EASTWOOD
Winner in 2016: Jackson Carlaw (Conservative)
ALTHOUGH there was a substantial Scottish Tory surge in both the 2016 Holyrood election and the 2017 Westminster election, there were a number of remarkable differences between the two results.
There were several constituencies where the Tories were barely at the races in 2016, but where they made a fairly effortless gain one year later. That can perhaps be partly explained by the realignment caused by the EU referendum, which occurred between the two elections. However, one of the constituencies that went exactly the same way in both years was Eastwood, and its Westminster equivalent of East Renfrewshire.
In 2016, the then Conservative deputy leader Jackson Carlaw took the Holyrood seat, bringing to an end a succession of Tory near misses against Labour’s Ken Macintosh, stretching all the way back to the inaugural devolved election in 1999. A rather more easily likeable Tory candidate in the shape of Paul Masterton completed the double in the Westminster seat in 2017. In both cases, the winning margin over the second-placed SNP was less than overwhelming, but the Tories must nevertheless have thought that normal service had resumed, and was here to stay, in what had once been a true-blue constituency.
The Westminster seat was continuously in Conservative hands for more than seven decades between 1924 and 1997. Even in Clement Attlee’s Labour landslide year of 1945, the Tory incumbent held on by the reasonably comfortable margin of 7%, and in subsequent years the majorities were enormous, peaking at 16,588 votes in 1955. In the run-up to the 1997 election, one of the main reasons that a complete Tory wipe-out in Scotland was presumed to be highly unlikely was that Eastwood (as the constituency was then called) looked like such a fortress. But Jim Murphy pulled off an extraordinary gain for Labour, thus helping to deliver a Tory-free Scotland – so never let it be forgotten that Murphy at least did one good thing for his country.
The Tory expectation was probably that Murphy would be a single-term MP, but he was shrewd enough to make great efforts to build up his personal profile in the local area. It was sometimes observed that his relationship with his constituents was more akin to that of an American congressman or senator. That helps explain why he not only defied the odds and held the seat for 18 years, but also built up astonishingly big majorities over the Tories, with the most impressive being his 10,420-vote victory margin in the 2010 General Election. The Conservatives never actually got their revenge on him – when he finally lost in 2015, it was to the SNP’s Kirsten Oswald, although that wasn’t much consolation for him given that he was Scottish Labour leader at the time and had been billed as the messiah who would make the post-indyref Nat surge vanish in a puff of smoke.
Murphy’s handiwork helped ensure that Eastwood has evolved from being a Tory-Labour battleground into primarily a Tory-SNP battleground. But which of those two parties currently has the upper hand? Whisper it softly, but it might just be the SNP. Oswald took the Westminster seat back from the Tories in 2019, and the number one reason was probably Brexit. In contrast to many of the other seats the Tories were defending that year, East Renfrewshire had overwhelmingly voted Remain.
That hadn’t seemed quite such an important factor in the 2017 General Election, probably because it was assumed that Theresa May would cobble together some kind of soft Brexit, but by 2019 it was clear that a national Conservative majority would trigger either a hard Brexit or a no deal Brexit. The tension between a Remain constituency and its Brexit-enabling MP became intolerable, and voters resolved the tension in the most natural way by returning to the SNP.
Logically the same thing should happen next week – although strictly speaking that wouldn’t be a “return” because the SNP have never previously held the Holyrood version of the seat. The only thing that might stand in their way is Jackson Carlaw’s personal vote. It may seem downright odd to independence supporters that there are people out there who will vote for Carlaw simply because they like his personality, but it takes all sorts.
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