EDINBURGH EAST
Winner in 2016: Ash Denham (SNP)
HERE’S a possible pub quiz question: of the four parties that usually contest all of the constituencies in Scotland, which was the only one whose leader failed to win a constituency seat in the 2016 Holyrood election?
The answer is, of course, Labour, and the leader in question was Kezia Dugdale, but what you might be harder pressed to remember is that the constituency she failed to win was Edinburgh Eastern.
She was easily beaten by the SNP’s Ash Denham, and there was precious little sign of the traditional “leader’s bonus”.
The Labour vote slumped by 7%, which was only marginally less bad than the national figure of 9%.
In a way, the constituency was a slightly surprising choice for Dugdale (below), because the predecessor seat of Edinburgh East and Musselburgh had been won by the SNP even in 2007 when they were more or less level pegging with Labour nationally.
Kenny MacAskill’s win represented the SNP’s first parliamentary foothold in the capital. That said, his 7% margin of victory in the redrawn constituency in 2011 was surprisingly modest given the scale of the national swing from Labour to SNP.
There was nothing underwhelming about the SNP’s win in the overlapping Westminster seat of Edinburgh East in 2015 – Tommy Sheppard transformed a huge Labour majority of 9000 votes into an SNP majority of the same size.
Unlike so many of his SNP colleagues in Lothian, he had little difficulty in defending the constituency in 2017, and two years later his majority surged to a new high of more than 10,000 votes.
Ash Denham, meanwhile, has her own reasonably comfortable majority of 5000 votes to defend this year.
With no particular evidence that this is promising territory for any Labour fightback, a solid SNP hold should be on the cards.
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