State of the Union
We asked an SR panel
if the break-up of the UK
is now likely
Kenneth Roy
In Shotts, a key to
the SNP’s stunning
rout of Labour
R D Kernohan
It will look like
a national crisis.
It may produce one
Ian Hamilton
Why I didn’t
vote in
this election
Walter Humes
Despite the euphoria,
there is still an underlying
malaise in Scottish politics
State of the Nation
The Scottish Review’s
analysis of the seats,
region by region
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06.05.11
No. 400
The final score
SNP
Central Scotland (6)
Airdrie and Shotts
Cumbernauld and Kilsyth
East Kilbride
Falkirk East
Falkirk West
Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse
Glasgow (5)
Glasgow Anniesland
Glasgow Cathcart
Glasgow Kelvin
Glasgow Shettleston
Glasgow Southside
Highlands and Islands (6)
Argyll and Bute
Caithness, Sutherland and Ross
Inverness and Nairn
Moray
Na h-Eileanan an Iar
Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch
Lothian (8)
Almond Valley
Edinburgh Central
Edinburgh Eastern
Edinburgh Pentlands
Edinburgh Southern
Edinburgh Western
Linlithgow
Midlothian North and Musselburgh
Mid Scotland and Fife (8)
Clackmannanshire and Dunblane
Dunfermline
Kirkcaldy
Mid Fife and Glenrothes
North East Fife
Perthshire North
Perthshire South and Kinross-shire
Stirling
North East Scotland (10)
Aberdeen Central
Aberdeen Donside
Aberdeen South and Kincardine North
Aberdeenshire East
Aberdeenshire West
Angus North and Mearns
Angus South
Banffshire and Buchan Coast
Dundee City East
Dundee City West
South Scotland (4)
Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley
Clydesdale
Kilmarnock and Irvine Valley
Midlothian South, Tweeddale and Lauderdale
West Scotland (6)
Clydebank and Milngavie
Cunninghame North
Cunninghame South
Paisley
Renfrewshire North and West
Strathkelvin and Bearsden
Total 53
Labour
Central Scotland (3)
Coatbridge and Chryston
Motherwell and Wishaw
Uddingston and Bellshill
Glasgow (4)
Glasgow Maryhill and Springburn
Glasgow Pollok
Glasgow Provan
Rutherglen
Lothian (1)
Edinburgh Northern and Leith
Mid Scotland and Fife (1)
Cowdenbeath
South Scotland (2)
Dumfriesshire
East Lothian
West Scotland (4)
Dumbarton
Eastwood
Greenock and Inverclyde
Renfrewshire South
Total: 15
Conservatives
South Scotland (3)
Ayr
Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire
Galloway and West Dumfries
Total: 3
Liberal Democrats
Highlands and Islands (2)
Orkney
Shetland
Total: 2
In Shotts, a key to
the SNP’s stunning
rout of Labour
Kenneth Roy
Photograph by Islay McLeod
Friday, 12 noon
After fronting Reporting Scotland, I would dash, make-up still intact, to Central Station in time to make the slow, early evening train to Edinburgh. I am working from memory here, but I think it stopped at 20 stations, from one of which I had a stiff walk home. As often as not, I was joined by a sporting institution called Jim Rodger, a football reporter with the Daily Record, who talked – well, a lot. Jim left the train at Shotts, one of the many Labour seats lost last night to the Scottish National Party.
I should have listened to Jim Rodger more than I did; I realise that too late. I longed only for silence; instead, I had the company of Jim. He had more contacts in Scottish football than any man alive, none of whom interested me, but he also possessed a deep knowledge of Lanarkshire Labour politics. We spoke of our mutual friend – possibly only acquaintance in my case – Mick McGahey, then a power in the land, whose father was a coal miner in Shotts when Mick was born. But the McGaheys were minor figures in Shotts compared with the profound symbolic importance of the Herbisons.
Peggy Herbison, born in 1907, graduated from Glasgow University in 1928, MA with honours. There were 22 mines in her native village (‘small rural town’ as it is erroneously described on Wikipedia) when she became a school-teacher. A personal achievement considered routine by our standards was momentous then. She went on to be a minister in Harold Wilson’s reforming 1964 government, resigning on an issue of principle when Wilson refused to increase the child allowance. She was the first woman to be lord high commissioner of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Peggy Herbison is now regarded as an influential figure in the development of Britain’s welfare state.
