This post covers the regional seats. Those seats roughly in the North of the city can be found here. The seats roughly in the North, and Rutherglen are here.
Well then, let’s take a look at the regional seats in this constituency. Notional results below:
| Party | Const. Seats | Region Votes | Region Votes % | Add. Members | Total Members |
| Labour | 9 | 81592 | 38.3% | 0 | 9 |
| SNP | 0 | 57621 | 27% | 5 | 5 |
| Lib. Dem. | 0 | 15127 | 7.1% | 1 | 1 |
| Conservative | 0 | 14324 | 6.7% | 1 | 1 |
| Green | 0 | 10911 | 5.1% | 0 | 0 |
| Additional Members | |
| 1. Bashir Ahmad/Anne McLaughlin* | 2. Sandra White |
| 3. Bob Doris | 4. Robert Brown |
| 5. Bill Kidd | 6. |
| 7. | Patrick Harvie |
Bashir Ahmad sadly died in 2009, and was replaced by Anne McLaughlin, Patrick Harvie was elected for the Greens in 2007, but has notionally lost his seat on the boundary changes.
In my constituency seat previews I said I thought two seats currently held by Labour would go the SNP and one seat, Glasgow Cathcart, was too close to call between Labour and the SNP. So we have two scenarios, one where the SNP makes two gains from Labour and one where it gets 3.
Scenario 1: Labour holds Glasgow Cathcart, SNP gains Glasgow Southside and Glasgow Kelvin
| Party | Const. Seats | 2007 | U-Swing | Regional Members | Total Members | Change (from notionals) |
| Labour | 7 | 38.3 | 45.4 | 1 | 8 | -1 |
| SNP | 2 | 27 | 32.3 | 4 | 6 | +1 |
| Conservatives | 0 | 6.7 | 5.1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Lib. Dems. | 0 | 7.1 | 3.8 | 0 | 0 | -1 |
| Greens | 0 | 5.1 | 6.1 | 1 | 1 | +1 |
Under this scenario the first three seats all go to the SNP, electing Humza Yousaf, a former staffer of deceased MSP Bashir Ahmad who is tipped as a future political notable, then re-electing Bob Doris and electing Sid Khan, a local businessman. The SNP’s MLAs are then followed by Patrick Harvie, the de facto leader of the Green Party who will be highly cheered by our projection currently showing them ahead of both the Tories and the Lib Dems. Harvie is fairly secure with the fourth seat in this projection. Labour gets seat number five, which goes to Hanzala Malik, a local councillor. The sixth seat goes to the SNP’s James Dornan, leader of the SNP’s local council group. The Tories get the final seat under this scenario. Two different members of the Glasgow list quit following an internal row over candidate selection. My understanding is that the Tory’s top ranked candidate is now Ruth Davidson, who was the party’s candidate in the Glasgow North East by-election in 2009.
With the last seat in the hands of the Conservatives it would take a drop in the Tory vote of only 0.1% for the party to lose its seat and for Labour to win a second seat instead. They would elect Drew Smith, the secretary of the Glasgow North constituency party. The Lib Dems would have to gain about 2% more to elect their top candidate, Katy Gordon, the party’s 2005 and 2010 candidate in Glasgow South, which she is also constituency chair of. The Greens would need to gain about 5% to elect their second candidate, Martha Wardrop, one of the co-leaders of the 5 Green councillors on Glasgow City Council. The SNP would need to gain about 2% of the vote from various sources in order to elect a fifth regional MSP. In this case they would elect Bill Kidd, a councillor.
Scenario 2: The SNP gain Glasgow Cathcart, Southside and Kelvin
| Party | Const. Seats | 2007 | U-Swing | Regional Members | Total Members | Change (from notionals) |
| Labour | 6 | 38.3 | 45.4 | 2 | 8 | -1 |
| SNP | 3 | 27 | 32.3 | 3 | 6 | +1 |
| Conservatives | 0 | 6.7 | 5.1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Lib. Dems. | 0 | 7.1 | 3.8 | 0 | 0 | -1 |
| Greens | 0 | 5.1 | 6.1 | 1 | 1 | +1 |
Seat 1: Humza Yousef (SNP) Seat 2: Hanzala Malik (Lab) Seat 3: Bob Doris (SNP) Seat 4: Patrick Harvie (Green) Seat 5: Drew Smith (Lab) Seat 6: Sid Khan (SNP) Seat 7: Ruth Davidson (Con)
Almost zero real change here. The only change being that with the gain of Cathcart Labour gets the second seat instead of the SNP. If Labour got a third seat, they’d elect Anne McTaggart, a local councillor. The last seat remains with the SNP, and so all the same swings apply as previous. There is a fly in the ointment however...
