Lothian East: winner in 2019: Kenny MacAskill (elected as SNP, switched to Alba in 2021)
WHEN total Labour dominance among Scottish seats at Westminster was suddenly replaced by total SNP dominance at the 2015 General Election, one of the big symbolic “changing of the guard” moments was the defeat of the then shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander at the hands of 20-year-old Mhairi Black.
Labour will now be hoping Alexander proves to be the bookend at both sides of a curtailed era of SNP majorities, because if he wins Lothian East and returns to being an MP, he will be the poster boy for any wider Labour victory in Scotland, and could potentially hold one of the great offices of state by the end of next week.
That’s a thoroughly depressing prospect for independence supporters, but it has to be said that he’s conveniently loaded the dice in his own favour by standing in a constituency where the SNP are far more vulnerable than in his former Paisley and Renfrewshire South where he was humbled by Black.
Lothian East was known until this year’s election as East Lothian (which in a rare point of cross-party consensus everyone agrees was a far better and more natural name), and it was one of the handful of Scottish seats that Labour regained in 2017 under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
Although the SNP took it back in 2019, they did so with just 36% of the vote, nine points lower than their national vote share and 14 points lower than Black managed in her own seat.
In many constituency races, 36% would have been a losing total, but it was enough for the SNP in East Lothian because the local Unionist vote was split almost down the middle between Labour, who took 29.5%, and the Tories, who took 26.5%.
Probably the decisive factor was that many Conservative supporters were caught in two minds over whether their own party or Labour were the most promising anti-SNP tactical option, given that Labour had the incumbent MP but were clearly going backwards, whereas the Tories themselves were starting from a strong third place in what was a genuine three-way marginal seat.
This year, there isn’t any sense of confusion or suspense over how the Unionist vote will break in Lothian East. If national poll trends hold true, Alexander can expect to be able to rely on a local Labour vote share well into the 40s, leaving the Tories in the dust.
That almost certainly means the SNP will have to improve on their own 36% share to have any chance of winning again, and there’s precious little evidence in the history of the constituency that they have the ability to do that.
It’s true they took 42.5% of the vote when they won East Lothian in their post-indyref 2015 landslide, but that was seven points below their national performance, again confirming the pattern that the SNP tend to do less well in East Lothian than nationwide. In the current circumstances that could point to a sub-30 vote share and probable defeat.
At one point, Alexander probably anticipated that his advantage over the SNP would be even greater due to a split in the pro-independence vote.
The winning SNP candidate in 2019 was Kenny MacAskill, who defected to Alba two years later and was widely expected to take on his former party in the constituency. But MacAskill has taken observers by surprise with a decision to contest Alloa and Grangemouth instead. Alba will still have a candidate in Lothian East, and are blessed with a very useful Plan B in being able to field George Kerevan, who was the local SNP MP between 2015 and 2017.
But they are ripping up the standard playbook for a small party that has benefited from a defection. Normally the tactic would be to milk the benefits of incumbency for all they’re worth and then flood the constituency with all the activists at the party’s disposal, thus creating a localised bubble-like by-election atmosphere.
The latter is unlikely to happen because Alba are spreading their resources more thinly by standing in one-third of Scottish constituencies. It remains to be seen whether any incumbency bonus at all will actually be detectable in Kerevan’s vote share.
Ultimately, though, how much the pro-independence vote is split may not really matter, because the logic of the Lothian East electoral arithmetic points inexorably towards a Labour gain. We must all brace ourselves for Douglas Alexander being someone important again.
