Inverclyde Council 2022

Unlike many of Scotland’s council areas, Inverclyde doesn’t preserve or indicate a particular historic unit. The name is a relatively recent coinage for what is in effect West Renfrewshire. Situated on the Firth of Clyde, this area has a long maritime and industrial history, with the formerly separate towns of Port Glasgow, Greenock and Gourock having gradually grown into one another. It also includes smaller, and generally more affluent, villages such as Wemyss Bay, Inverkip and Kilmacolm.

As you’d expect from such an industrial area, the political tendency here was mostly towards Labour, although the Conservatives did win a wider western Renfrewshire seat in 1983 that excluded the urban core. That core remained with Labour in both parliaments right up until 2015 when the SNP picked Inverclyde up in their landslide, which they repeated locally at the 2016 Scottish Parliament election.

Perhaps surprisingly however, Inverclyde was also long a Liberal Democrat (and predecessors) stronghold at local level. They were the primary opposition to Labour in the previous, identical, district except in 1977, when they won a majority. They’d again repeat that feat in the 2003 election, causing Inverclyde to stick out like a sore orange thumb in an otherwise red tinted Central Belt.