George Galloway and the Coalition Against the Cuts
Oh yes, Gorgeous George is back and this time it’s Glaswegian. Back when Galloway was a Labour MP he represented the Glasgow Hillshead and then the Glasgow Kelvin seat from 1987 until 2005. When RESPECT formed it decided to not run in Scotland due to the presence of the Scottish Socialist Party under famed MSP Tommy Sheridan, which had 6 MSPs at the time. RESPECT did not want to split the far-left vote. The destruction of Sheridan’s political career and the SSP with it led RESPECT to de facto back his successor party, Solidarity, which failed to get a single seat in 2007, but Sheridan did get fairly close to being elected in 2007.
There is clearly some evidence of a portion of the Glaswegian electorate who are willing to vote for the far-left with the right party, just Solidarity and the SSP are now almost totally discredited. In 2003, however, the SSP got 15.2% of the Glaswegian regional vote, putting it only a couple of percent behind the SNP. This was enough to elect two regional MSPs, Sheridan and Rosie Kane. It’s also worth noting that together far-left parties got 6.5% of the vote in 2007, which would have been enough for a seat.
Attempting to fill that gap is Galloway, who has aligned Solidarity, and a series of trade unionists, and far-left community activists behind him. He certainly has a fairly snazzy website but can he be elected?
To get elected Galloway probably needs at least 5% of the vote and to come ahead of the Lib Dems (which shouldn’t be too difficult) and preferably also the Greens or the Tories (much more so). These sorts of numbers are far too small to poll accurately, so the only real barometers are gut instinct and local buzz. From what I can tell, poking around local newspaper websites and on local internet forums there seems to be little in the way of a suspicion he’ll be elected. This is line with my general gut instinct about Galloway – his star has very much fallen since 2003 and particularly since his stunning 2005 win in Bethnal Green and Bow. He gained an extremely poor reputation as a MP, with the nadir probably being his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother. He got only 17.5% in the Poplar and Limehouse seat in 2010. The issues on which he ran in 2005 – particularly opposition to Tony Blair and the Iraq War are also not really relevant, and he has gained a reputation for supporting authoritarian regimes. Even amongst those on the far-left he is not particularly popular to my mind. While he was once a Glaswegian MP I also do not think that moving to London will have helped his local image.
All that said, he is a good orator, unquestionably, and if he is probably better known to Glaswegians than any of their current regional MSPs. Glasgow is also a very left-wing city and there is a small, but notable, population of Muslims in Glasgow (numbering about 33,000), which tends to represent Galloway and RESPECT’s core demographic (though, of course, I do not mean to suggest that Muslims in the city will vote for Galloway en masse).
Any Glaswegians who wish to comment on the Galloway campaign, I’d be more than happy to hear your thoughts, but my feeling is that he will fail to be elected and will probably do even worse than Solidarity in 2007. I do think there is space in the Scottish party system for a far-left political party, and that Glasgow is the best potential ground from which to launch one but I think that worn-out figures of questionable integrity like Sheridan and Galloway are not the ones to lead such a party, and that Solidarity, the SSP and RESPECT are labels which are equally unlikely to bring success, particularly while the far-left remains splintered between several forces.
Overall Summary
This can’t make particularly cheerful reading for Labour. While they remain dominant in Glasgow, our projections show them losing a seat overall, and the SNP liable to pick one up. It’s also not cheerful reading for the Tories and for the Lib Dems in particular. Looking at the Lib Dems realistically, I just don’t see them getting enough votes here to retain their seat. They are very weak in Glasgow as it is and it wouldn’t take much for them to lose their seat. The Tories can take comfort in that polls for Scottish Parliament elections generally underestimate them, but their candidate problems in Glasgow cannot help either public perception or raise the morale of their party activists. I suspect they will retain their seat but it will be quite close for them. Coming ahead of the Lib Dems and Galloway may prove key. Fortunately for them both these benchmarks should be quite doable. The Greens also have reason to celebrate – Patrick Harvie looks fairly solid for his re-election. That said, the usual warnings about it being difficult to get an accurate reading on the Greens apply, and a loss of 2% (which is Margin of Error stuff) would be enough to see them gone. They should certainly not be cocky. That said they should be able to pick up some support from students in the North of the city, particularly disaffected Liberal Democrats. Winning an elusive second seat appears to be beyond the party’s reach, however.
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