In an era often described as dominated by political disaffection, Harry, a 68-year-old floating voter from Glasgow East, has a different view of the coming general election. The longtime Labour voter says simply: “I think this election will change things,” as he discusses the country’s political future in a function room contained within a small redbrick, two-story block typical of the Tollcross suburb of the city.
Like so many others in Scotland, Harry is now far more supportive of the Scottish National party, amid predictions that the once safe Labour seat could be one of dozens to fall.
“If you look at the polls, this is going to be a hung parliament, and I think people will think twice before they vote this time. In the past, they were just cannon fodder for Labour,” he says.
He hopes that a cohort of SNP MPs at Westminster could force Labour to return to its true, socialist roots, giving Scotland much greater influence at Westminster. “I honestly believe that’s how it should work,” he added. A fellow panellist, Mark*, 35, agrees. “Scotland, for the first time in 30 years, has a significant role to play in this,” he said.
The pensioner is one of 12 now floating voters recruited for the first of five focus groups organised by qualitative polling firm Britain Thinks – working in partnership with the Guardian – in seats that exemplify where the complicated, multidimensional battle to control Westminster will be won and lost.
The days of the Tory-Labour swingometer are over: Ed Miliband’s prospects of striding confidently into No 10 partly depend on how far the party can stem the SNP tide in Scotland.
Glasgow East’s potential to deliver a wounding blow to Labour came from Lord Ashcroft’s recent polling of key battlegrounds: it predicted a 25.5% swing to the SNP, the greatest margin for the SNP of any Glasgow seat found by his surveys.
This ought to be secure Labour territory; for decades it had returned Labour MPs, MSPs and councillors. That ended in the summer of 2008, when the SNP’s John Mason won the Westminster seat in a byelection by the narrowest of margins – 365 votes.
It was retaken with a hefty 11,840 majority by Labour in the 2010 general election by Margaret Curran. She is now Labour’s shadow Scottish secretary, making Glasgow East even more highly prized for the SNP. Last September’s Scottish referendum has given the SNP good cause to be confident: Glasgow East, like nearly every part of the city, voted yes to independence.
Away from the focus group, in the Forge shopping centre in Parkhead, the pro-SNP mood is not difficult to find. Terri David is exactly the kind of voter who embodies Labour’s challenge.
A health service administrator in her early 60s, and a member of that intractable demographic of older women who had voted against independence in last autumn’s referendum, she nonetheless plans to vote for the SNP in the forthcoming general election.
“We’ve always been Labour, but I’ll probably vote SNP this time, even though I don’t want full independence. I just think they’ve done more for us,” she explains, taking a break from browsing.
Labour’s key message that a vote for the SNP will let the Tories back into Downing Street leaves her unmoved: “I just don’t see that happening. It’s a tactic of Labour, but if anything I think it will be a coalition with Alex Salmond looking out for us. We’ve always felt like the poor relation [at Westminster]. We need to get away from that.”
For Natalie McGarry, the SNP candidate hoping to oust Curran in May, the leap in SNP support is a consequence not only of the post-referendum nationalist surge but of historic Labour neglect. Senior Labour figures admit that was a key factor in their 2008 byelection defeat: the local party had atrophied and been in a sorry state before Curran took over.
“People have felt abandoned by Labour in this constituency for a long time,” says McGarry, sitting among boxes of SNP leaflets and bibs in a newly rented campaign shop on Westmuir Street, a short walk from the Forge. “A lot of people voted for them with a heavy heart, but when they shared the platform with the Tories during the referendum that covenant was broken once and for all,” she said.
And it is a view reflected back to McGarry that evening on the doorsteps of Garrowhill, a more comfortably middle-class pocket further east. Glasgow East spans a far more varied demographic than the chronically deprived Easterhouse housing schemes, spanning aspiring working class areas like Baillieston and Springboig, where Labour support is still strongest, to relatively well-off suburbs like Mount Vernon, Sandyhills and Garrowhill.
