Labour was once unchallenged in certain neighbourhoods – not any longer, writes MARK HENNESSY, London Editor, in Glasgow
ON THE Springburn Road in Colston in Glasgow, men for decades left every day for work in the shipyards, the railways or with Glasgow City Council. They did not simply vote Labour. They were Labour.
“A minute after you got the job, the union organiser was around to sign you up. A minute later, the Labour organiser was there to do the same,” says SNP member Ari Mack as he canvasses Colston Avenue, still sleepy on a bank holiday Monday.
The price for refusing the former, not that anyone ever really did, was no job. The price of not joining Labour was social exclusion: “If you didn’t join, you didn’t get invites to the dances, so you did. Everybody did,” he says.
The Maryhill-Springburn Scottish parliament constituency is a patchwork, with lower-middle-class districts alongside the high-rise flats of the Botany, so named because most of its 19th-century residents could expect little more than transportation to Australia.
Now Lord Martin of Springburn, Labour’s Michael Martin was for 30 years the area’s Westminster MP, becoming the first Catholic to be elected as speaker of the House of Commons before he was ousted because of his mishandling of the MPs expenses scandal.
However, SNP candidate Bob Doris, who served in the last Holyrood parliament, believes change is taking place in Maryhill-Springburn, and elsewhere: “People around here have begun to question what Labour has ever done for them. Round here, Labour is in retreat.”
He says locals have taken a dim view of the Labour-controlled Glasgow City Council’s decision to close 20 primary schools in the city. “People see that Labour has let them down. Labour’s appeal has always been, ‘We’ll protect your benefits’, whereas ours is, ‘We’ll help you to get a job’. Meanwhile, the aspirational middle-class vote has come over to us in a big way,” he says.
On the other hand, the SNP, which held power in Holyrood as a minority party after the last election, has not frightened the horses: “People see the SNP delivering: no tuition fees, a council tax freeze.”
For decades, the SNP attracted, or repelled voters by its demand for an independent Scotland, though for much of this campaign the SNP was careful not to push its ambitions too loudly, saying only that it would hold a referendum “at some point” over the next five years. Now, however, confidence is increasing as the opinion polls swing in its direction, leading party leader Alex Salmond to say that in a second term – even if leading another minority administration – he would have “the moral authority” to push for independence.
Salmond’s last push for a referendum failed because the other parties in Holyrood would not agree to one, but Doris believes the numbers in the next parliament will be different and so, too, will the political dynamic.
“The Liberal Democrats are going to be slaughtered. They will be the fourth party of Scottish politics, behind the Greens. They’ll need to get back into the centre ground of politics in Scotland. And that means supporting a referendum,” he argues.
The SNP’s confidence in Springburn stands in stark contrast to the atmosphere displayed a couple of hours earlier in the Lighthouse Gallery in the city, where Labour’s Scottish leader Iain Gray “relaunched” his party’s election campaign. The fact that a relaunch was needed says much about Labour’s fortunes.
In a 25-minute speech, Gray devoted most of his time to attacking Salmond, accusing him of “a rhetorical fantasy that falls apart in your hands”. Despite the bravado, Labour’s fears about May 5th were evident, with the latest opinion polls predicting that it could be 20 seats behind the SNP and some even saying Gray’s own seat is in jeopardy.
Elections, however, are fought street by street. Buoyed by the polls, the SNP still faces an uphill struggle in Maryhill, judging by Doris’s decision to run both as a constituency candidate and also on the regional list, where seats are shared out according to a party’s support across a region.
Clearly less sanguine than some, SNP councillor Billy McAllister, a prominent figure locally for standing up to the local drugs gang, which controls much of Scotland’s illegal trade, believes that old habits will die hard in Maryhill.
“I’ve three aunties living around here. They all think I am doing a good job, but they still vote Labour. One of them said to me the last time, ‘I nearly voted for you, but I just couldn’t in the end, with my husband’s picture looking down on me from the wall’.”