A squadron of Scottish National party activists and councillors, easily identified by their fluorescent yellow tabards, clipboards and evangelical smiles, are chapping on doors in the east end of Glasgow. The sun is shining in Calton and the party is picking up votes.
A few hundred metres away, a vast portrait of Jock Stein, one of Glasgow’s most famous sons, gazes down from the flank of Celtic’s football stadium. This is a city where identity and allegiances matter. And yet in the shadow of Celtic Park, from where Stein led his “Lisbon Lions” to become champions of Europe almost exactly 50 years ago, once deep-rooted loyalties to Labour are evaporating. In Thursday’s local government elections, the party is widely expected to once again fall to defeat by the SNP, removing it from its last major bastion of power in Scotland.
Stephen McDonald, a council worker in the roads department, locally born, is a case in point. “Labour are nothing here now,” he says. Disillusioned with the party, he is on the cusp of voting SNP for the first time. “I’m not too sure. Labour has treated us with disdain, but the thing with the SNP is independence: it puts me off voting for them. Other than that, I wouldn’t mind them running the city.”
Calton is emblematic of how much Glasgow has changed for other reasons. Once infamous for its deprivation, gangs and drug abuse, the neighbourhood is being rejuvenated.
Its decrepit low-rise blocks have been demolished and replaced with bright brick terraced homes and neat fenced gardens, often with new cars on the driveway. There are other sceptics among McDonald’s neighbours, but just up the road from him are the Bradys, a family committed heart and soul to the SNP and Scottish independence.
Rosie Brady says her three sisters and brother vote SNP, as do all five of her daughters: Erin has just turned 17 and will vote for the first time in the council elections on 4 May. Now that Holyrood controls local elections, all 16- and 17-year-olds in Scotland have been given the vote.
“I think the SNP care about people and they listen to the people,” says Rosie. “I think they will improve the city as a whole. I just think they’re the people for the job; they’re the way to go.
“They will stand up for Scotland.”
Buoyed by that intensity of support, the SNP believe they will win at least three of the ward’s four council seats. It won just one in 2012.
Sentiment has swung here and across much of the city in a remarkably short period of time. Glasgow became known as “Yes City” after it voted for independence in 2014, against the national tide. The referendum was a springboard for the SNP. It won all seven of Glasgow’s Westminster seats eight months later in May 2015, and then all eight of its Scottish parliament constituency seats the following year. In all six Glasgow council byelections since the referendum, the SNP has triumphed.
On Thursday, as one SNP fundraising leaflet unkindly but accurately put it, the party has a chance to “complete the set”, making it the dominant force in all areas of Scotland’s political life.
Labour is defending its control or shared control of 18 of Scotland’s 32 local authorities, including Edinburgh, Renfrewshire, North Lanarkshire, Inverclyde and Fife, but defeat in Glasgow would hurt the most. Losing control of Glasgow would deny Labour the shop window it desperately needs to have a meaningful chance of regaining lost ground.
Susan Aitken, SNP leader on the council, says the catalyst for Labour’s demise was the independence referendum in September 2014 but its roots can be traced further back than then. She accuses Labour of being “arrogant and making assumptions” about its right to power.
“It wasn’t just that they campaigned with the Tories [in the referendum campaign] but the kind of rhetoric that they used. The message they sent to people was … if Scottishness is part of your identity and that matters to you, essentially there’s no place for you in the Labour party,” she said.
“Not only that, we actually think you’re a bad person because nationalism is bad.”
Much too hinges on the SNP’s transformation as a political force under Nicola Sturgeon: as MSP for Glasgow Southside, she is the city’s most famous politician. “If we win this election, it will be on the back of how people feel about the Scottish government, and absolutely Nicola is the embodiment of that,” Aitken says.
Aitken is still hedging her bets. “I’m extremely wary of saying we will win, but we have set an ambition of winning a majority, and I believe our level of support justifies that position,” she says. Still deeply embedded in the city’s institutions, Labour currently has 41 councillors to the SNP’s 30, and the SNP may yet need to rely on Scottish Green councillors to secure overall control. “I don’t think Labour is finished in Glasgow. They will still win a fairly strong number of councillors.”
It is unclear how many councils Labour will actually lose on 4 May, but the outlook is bleak. Recent polls put its support at between 14% and 18%. The party is now reduced to one Scottish MP and sits in third place in Holyrood. So in three elections held in three successive years, it looks very much as if Labour will have lost everything. And that in turn could set the tone for the next general election five weeks later.
Labour’s leader Frank McAveety takes a different view. A former local government and sports minister at Holyrood who trades on being “Mr Glasgow”, he casts the SNP group hoping to replace his party as woefully inexperienced.
His campaign slogan will be “Glasgow needs a fighter”, and he is determined to keep the contest as heavily focused on the city as possible, one where Glasgow’s enemy is the SNP-controlled government in Edinburgh. Labour’s decline at national and UK level, and Corbyn’s increasing unpopularity as leader, forces him to frame this election as a local affair.
“Of course there’s a massive challenge because of recent election results,” he said. “But people know what they’re voting for [in Glasgow]; they understand that running this city requires a level of knowledge and experience.”
Despite Aitken’s references to Labour’s anti-independence stance three years ago, McAveety says there is a palpable sense that the city’s voters are irritated – “scunnered” – by Sturgeon’s renewed focus on an independence referendum, even among yes voters.
“This is a time when everybody has to get off this constitutional bandwagon and talk about real things. The SNP has for 10 years been cutting Glasgow’s budget,” McAveety said. “If we’re talking about identity politics, there’s a very strong Glasgow identity and a very strong sense of what makes us as a city.”
Aitken, for her part, wants to rename the council “the city government” if she wins. Challenged on whether Glasgow’s voters should feel worried that an SNP-run council would be controlled and directed by Sturgeon’s SNP government in Edinburgh, she said: “Absolutely not. The fact we’re saying we want to call ourselves a city government, some people see that as a challenge. I have to say the first minister has no problem with it at all – she admires that ambition. She admires us setting out our stall.”
Aitken accepts that she and her candidates, nearly half of whom are first-timers, have no experience of power, but insists that she too believes Glasgow is a “brilliant” city. She says she simply thinks the city can learn from others. “People listen to him and say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Are you seriously saying everything in Glasgow is fine?’ We have a 20-year life expectancy gap between the richest and poorest neighbourhoods in this city,” she says. “It’s foolish and arrogant to somehow say we can’t do it better.”
