Winner in 2019: Patricia Gibson (SNP)
THE 15 miles of sea that separate the two component parts of the North Ayrshire and Arran constituency may have played a key role in originally bringing about the SNP dominance of Scottish politics that will be under threat this week.
Kenny Gibson’s razor-thin 48-vote victory in the equivalent Scottish Parliament seat of Cunninghame North in the 2007 Holyrood election was decisive in making the SNP the largest party for the first time, but Labour briefly threatened to challenge that result due to the large number of rejected ballots, with a particular focus on damaged votes that had come over the water from Arran.
The fact that the SNP were winning in the area as early as 17 years ago may be a clue that they have a better chance there on Thursday than in many other parts of the Central Belt, and the result from the 2019 general election confirms that.
Labour are the only realistic challengers, but they start from a distant third place, almost 35 points behind the SNP.
That means they would need to be around nine points ahead of the SNP nationally to gain the seat on a uniform swing. On the evidence from conventional polling, that leaves them on the fringes of contention at best.
Part of the explanation for this relative Labour weakness may be that the constituency, in common with the other Ayrshire seats, is more socio-economically mixed than the parts of Scotland where Labour’s position was most impregnable in the late 20th century.
The balance is sufficiently in favour of lower-income communities like Stevenston and Saltcoats to have reliably returned Labour MPs for three decades prior to the indyref, but there are also wealthier localities such as Fairlie and the Isle of Arran itself – which explains why the predecessor seat of Cunninghame North had a Tory MP as recently as 1987.
That said, it can be dangerous to leap to conclusions about the present-day political implications of relative affluence, as Arran vividly demonstrated by voting in favour of independence at the 2014 referendum.
The Tories are certainly much stronger in North Ayrshire and Arran than they are in the true former Labour heartlands. They took 31% of the local vote in 2019, six points above their national vote share, which was enough to put them comfortably in second place behind the SNP. That large pool of voters now holds the key to the result on Thursday.
A proportion of them will undoubtedly switch to Labour due to deep disaffection with the Sunak (below) administration, but as long as that only happens in line with the trends suggested by national polls, the SNP should hold the seat with a reduced majority.
But if the local swing from Tory to Labour is magnified by tactical anti-SNP considerations, the outcome will start to look much more uncertain.
In the SNP’s favour is that at least some Tory supporters may intuitively be sceptical about any claim that switching from the second-placed party to the third-placed party will somehow help to stop the first-placed party.
If Labour are sending out bar chart leaflets to pitch for tactical votes, they’re going to have to be considerably more creative than simply praying in aid the result of the last general election.
The constituency-level projections from polling companies have been a very mixed and contradictory bag in this campaign so far, but there are at least some that point to a fairly routine outcome in North Ayrshire and Arran, with Labour easily replacing the Tories in second place but not getting anything like the type of surge required to gain the seat, even after a sharp reduction in the SNP vote.
The Find Out Now projection, for example, has Patricia Gibson holding the seat for the SNP with 41% of the vote, Labour in second place on 27% and the Tories on 14%. If that proves to be anything like the real outcome, it will give the SNP some rare breathing space on a night that could see dozens of knife-edge battles with Labour across the central belt.
