Ward Profile
Cause of By-Election
A trip to Inverclyde West allows Ballot Box Scotland to fill in another gap in my by-election spread. Until now, there hadn’t been one here at any point since I’d launched the project. This is one of many by-elections cropping up because a sitting councillor was elected MP, in this case Labour’s Martin McCluskey for Inverclyde and Renfrewshire West. He was elected for the first time in 2022, though he’d made two attempts at the former Inverclyde constituency in 2017 and 2019.
Ward Details
Inverclyde West is one of 7 wards in Inverclyde, and elects 3 councillors at a full election. Inverclyde is oddly resistant to actually giving its wards useful names that identify what areas they cover, but this one is to all intents and purposes Gourock. There haven’t been any boundary changes since STV was brought in either, so it’s all easily comparable.
For elections to the Scottish Parliament, the ward is entirely within the Greenock and Inverclyde constituency which the SNP gained from Labour in 2016. At the UK Parliament it’s within the Inverclyde and Renfrewshire West constituency that Labour won this year, the SNP having gained the former Inverclyde seat from them in their 2015 landslide.
Electoral History
This is a ward that loves an Independent, with Ronald Ahlfeld elected alongside a Labour and Lib Dem councillor in 2007. It may surprise you to find a Lib Dem but no SNP councillor in a west Central Belt ward, but the Lib Dems had actually won a majority on Inverclyde council in the last FPTP election in 2003. Their councillor made a fascinating sideways move to the rump Liberal party mid term, and in their 2012 collapse the SNP easily picked up their seat.
In 2017 it was Labour who surprisingly missed out on a seat, with a second Independent Lynne Quinn taking their place. Keeping up a ward tradition of defections, SNP councillor Christopher McEleney undertook a high profile jump to Alba, but fell flat in his 2022 re-election bid. With Ahlfeld retiring, Quinn easily held her seat, and Labour regained representation.
Votes over the period are pretty fascinating: the Lib Dems didn’t just win a seat in 2007, they were the most popular party overall. Not by a huge amount admittedly, with Ahlfeld and Labour not far behind, but still remarkable for this part of the country. Ahlfeld proved immensely popular and over his new two runs would win enough votes to near enough win two seats himself if he could. When the Lib Dems fell to bits in 2012, the sitting councillor actually got more votes as a Liberal than his former party did.
Labour’s loss of their seat in 2012 is all the more remarkable when you look where Quinn started at: a paltry 4.1% of the vote! That’s one of the lowest starting shares anyone not getting a same-party surplus went on to win from. Basically, Ahlfeld’s massive surplus immediately lifted Quinn into third place and there she remained the whole time. She was very easily re-elected in her own right in 2022, though not approaching Ahlfeld’s level of support, and his absence allowed the SNP and Labour to reach their best results thus far.
Councillors and Key Stats
3 Councillors, in order elected:
⚪Independent: Lynne Quinn
🟡SNP: Sandra Reynolds
🔴Labour: Martin McCluskey
Change vs 2017: +1 Labour, -1 Independent (Ronald Ahlfeld retired)
Turnout: 54.8%
Electorate: 8773
Valid: 4774 (99.4%)
Spoiled: 30 (0.6%)
Quota: 1194
Candidates
🟠Lib Dem: John Burleigh
🔴Labour: Martin McCluskey
⚫Alba:Christopher McEleney
⚪Independent: Lynne Quinn
🟡SNP: Sandra Reynolds
🔵Conservative: Ted Runciman
⚪Independent: William Wilson
First Preferences
Votes Excluding Independent (Double-Distributed)
Note: Given Quinn’s significant popularity, it seemed useful to give a clearer indication of how the votes look if she is eliminated and her 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 she hadn’t been on the ballot at all. I simply further re-distribute the non-transfers in the same proportion to her actual transfers. It’s notable how much the other Independent gets. I think this ward is quite a good example that a lot of voters do actually kind of treat Independents as if they were a party: transferring to other Independents ahead of other parties.
Transfers (single winner recalculation)
Two-Party Preferred
By-Election
Candidates
We’ve got five parties on the ballot here, but it’s not the Holyrood 5. The Lib Dems have all but evaporated in Inverclyde, and the Greens are still yet to nominate a candidate at council level here. Instead, it’s Reform UK and Alba rounding out the ballot paper here. Part of the problem for the Lib Dems may in fact be that the Reform UK candidate was theirs in 2022.
That’s quite the political jump to make on the surface, but he stood as an Independent for the Inverclyde and Renfrewshire West seat this year on a distinctly socially conservative platform, so perhaps his old party wasn’t the best fit for him. McEleney also returns for Alba from 2022, and it’s the same Conservative candidate too. In effect, only the two parties with any chance of winning have new candidates.
🟣Reform UK: John Burleigh
🔴Labour: Ian Hellyer
🟡SNP: Robert Kirkpatrick
⚫Alba: Christopher McEleney
🔵Conservative: Ted Runciman
Analysis
Given Labour had a significant edge over the SNP in 2022, I don’t see how the outcome here can be anything other than a Labour win. If they don’t, it’ll be the SNP, but I just don’t think that’s happening. Labour may have done less well in the past couple of weeks than they’d have liked, but that’s a barrier to them making gains on 2022 terms: it doesn’t suggest they’ll have any difficulty with effective holds.
The only other thing to watch for here is what the Alba vote does. Alba’s popularity here in 2022 was so limited that even eliminating Quinn and doing that double-distribution that shaves her non-transfers down to near-nothing, they didn’t even gain a full additional 1%. They are however the only vehicle available for dissatisfied SNP voters who want to remain within their constitutional camp.
Given my surprise at their Aberdeenshire absences, but their keenness to big up modest successes in two other local by-elections, I’m coming to a cynical guess at what their strategy may be. I think they are carefully selecting by-elections where they have a candidate that can put in the work, and they can focus some campaigning, to get a 5-7% result that they can then say is a Holyrood-entering level. At the same time, they are avoiding paper candidacies that’d come out as more like 2-3% and puncture that narrative, and “heartland” wards that carry a risk of embarrassment if they don’t get much of the vote.
That contrasts to the Green approach, which is basically that they’ll stand a paper candidate anywhere they can find someone willing to do it (which is clearly not everywhere), but only do serious campaigning in wards worth trying to win a seat in 2027. Reform UK also seem to be taking a similar approach of just standing whenever and wherever they can.
For both of those parties, getting any votes at all is welcome as it keeps voters in the habit of backing them. They also have less to lose, the Greens because they’re perfectly fine with doing less well in non-target areas because they know they have much stronger bases elsewhere, and Reform UK because they literally having nothing to lose.
Prediction
Labour Win.
2022 Results (Detailed Data)
Transfers (full election)
All candidates in this ward were elected on first preferences alone, and thus no transfer rounds were required.
Results by Polling District
Second Preferences
Two-Candidate Preferred
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