Winner in 2019 of predecessor seat of Motherwell and Wishaw – Marion Fellows (SNP)
CONTRARY to popular belief, it was Motherwell rather than Hamilton that elected Scotland’s first-ever SNP parliamentarian.
The unusual circumstances of a wartime by-election in April 1945 – when the Tories and Labour were still sharing power at Westminster and thus didn’t stand candidates against each other – provided an opening for the SNP’s party secretary Robert McIntyre to make a winning pitch to a local electorate hungry for a proper choice.
But he was unfortunate that a general election was called just three months later, meaning that he lost his seat before having had a chance to properly establish himself or his party on the national stage. Unlike the Hamilton result 22 years later, it’s doubtful whether his victory left any real long-term legacy.
What it did succeed in doing, though, was buttressing Motherwell’s reputation for political radicalism and unpredictability. In 1922, the constituency had also been the first in Britain to elect a Communist Party MP, Walton Newbold.
So do traces of that almost revolutionary spirit survive into the present day, and if so, could that be of help to the SNP as they seek to fend off a resurgence in the newly-redrawn constituency of Motherwell, Wishaw and Carluke from a modern Labour Party that are very much a small-c conservative version of themselves?
The evidence is mixed. The outgoing Motherwell and Wishaw constituency was certainly at the vanguard of the SNP’s post-indyref breakthrough at Westminster, with Marion Fellows, above, gaining the seat from Labour in 2015 with an extraordinary 56.5% of the vote.
However, in the two subsequent general elections, her vote dropped back to a level only a little higher than the SNP national share, which in 2017 gifted Labour an unexpected opportunity to grab the seat back at their first attempt.
They came within just a 0.7 percentage point margin of doing so. That near miss will set alarm bells ringing that the constituency is exactly the sort that Labour can be expected to gain now that they are performing significantly better in the polls than they were in 2017.
Further clues that Motherwell may not be one of the SNP’s areas of greatest underlying strength are provided by the election results in the equivalent Scottish Parliament constituency, which did not fall to the SNP until 2016. That means Labour held it even when the SNP were being elected to power nationally in both 2007 and 2011.
In the case of 2007, that can be partly explained by a “leader’s bonus” for the incumbent first minister Jack McConnell, who was the local Labour MSP. But there was no such alibi in 2011, when McConnell was no longer the candidate and when Motherwell and Wishaw was one of only 20 out of 73 constituencies in Scotland that the SNP failed to win.
On the other hand, though, that happened prior to the 2014 independence referendum, when the constituency was one of the minority known to have voted Yes. As in other parts of west-central Scotland, that event seems to have provided a moment of sudden clarity that caused the relationship between the Labour Party and their traditional voters to totally break down.
But the problem for the SNP in the coming days is that polls suggest this year’s election is the first since the independence referendum in which Labour’s hardline rejectionism on independence is not proving to be a barrier for Yes voters in switching back to Labour in places like Motherwell.
The constituency-level projections from polling companies suggest that it is happening to a big enough extent to put the SNP in trouble locally. Survation has Labour ahead of the SNP in Motherwell, Wishaw and Carluke by a margin of 54% to 25%.
That it’s been possible for such a particularly sharp anti-SNP swing to occur in a seat with disproportionately high independence support may lead the SNP to ponder whether a stronger emphasis on independence in this campaign could have shored up their position, and indeed could possibly still do so in the closing days.
An almighty final push on the ground may be essential if the SNP are to have any chance of keeping the flame burning bright in the very place it all started for them back when the world was still at war.
