017, but it was one of those they lost again in 2019.

The Conservatives were so dominant here that until 1988 the only opposition on the district council was a pair of “Ratepayers”. The addition of those heavily Labour-favourable areas in 1995 reduced the Conservatives to a slim minority, before Labour took similarly narrow leads in 1999 and 2003.