South Lanarkshire Council 2022

Compared to its northern counterpart, South Lanarkshire features more in the way of internal contrasts, both demographic and political. The overwhelming majority of the population is found in a small corner of the council nearest Glasgow, including Hamilton, East Kilbride, Cambuslang and Rutherglen – the former two having been the centre of districts and the latter two part of Glasgow from the 70’s to the 90’s. This area is par for the Central Belt course. By contrast, the now quite small county town of Lanark itself was the centre of a big rural Clydesdale district home to a large number of scattered towns.

Nonetheless, most of this area had firmly settled into Labour hands by the mid-20^th century, with Rutherglen the longest lived Conservative holdout. That Labour dominance was broken briefly albeit dramatically with Winnie Ewing’s famous victory for the SNP in the 1967 Hamilton by-election. This was the start of her party’s unbroken representation at Westminster, though it’d take until 2015 to win an MP in the area again – and Labour would briefly regain one of those seats in 2017. Change came earlier at the Scottish Parliament, with all constituencies bar Rutherglen going SNP in 2011, and Rutherglen itself flipping in 2016.

In the former districts, East Kilbride proved an early centre of SNP support, with a plurality in 1974 and majority in 1977, before clear Labour majorities for the remainder of its existence. Hamilton on the other hand was consistently Labour, whilst Clydesdale was Independent leaning for the first three and Labour for the last three elections. The advent of the current South Lanarkshire council in the 90’s then led to a period of clear Labour majorities.