Glasgow City Council 2022

Scotland’s largest city has in many respects followed a similar trajectory to other big cities across the UK. It was a major industrial centre with a booming population but often poor living conditions. A post-war transformation of the city had the double effect of massively reducing the population whilst setting the stage for a period of decline and deprivation. Though the city still faces many challenges, a cultural revival in the 90’s has continued to the present day, making the residents of the city almost unbearably proud of it. I’m allowed to say that, as I’m just as guilty as any Glaswegian!

Labour were without a doubt the dominant party for a long time. In the democratic era, non-Labour success in the city was a rare exception until recently. Those exceptions included a few by-elections, with the SNP winning Govan in both 1973 and 1988, and the then Social Democrats winning Hillhead in 1982, which had been the final Conservative seat in the city. The first of those gave the very sadly missed Margo MacDonald, later to serve three terms as an Independent MSP, her first entry into politics. Current First Minister Nicola Sturgeon won Holyrood’s Govan seat at the full election in 2007, and her party won another by-election victory in Westminster’s Glasgow East the following year. Since 2011, most of the city’s seats have been in SNP hands at most elections, though they briefly lost one at Westminster in 2017.

The city council was particularly solidly Labour, with a Conservative leadership between 1977 and 1980 the last before decades of unbroken Labour control. However, they never achieved the feat of becoming sole party as they have in some English cities and boroughs, facing a varying handful of Conservative, Liberal, SNP and even Militant Labour councillors. The latter became the Scottish Socialist Party, winning 15% of the vote in the last FPTP elections in 2003 – there’s a fascinating parallel universe where the SSP didn’t collapse spectacularly and benefitted from STV…