I never met her. I wish I had. The internal life of such places as Shotts once interested me so much that I persuaded the BBC to let me make a programme about their cultural traditions – their pipe and brass bands, their Burns suppers, their literary societies and drama clubs. When I got a bus at Easter to Iain Gray’s constituency, and it stopped at a place called Wallyford, I could think only of the Wallyford Miners’ Welfare Dramatic Society which once took part in the community drama festival with my father’s pampered troupe from Bonnybridge, where we made only stoves. All that is gone. Well, a good thing too, in one way. Coal-mining was a desperate business. I think the brothers of the Socialist Labour Party who would bring it back should be encouraged to do so, but only if they provide the labour personally.
But what happened to the creativity? Is it gone too? I looked at Wallyford on Good Friday 2011 and shuddered. It has been reduced to a large car park and the usual ‘social housing’, as the remaining council schemes have been rebranded. I look at Islay McLeod’s photograph of Mary Anne’s Cafe in Shotts with the same chilling presentiment. There is an emptiness. There is less than nothing left.
A distant relative of Peggy Herbison, the sitting MSP Karen Whitefield, disappeared last night in the national landslide. Alan Watkins, who died a year ago this weekend, called Labour the people’s party, latterly with a certain sour irony. The people’s party has been vanquished even from Shotts.
Ms Whitefield – not a form of address approved by the Scottish Christian Party, which would have the term ‘Ms’ banished from the language – was defeated after a bitter personal contest with the SNP’s Alex Neil. I once gave Mr Neil a sort of a job. The Scottish Labour Party, not to be confused with the party of that name which is going down with all hands today, but a breakaway sect formed by Jim Sillars, Alex Neil and others, had foundered and Alex Neil’s immediate prospects with it. He launched a personal comeback as the presenter of a Sunday morning political programme on the new radio station I was launching in the south-west of Scotland. I remember him as bright and combative. He went on to be brighter and more combative still. Alex Salmond, I believe, once said that he would not be able to work with Alex Neil as leader of the Scottish National Party. When I heard this, I laughed and thought: that’s my boy.
But here’s the key to much of what is going on. Alex Neil would have sounded, looked, felt, perfectly safe to the voters of Shotts as the weather broke suddenly and the heavens opened for Scotland’s earthquake. Alex Neil is himself from a mining background. He is about as left-wing as it gets this side of the mainstream. He speaks the language of the people. He would have appreciated my little BBC documentary on the artistic traditions of the Scottish miners. He would have known instinctively of the importance of the Wallyford Miners’ Welfare Dramatic Society to the folk memory of working-class Scotland. Why would Shotts not vote for such a man? He was, is, one of that community. He is bred from the same bone.
How clever of the SNP to nominate him for the seat. It is the brilliance of this strategy, adapted to local need and circumstance, which has stunned Labour and swept the nationalists to its epic victory.
Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review
analysis of the seats,
region by region
Click here
Click here
Click here
Click here
Click here
Click here
Click here
06.05.11
No. 400
Airdrie and Shotts
Cumbernauld and Kilsyth
East Kilbride
Falkirk East
Falkirk West
Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse
Glasgow Anniesland
Glasgow Cathcart
Glasgow Kelvin
Glasgow Shettleston
Glasgow Southside
Argyll and Bute
Caithness, Sutherland and Ross
Inverness and Nairn
Moray
Na h-Eileanan an Iar
Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch
Almond Valley
Edinburgh Central
Edinburgh Eastern
Edinburgh Pentlands
Edinburgh Southern
Edinburgh Western
Linlithgow
Midlothian North and Musselburgh
Clackmannanshire and Dunblane
Dunfermline
Kirkcaldy
Mid Fife and Glenrothes
North East Fife
Perthshire North
Perthshire South and Kinross-shire
Stirling
Aberdeen Central
Aberdeen Donside
Aberdeen South and Kincardine North
Aberdeenshire East
Aberdeenshire West
Angus North and Mearns
Angus South
Banffshire and Buchan Coast
Dundee City East
Dundee City West
Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley
Clydesdale
Kilmarnock and Irvine Valley
Midlothian South, Tweeddale and Lauderdale
Clydebank and Milngavie
Cunninghame North
Cunninghame South
Paisley
Renfrewshire North and West
Strathkelvin and Bearsden
Labour
Coatbridge and Chryston
Motherwell and Wishaw
Uddingston and Bellshill
Glasgow Maryhill and Springburn
Glasgow Pollok
Glasgow Provan
Rutherglen
Edinburgh Northern and Leith
Cowdenbeath
Dumfriesshire
East Lothian
Dumbarton
Eastwood
Greenock and Inverclyde
Renfrewshire South
Conservatives
Ayr
Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire
Galloway and West Dumfries
Orkney
Shetland
Kenneth Roy
I should have listened to Jim Rodger more than I did; I realise that too late. I longed only for silence; instead, I had the company of Jim. He had more contacts in Scottish football than any man alive, none of whom interested me, but he also possessed a deep knowledge of Lanarkshire Labour politics. We spoke of our mutual friend – possibly only acquaintance in my case – Mick McGahey, then a power in the land, whose father was a coal miner in Shotts when Mick was born. But the McGaheys were minor figures in Shotts compared with the profound symbolic importance of the Herbisons.
