Livingston: winner in 2019: Hannah Bardell (SNP)
FOR connoisseurs of hysterical over-reactions to election results, one of the all-time classics must surely be the TV news report about the outcome of the 2005 parliamentary by-election in Livingston, which had been caused by the sudden death of the Labour incumbent MP and former foreign secretary Robin Cook.
The concluding words threw the usual guidelines on impartiality to the wind by declaring that the SNP’s defeat meant that their hopes of taking power for the first time in the 2007 Holyrood election “lay in tatters”.
The logic was that West Lothian was a rare area of relative strength for the SNP in the Central Belt – it had been the scene of one of their earliest historical breakthroughs when Billy Wolfe took 23% of the vote against Labour’s Tam Dalyell in a landmark 1962 by-election, and, the theory went, if they couldn’t win there, they couldn’t win anywhere.
But, of course, history records that the SNP did in fact win power at the 2007 Holyrood election, and Livingston was one of their key constituency gains en route.
Their local margin of victory over Labour was 2.6 percentage points, slightly better than the equivalent national lead of only 0.7 points.
That could offer some encouragement for the SNP, because it suggests they’re capable of winning in Livingston when the Scotland-wide race is tight.
However, the most important ingredient in a first-past-the-post election may now be missing, because Bardell’s lead over Labour in 2019 was 25 percentage points, slightly less than the national SNP lead over Labour of 26 points.
A relatively modest boundary revision hasn’t changed that equation at all, meaning that on a uniform swing Labour can be expected to gain the constituency if they have any sort of national lead over the SNP, and might even win if they are fractionally behind nationally.
It’s not known exactly how Livingston voted in the 2014 indyref, but the figures for the West Lothian council area were Yes 45%, No 55%, identical to the national results. The one glimmer of hope is that 69% of the constituency’s population report having an exclusively Scottish national identity, higher than the Scotland-wide figure of 65%.
All that can be reasonably deduced is that Livingston is placed right in the heat of the SNP-Labour Central Belt battlefield, and although Bardell has a realistic chance of returning to Westminster for a fourth successive term, her position is far from secure. This one could be a nailbiter.