Knocking on doors in its well-tended cul-de-sac, McGarry gets a warm response as an SNP candidate, although not many householders appear to know who she is.
Canvassing previous Labour voters who were pro-independence or still undecided during the referendum, McGarry hears complaints that the party is no longer socialist and should not have sided with the Tories at the referendum. Curran admits she hears this too. “‘You were too invisible during the referendum campaign, you didn’t fight for Labour values enough’ – that’s the toughest message I’m getting back on the doorstep,” she says.
But McGarry’s canvass highlights two other developments that both SNP and Labour activists in Glasgow East are detecting. First, middle-class voters who habitually voted Labour to keep the SNP out are now doing the exact opposite. Second, the shift from Labour to undecided is as significant as from Labour to SNP. The canvass returns that evening gave 21 households to the SNP, nine to Labour, but 22 did not yet know how they would vote in May.
And many of those floating voters worry about whether a strong SNP vote will increase the chances of a Tory victory – one of Labour’s biggest weapons in this contest.
Brian, another member of the Guardian/BritainThinks focus group, said:
“You’re torn between the SNP and Labour, and where your heart is going to go. Your heart’s saying SNP but you’re going to vote Labour because you don’t want another Tory government.”
But there are still loyal Labour voters. Marshalling the tea pots a few miles north at Easterhouse Baptist church cafe, there is no doubt in Bob Holman’s mind: at 78, the dearly loved community activist says that voting Labour is “emotional”, regardless of the fact that he voted yes to independence.
Holman, who was responsible for then Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith’s “Easterhouse epiphany” about the damage caused by urban poverty, believes the mood on the housing schemes is turning towards the SNP, and that the final result “will swing on how many people don’t vote”. Glasgow East has a traditionally low turnout; in 2010 it managed 52.3% compared with a national average of 62.1%.
“I think Margaret Curran will just scrape in,” Holman predicts. “She’s been a good constituency MP, and she will get a big personal vote.” It is perhaps inevitable that locals recognise Curran’s name and face far more readily than McGarry’s. According to some Labour activists, there is one distinguishing feature that they would like voters to remember about McGarry – the fact that her partner David Meikle is a Conservative councillor for Glasgow City (the only one).
And they are not above raising this on the doorstep, though Curran insists: “Her personal life is her own business.” It is an early indication of how bruising this contest is likely to get, particularly if polling continues to tighten.
Fellow Labour supporter the Rev Sandy Weddell echoes Holman’s comment on apathy. “People here are so busy trying to survive,” he says. “I don’t know if the protest is against Labour or Westminster. People say ‘what has Labour done for us?’ But look around at all this new housing that’s come from a Labour council.”
Yet if apathy prevails it will benefit Curran more, as the deeper-rooted incumbent. But Frances Curran (no relation), the former Scottish Socialist party MSP who stood against Margaret Curran in the 2008 byelection – both lost to the SNP’s John Mason – offers a more positive interpretation.
“There has been a feeling in the schemes for a long time of quiet desperation, that it didn’t matter who got elected in the general election or the council, and the main problem was apathy,” she argues.
“But the yes campaign mobilised apathy, and turned it into participation. The idea that those people are going to switch to Labour doesn’t make sense.”
On the streets of Springboig in the late morning sunshine, Curran cuts a familiar figure, enjoying tooting car horns and welcoming handshakes. She returns to the party’s core Scottish message: “If I lose my seat, it is David Cameron who benefits.” House to house she repeats the question: “Are you staying with us? We want to get rid of him [Cameron]!”
How solid does she think the SNP vote is in Glasgow East? “I think it’s moved on from teaching Labour a lesson,” she says. “The electorate are now saying that for every election you have to earn my vote; there are no certainties. Scottish politics has changed.”
* Surnames of panellists have been withheld to ensure they are not deliberately targeted by canvassing or on social media in the early stages of the campaign.