Peggy Herbison, born in 1907, graduated from Glasgow University in 1928, MA with honours. There were 22 mines in her native village (‘small rural town’ as it is erroneously described on Wikipedia) when she became a school-teacher. A personal achievement considered routine by our standards was momentous then. She went on to be a minister in Harold Wilson’s reforming 1964 government, resigning on an issue of principle when Wilson refused to increase the child allowance. She was the first woman to be lord high commissioner of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Peggy Herbison is now regarded as an influential figure in the development of Britain’s welfare state.
I never met her. I wish I had. The internal life of such places as Shotts once interested me so much that I persuaded the BBC to let me make a programme about their cultural traditions – their pipe and brass bands, their Burns suppers, their literary societies and drama clubs. When I got a bus at Easter to Iain Gray’s constituency, and it stopped at a place called Wallyford, I could think only of the Wallyford Miners’ Welfare Dramatic Society which once took part in the community drama festival with my father’s pampered troupe from Bonnybridge, where we made only stoves. All that is gone. Well, a good thing too, in one way. Coal-mining was a desperate business. I think the brothers of the Socialist Labour Party who would bring it back should be encouraged to do so, but only if they provide the labour personally.
But what happened to the creativity? Is it gone too? I looked at Wallyford on Good Friday 2011 and shuddered. It has been reduced to a large car park and the usual ‘social housing’, as the remaining council schemes have been rebranded. I look at Islay McLeod’s photograph of Mary Anne’s Cafe in Shotts with the same chilling presentiment. There is an emptiness. There is less than nothing left.
A distant relative of Peggy Herbison, the sitting MSP Karen Whitefield, disappeared last night in the national landslide. Alan Watkins, who died a year ago this weekend, called Labour the people’s party, latterly with a certain sour irony. The people’s party has been vanquished even from Shotts.
Ms Whitefield – not a form of address approved by the Scottish Christian Party, which would have the term ‘Ms’ banished from the language – was defeated after a bitter personal contest with the SNP’s Alex Neil. I once gave Mr Neil a sort of a job. The Scottish Labour Party, not to be confused with the party of that name which is going down with all hands today, but a breakaway sect formed by Jim Sillars, Alex Neil and others, had foundered and Alex Neil’s immediate prospects with it. He launched a personal comeback as the presenter of a Sunday morning political programme on the new radio station I was launching in the south-west of Scotland. I remember him as bright and combative. He went on to be brighter and more combative still. Alex Salmond, I believe, once said that he would not be able to work with Alex Neil as leader of the Scottish National Party. When I heard this, I laughed and thought: that’s my boy.
But here’s the key to much of what is going on. Alex Neil would have sounded, looked, felt, perfectly safe to the voters of Shotts as the weather broke suddenly and the heavens opened for Scotland’s earthquake. Alex Neil is himself from a mining background. He is about as left-wing as it gets this side of the mainstream. He speaks the language of the people. He would have appreciated my little BBC documentary on the artistic traditions of the Scottish miners. He would have known instinctively of the importance of the Wallyford Miners’ Welfare Dramatic Society to the folk memory of working-class Scotland. Why would Shotts not vote for such a man? He was, is, one of that community. He is bred from the same bone.
How clever of the SNP to nominate him for the seat. It is the brilliance of this strategy, adapted to local need and circumstance, which has stunned Labour and swept the nationalists to its epic victory.
