Kilmarnock and Loudoun: winner in 2019 – Alan Brown (SNP)
THE SNP face a stiff test in Kilmarnock and Loudoun on July 4, as they do in all of the other former Labour seats they hold in the Central Belt – but they do have a secret weapon that mostly isn’t available to them elsewhere.
Quite simply, their roots run deeper in Kilmarnock. Although they didn’t win or come close to winning the constituency in their original heyday of the mid-1970s, that can be largely explained by the personal vote for Labour’s formidable Scottish secretary Willie Ross, who was the local MP.
By the 1990s, Alex Neil (below) was the SNP’s own star candidate and he repeatedly outperformed the trends for his party nationally, peaking at almost 35% of the vote in 1997. That still wasn’t enough to capture the seat but it laid the groundwork that allowed the Holyrood version of the constituency to become a rare example of a genuine Labour-SNP marginal in the Central Belt as soon as devolved elections began in 1999.
After two near misses, the Scottish Parliament seat finally fell to the SNP’s Willie Coffey in 2007. That was the election in which the SNP first took power, but they were virtually tied with Labour in the national popular vote, suggesting that Kilmarnock and Loudoun is somewhere that the SNP can win even when the two main parties are at rough parity with each other across Scotland, which may prove to be the case next week.
Recent Westminster results confirm the SNP’s particular local strength – their incumbent MP Alan Brown held the seat with 51% of the vote in 2019 six points higher than the national SNP vote share.
And his lead over Labour, who had remarkably slipped to third place behind the Tories, was around 32 percentage points, compared to an equivalent national lead of 26 points.
That means the SNP can afford to be as much as five points behind Labour nationally in July, and would still win Kilmarnock and Loudoun on a uniform swing.
Straightforward Scottish patriotism may also be a factor in the SNP’s favour. More than 75% of the constituency’s population report having an exclusively Scottish national identity, higher than in the overwhelming majority of constituencies and well above the Scotland-wide 65%. That probably translates into a disproportionately high number of independence supporters. It’s not known exactly how Kilmarnock and Loudoun voted in the 2014 indyref but the wider local authority area of East Ayrshire produced a Yes vote of 47%, two points higher than the national Yes percentage.
The constituency is estimated to have voted against Brexit by a margin of 60.5% to 39.5%. That’s only a very slightly smaller gap than was seen across Scotland, so there shouldn’t be any cause for concern that the SNP’s stance in favour of EU membership, freedom of movement and immigration in general will be a problem with local public opinion.
Nevertheless, it’s testament to just how tough this General Election is proving for the SNP in the Central Belt that even an unusually favourable constituency could be a very close-run thing if the conventional national polls are right.
A minority of polls have even shown a big enough Labour lead to suggest the seat could change hands. The constituency-level projections from polling companies have so far been a mixed bag, with YouGov putting the SNP just ahead of Labour in the seat by 38% to 36%, but More In Common putting them just behind by 36% to 33%.
Alan Brown can probably only look forward to a relaxing election night if there’s a telling improvement for the SNP in the polls over the remaining week of the campaign. That could yet happen, and if so Kilmarnock and Loudoun might turn out to be one of the more comfortable of a large number of SNP holds in the central belt.
But failing that, the SNP will be urgently looking to Brown to eke out any sort of victory to ensure that a possible sea of red from coast to coast is interrupted by a satisfying dollop of yellow. On balance, the odds are probably just about in his favour.
