Ward Profile
Cause of By-Election
After a nearly two month gap in the by-election calendar, election season returns to Scotland with a trip to East Renfrewshire’s Barrhead, Liboside and Uplawmoor ward. Labour Councillor Betty Cunningham sadly passed away in early June. Cunningham was a very long serving councillor, having first been elected in 1999 for the single member Barrhead East ward.
She subsequently served as the local Provost in the 2003-2007 term, then easily making the transition to the new multi-member Barrhead ward when STV was introduced in 2007. In line with Scotland’s longstanding links to Malawi, Cunningham was also known for her charitable works in that country, which formed part of the basis for an OBE in 2011.
Ward Details
Barrhead, Liboside and Uplawmoor is one of 5 wards in East Renfrewshire, and elects 4 councillors at a full election. The overwhelmingly dominant part of this ward is Barrhead, which constitutes around 94% of the entire population. Barrhead (and neighbouring Neilston, not in the ward) are a very odd inclusion in East Renfrewshire, representing traditional working class towns, in comparison to the affluent suburbs in the Eastwood area. In the original 2007 boundaries, this represented the entirety of a Barrhead ward.
Boundary changes ahead of 2017 were therefore more geographically impactful than they were politically. Most of the small remaining population that was added is within the village of Uplawmoor, which is relatively affluent. I’m not entirely sure that the “Liboside” in the name is actually a recognised or locally used appellation, but I’d assume it’s simply a means of identifying the rural component to the north and east of Loch Libo, which lends its name to Lochlibo Road which runs all the way from Barrhead to Irvine in North Ayrshire.
For elections to the Scottish Parliament, the ward is entirely within the Renfrewshire South constituency which the SNP gained from Labour in 2016. It had previously been in the original form of the Eastwood seat, which was likewise Labour, and from next year’s election will be within the new Renfrewshire West and Levern Valley seat.
For the UK Parliament it is part of the East Renfrewshire seat which has had a chaotic history. It was the seat of brief Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy until he led them into their crushing 2015 wipeout in the face of the SNP juggernaut. The Conservatives relieved the SNP of the seat in 2017, but handed it back in 2019, before it ultimately circled back round to Labour in last year’s election.
Electoral History
Given that it’s almost the entirety of this ward, we can basically ignore the boundary changes and include the prior Barrhead ward in our comparison here. At the first two elections, the seats went two to Labour, one to the SNP, and one to Independent Danny Devlin. Interestingly, Labour stood three candidates here in 2007; given Devlin’s old FPTP ward was a half-n-half between Neilston and Barrhead, maybe they assumed he was standing on the Neilston end? Although the pattern held in 2012, it was with a new SNP and secondary Labour councillor.
The big Conservative revival underway by 2017 saw that second Labour seat turn blue, whilst the SNP incumbent was undone by the alphabet effect and swapped places with a party colleague. Conservative representation wasn’t to be however, as Paul Aitken quit the party less than a year later, and he’d temporarily end up as the first and only Brexit Party Councillor in Scotland, and would have been their 2019 candidate for East Renfrewshire had the party not opted to stand down in Conservative-held constituencies. In 2022 the Conservatives went one better by picking a candidate they had to disown before polling day, and their seat went to the SNP, giving them their first ever twofer in this ward.
Looking instead at vote distributions, we can see 2007 was pretty cut and dried: those are indeed vote shares that guarantee two (but certainly not three!) Labour, Devlin, and the SNP. Although Labour slipped a bit in 2012, they still retained a lead and clear justification for two seats, before crashing down to barely one quota in 2017 and remaining flat into 2022, when they only stood one candidate for the first time. For his part, Devlin’s support has fluctuated a little over the years but has always been very comfortably enough to be elected on first preferences alone.
The SNP meanwhile show steady upwards motion at every election, eventually leading to their double at the last election. Not that you can see it in this chart, but some beautiful voter management from the SNP in 2012 where their vote split exactly 50:50 between their two candidates. Lovely stuff from a campaign efficacy perspective. You can also see how even at their 2017 peak the Conservatives were still a bit short of a quota, marking this out as easily their weakest East Renfrewshire ward, before then crashing back down in 2022 in the face of their own loss of support, Aitken standing as an Independent, and the suspension of their new candidate.
Councillors and Key Stats
4 Councillors, in order elected:
⚪Independent: Danny Devlin
🟡SNP: Angela Convery
đź”´Labour: Betty Cunningham
🟡SNP: Chris Lunday
Change vs 2017: +1 SNP, -1 Conservative
Electorate: 14548
Turnout: 47.2%
Valid: 6733 (98.1%)
Spoiled: 133 (1.9%)
Quota: 1347
Candidates
⚪Independent: Paul Aitken
âš«Alba: Neil Anderson
🟡SNP: Angela Convery
đź”´Labour: Betty Cunningham
⚪Independent: Danny Devlin
🟡SNP: Chris Lunday
🔵Conservative: Greg Turner
🟢Green: Frank Wilson
First Preferences
First Preferences
Note: Given Devlin’s significant popularity, it seemed useful to give a clearer indication of how the votes look if he is eliminated and his second preferences re-distributed. In this case I’ve done what I’ve dubbed a “double-distribution”, where I assume that most of the first preference only voters would actually have backed someone else if he hadn’t been on the ballot at all.
Transfers (single winner recalculation)
Two-Party Preferred
By-Election
Candidates
Six parties on the ballot here, but it’s not quite the Holyrood 5 plus Reform: the Lib Dems are absent. In their place we have the Abolish the Scottish Parliament Party, who have certainly chosen an interesting level of government to stand for on that platform. A few of these candidates are returning faces: the Conservative contested neighbouring Newton Mearns North and Neilston in 2022, the SNP Clarkston, Netherlee and Williamwood, and the Green Giffnock and Thornliebank; she also contested East Renfrewshire at last year’s General Election.
🔵Conservative: Farooq Choudhry
đź”´Labour: Julie Ann Costello McHale
🟤Abolish the Scottish Parliament: Gus Ferguson
🟣Family: Andy MacGibbon
🟡SNP: David McDonald
🟢Green: Karen Sharkey
Analysis
As is so often the case in wards with strong Independent councillors, Devlin would have been the winner for a single seat. That’s no use to us for a by-election, so if we run it with him as the first elimination it obviously goes to an SNP vs Labour head-to-head. The SNP emerge from that the narrow victors, with a lead just shy of 2%. In the current context, I’d mark that out as a tossup.
I’d expect, all things considered, that the SNP’s share (compared to the notional distribution without Devlin, rather than necessarily raw share) will drop more than Labour’s does. However as in so many other wards they may be aided by the presence of Reform, who are really eating into the Labour vote at the moment. In many recent by-elections those votes just haven’t then transferred back to Labour, causing them to lose even against weak SNP shares.
That’s especially going to be the case in this ward, which as mentioned earlier is the real odd one out in East Renfrewshire terms. Whereas the rest of the area is full of Conservative voters but not the kind who are particularly likely to swing Reform, this ward is light on Conservatives but heavy on the kind of working class communities that have seen growing backing for Reform.Â
Prediction
SNP-Labour Tossup.
2022 Results (Detailed Data)
Transfers (full election)
Results by Polling District
Second Preferences
Barrhead, Liboside and Uplawmoor: Two-Candidate Preferred
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