DUNFERMLINE
Winner in 2016: Shirley-Anne Somerville (SNP)
THERE’S no Holyrood constituency that better illustrates how fundamentally the indyref changed Scottish politics than Dunfermline.
Three years before the referendum, the seat was one of the many spectacular gains the SNP made in Labour heartlands en route to an overall majority.
But the new MSP, Bill Walker, was forced to resign in 2013 after being convicted of domestic violence, and in the resulting by-election Cara Hilton took the seat back for Labour with relative ease.
That result, taken in combination with the outcome of the 2012 local elections, left the impression that the scale of the SNP’s national triumph in 2011 had been a blip.
Many traditional Labour voters, although they had become a little more open to voting SNP if the circumstances were right, still tended to revert to their usual party by default.
By contrast, the swing to the SNP since the 2014 referendum seems to be built on much more solid foundations. Shirley-Anne Somerville, who lost out to Hilton in the by-election, regained Dunfermline for the SNP in the 2016 election on a substantial swing of 6%.
Meanwhile, there have been no fewer than three post-indyref elections to the overlapping Westminster constituency of Dunfermline and West Fife, and all of them have been won by the SNP’s Douglas Chapman, who recently became the party’s national treasurer.
He initially gained the seat in the 2015 landslide with a gargantuan 27% swing from Labour incumbent Thomas Docherty. In 2017, Hilton took over as the Labour candidate after losing the Holyrood seat, and came surprisingly close to winning due to Corbynmania.
However, Chapman clung on, and in the 2019 election Hilton slumped to an even lower Labour vote share than Docherty had managed in 2015.
It appears that since the indyref, the typical voter is a default SNP supporter who may occasionally consider voting Labour if there’s a strong enough reason – the exact opposite of the situation that applied prior to September 2014.
That said, Dunfermline isn’t quite as secure for the SNP as many former Labour heartland seats. Somerville’s margin of victory in 2016 was 14 percentage points, which sounds enormous, but means that on a uniform swing Labour could take the seat this year even if they’re around nine percentage points behind the SNP nationally.
In other words, Dunfermline is one of a relatively small number of constituency seats that Labour would have a roughly 50/50 chance of taking if they can manage the type of national result they secured under Jeremy Corbyn in 2017.
Even if they fall a little short of that, a higher than average local swing might get them over the line.
The fact that it was still possible for the 2017 result to occur after the indyref means there can be no room for SNP complacency.
However, so far there’s no sign of any Labour surge in the polls, and if the current state of play persists until election day, Somerville may actually have a chance of holding Dunfermline for the SNP with an increased majority.
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