MOTHERWELL
Winner in 2016:Clare Adamson (SNP)
MOTHERWELL was the scene of the first-ever SNP triumph in a parliamentary election. The future party leader Dr Robert McIntyre took advantage of the unusual circumstances at the end of the Second World War to secure a freakish Westminster by-election gain from Labour.
However, he only held the seat for a matter of weeks due to a General Election intervening, and he would probably have been disappointed to know that his success wasn’t going to generate any long-term local legacy.
Motherwell and Wishaw was not one of the seats the SNP took in their mid-1970s heyday – in fact, they didn’t even come close, with Labour holding on by a margin of 12.8% in October 1974.
In 2007, when the SNP took power at devolved level for the first time, the Scottish Parliament version of the seat remained firmly in the hands of the outgoing Labour First Minister Jack McConnell, who still enjoyed an overwhelming 23% lead over the SNP’s Marion Fellows. And even in 2011, when Labour’s national vote slumped and the SNP grabbed an overall majority, McConnell’s successor as Labour candidate John Pentland managed to squeeze out a very narrow victory over the new SNP candidate Clare Adamson.
It took the total carnage in former Labour heartlands in 2016 for Adamson to finally take the seat, although when she did it was with a large majority of more than 6000 votes.
Meanwhile, the Westminster seat fell to the SNP in 2015, as did practically every other seat in Scotland – but perhaps more significant is that Labour came within a whisker of taking it back in 2017. The SNP re-established a decent lead in 2019, but this is clearly a location in which Labour might well prosper if they can just get back into the game nationally.
The snag is that there is no sign whatever of them doing that. Assuming a uniform swing, they would need to cut the SNP’s national lead to around two percentage points before they’d take the Holyrood seat of Motherwell and Wishaw.
Instead, recent polls show them trailing by as much as 30 or 35 percentage points. That suggests Clare Adamson’s re-election bid should be reasonably plain sailing.
Also worthy of note is that the constituency has attracted an eclectic array of fringe candidates this year, including a Communist, and also Ukip, who continue their zombie post-Farage existence in Scotland.
But the most eye-catching name is Mark Meechan, aka “Count Dankula”, who ended up with a criminal conviction after posting a video on social media in which he coaxed a dog into giving a Nazi-style salute.
Perhaps surprisingly given his recent past in Ukip, he’ll be standing for the Scottish Libertarian Party, which according to its website is still solidly in favour of Scottish independence.
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