Yes Election #52: Aberdeen Donside went from 'miracle gain' to heartland

ABERDEEN DONSIDE

Winner in 2016: Mark McDonald (SNP)

ABERDEEN’S most northern constituency has been in SNP hands for several years longer than the party have been in government.  

The late Brian Adam first gained it from Labour in 2003 at a time when the SNP’s national vote was slumping by 5%, and indeed when there was a slight national swing from SNP to Labour.  

He had also come very close to grabbing the seat in the inaugural Holyrood vote in 1999 when Labour enjoyed by far their best national result to date in a devolved election.

That might give the impression that northern Aberdeen had long been unusually fertile territory for the SNP, but nothing could be further from the truth. The Westminster constituency of Aberdeen North was not one of the 11 Scottish seats that the SNP took at their pre-devolution high watermark of October 1974.  

In fact, they didn’t even come within light years of taking it, and Labour held on by a margin of more than 21 percentage points.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the SNP usually polled lower in the constituency than they did nationally. For example, in 1979 when a young Maureen Watt was the candidate, the SNP took 13% of the vote locally compared to a Scotland-wide figure of 17%.

The earliest speck of an indication that things might swing the other way came in 1992 when the SNP’s James McGugan took 24% in Aberdeen North, a touch better than the SNP’s national performance.

But ironically when Adam stood for the first time in 1997, he failed to set the heather alight and the SNP slipped back slightly.  

Alasdair Allan, who later became the MSP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, was the SNP’s standard bearer in the 2001 UK General Election and substantially outpolled the party’s national percentage vote – but of course by that point he was riding the momentum from Adam’s near miss in the first Holyrood election.

So it appears that devolution as an event was sufficient to dramatically change voting patterns in northern Aberdeen, in a way that wasn’t so much the case in most of the central belt.

Inevitably, the progressive strengthening of the SNP as a national electoral force since 2003 has transformed the Holyrood version of the constituency from what once seemed like a miracle SNP gain into an extremely safe SNP heartland seat.  

The only setback along the way came in the 2013 by-election caused by Adam’s tragic death, when the SNP vote dipped by more than 13 points from the 2011 result.  

That might be partly explained by the loss of Adam’s personal vote, but it was also in line with other Holyrood by-elections at around the same time which suggested the SNP were struggling to maintain the exceptionally high support they enjoyed when winning their 2011 overall majority.

Nevertheless, Adam’s successor as SNP candidate, the former list MSP Mark McDonald, still won the by-election by a decent margin of 2000 votes.

The dramatic realignment caused by the 2014 independence referendum ensured the SNP’s dip was only temporary, and in 2016 McDonald bounced back to record an even bigger win in Aberdeen Donside than Adam had managed five years earlier, with Labour slipping to an unprecedented third place.  

Meanwhile, Kirsty Blackman (above) has been elected as the SNP’s Westminster MP for the expanded Aberdeen North constituency on three occasions since the indyref.  The two most recent of those results offer strong clues that Labour are unlikely to be competitive in the Holyrood seat this year.  

In 2017, Aberdeen North was not one of the seats that Labour came close to taking as a result of the Corbyn surge, and in 2019 Labour nosedived to a dismal 13% of the vote, well behind the Tories in third place.

Scandal has forced Mark McDonald out of the SNP – and out of politics – since his 2016 win, but the new SNP candidate Jackie Dunbar should be assured of a big majority on May 6.