Labour’s 40-year rule of Glasgow City Council ended by SNP

SNP Glasgow leader Susan Aitken called it a “historic moment” for Scotland's biggest city.

There were 85 seats up for grabs, with boundary changes adding six more councillors than in 2012. Nicola Sturgeon’s party fell four short of a majority, taking 39.

The Scottish Greens took seven seats, but it was the Tories who walked around the count at the Emirates stadium smiling like winners after taking eight seats, surpassing their own expectations.

Labour’s total of 31 was greater than some of their own councillors had predicted just two days before the vote, but, even taking in boundary changes, it was still way down on the 44 taken by the party in 2012.

It marks the end of an era in Scotland’s biggest city. Labour have held the reins here for all but nine of the last 72 years.

Now it's the turn of the the SNP, but their failure to get the 43 seats needed for a majority administration sets the scene for a coalition with the Greens’ eight councillors, though Aitken did not rule out working with Labour.

“They’d have to change their behaviour,” she told The National.

Aitken, who was also the SNP’s local election campaign co-ordinator across Scotland, said she was disappointed not to have won a majority in the city, but denied the party had got its Single Transferable Vote strategy wrong. There had been some rumblings that the SNP put too many candidates up, effectively splitting their own vote.

“We knew that we were being ambitious,” she said. “But we also knew from the start in a PR system an overall majority is very difficult to achieve. What we are absolutely, emphatically, is the biggest party in Glasgow City Council.

“Labour have lost this election and we have won it. It’s a historic moment for Glasgow, it’s a historic moment for our party.”

There was no disappointment either from Rhiannon Spear, one of the SNP’s newest councillors. “We were so incredibly ambitious, and we were right to be ambitious,” she said.

Another notable victory for the party was Graham Campbell, a well-known local activist and former director of the African Caribbean Network. “The thing I’m most pleased about is that it actually didn’t matter too much that it was me,” he told us. “I wondered if being an African-Caribbean person would be an issue, and it really wasn’t.”

Last week Campbell looked almost certain to be Glasgow’s first black councillor. In the end, he was the second by mere minutes after Tory Ade Aibinu was elected in the Victoria Park ward.

The 28-year-old student at Glasgow Caledonian University, who is originally from Nigeria and who moved to Glasgow in 2008, is one of the bright young things of the party.

Aibinu joins six other Tory councillors including David Meikle, who has for the last five years been the Scottish Conservative's sole representative in Glasgow’s city chambers.

Another one to watch will be highly ambitious 19-year-old Euan Blockely, elected in Linn. Just last year he left Ukip after David Coburn stopped him from getting a place on the party’s Holyrood candidate list.

There were also wins for Ruth Davidson’s party in some of the most deprived areas in the city, including Shettleston and Calton – areas that have previously been Unionist if not Tory.

MSP Adam Tomkins said the results were not unexpected: “We ran a campaign in Glasgow that was very much focussed on target wards and we’ve been successful in every one of those targets,” he said.

In Partick East and Kelvindale, he added, the Tories were only 30 votes behind the SNP: “The last time a Conservative was elected in that part of the city was 20 years ago. We’ve gone from no representation in 20 years to practically winning first-past-the-post and getting in on first preferences.”

He added that the party came close in a number of other seats as well. “This is not our ceiling,” he said. “This is not our cap. We can go further. There is no no-go area for the Scottish Conservatives.”

In 2012 the Greens won five seats in Glasgow. Though they increased that tally by just two, there were some surprising breakthroughs for Patrick Harvie’s party, including the election of a councillor in Govan.

Greens have always done well in the leafy, middle-class areas of the city, but Allan Young is now their elected representatives for an area that, while slowly gentrifying, has for decades been one of the country’s most deprived.

Harvie was stunned a little by the Tory revival and says voters who put their faith in Conservative councillors will regret the choice they’ve made.

“Other parties have been very irresponsible in trying to use national issues to tell people that’s what this election’s about. As if people would pick up the phone to their councillor and say the bin needs emptying and just expect the answer: ‘no second referendum’. It’s facile and it’s patronising.”

Turnout in the city was 39.9 per cent, up seven points on 2012. There were a number of complaints about incorrectly completed ballot papers, with some wards having to discard hundreds of votes because people had used two crosses instead of numbering candidates in order of preference.

According to the BBC’s Philip Sim there were 42 occurrences of a party running more than one candidate in a ward in Glasgow. They were returned in alphabetical order in 36.