Post by Robert Waller on Aug 5, 2022 9:40:31 GMT
“The King sits in Dunfermline town
Drinking a blood red wine,
"Where can I get a good sea captain
To sail this ship of mine?"
Sir Patrick Spens sounds like the name of a Tory knight of the shire from the 1950s, but aside from being the doomed figure of a Scottish ballad from (at least) the 18th century, one thing that Dunfermline has never sought has been a Conservative MP. The seat in which the town is located has had a Scottish Nationalist member since 2015, was represented by Labour for most of the period between 1922 and that date. However it has had a Liberal Democrat MP in the shape of Willie Rennie as recently as 2006-10, following a much more distant tradition that saw Coaltion Liberals win in 1918 and 1931, and even before then, when Dunfermline was part of the Stirling District of Burghs, was solidly represented by Liberals – indeed it was Campbell-Bannerman’s seat from 1868 to his death very shortly after leaving the office of Prime Minister in 1908.
All this is despite Dunfermline having a truly distinguished and indeed royal history. For 500 years Dunfermline was in effect Scotland’s capital, and in its fine abbey is buried a national hero, Robert the Bruce, among eight kings, five queens, six princes and two princesses of the royal Scottish house. It was also the birthplace of the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, whose statue still stands in Pittencrieff Park, and extensive oasis of green just west of the town centre below the abbey. There tends to be dissent when I stress what a distinguished set of historic buildings Dunfermline has in its centre. Some prefer to agree with the jeremiads of the former Independent on Sunday and Granta editor Ian Jack, who went to the high school here, when he lamented the loss of the Opera House theatre, the linen mills that had formed the core of Dunfermline town’s industry from the mid 19th century to the first decade of the 21st, and the ruins of the Cooperative store in Randolph Street.
www.theguardian.com/books/2006/feb/18/featuresreviews.guardianreview11?CMP=gu_com
It is true that in 2022 the long narrow High Street has adjacent branches of Poundland, Savers, Poundstretcher and betting shops. But as with every other town there are a variety of residential neighbourhoods. In the days of the smaller wards before Scotland moved to STV for local elections, the Liberal Democrats were very strong in areas such as Garvock & Carnegie in the north east of the town, Pitcorthie to the south east – both heavily owner occupied - and Dunfermline Central. Meanwhile Labour traditionally held the council estates ubiquitous in Scottish towns, such as the interwar semis of Bellyeoman, the dour post war Abbeyview and Headwell, and the brutalism of Touch in the former Woodmill ward and Elizabeth Street nearer the centre. Dunfermline’s centre of gravity has gradually moved eastwards, rather like say Baton Rouge and Memphis in the American South, and is still doing so; this is connected with the decline of the High Street noted above. The newest residential neighbourhoods are stretching to the east: Masterton and Duloch just inside the M90, and here too are the Tesco and Aldi superstores, and Dunfermline’s largest employers in the 2020s – Sky TV and Amazon. Dunfermline town thus holds many examples of urban transformation in concrete form, and also demonstrates a pattern of economic decline and renewal – that is, partial decline and partial renewal. Plenty of evidence for each can be found to support whichever thesis being advanced.
In the 2022 STV local elections for the Fife unitary, the SNP candidates led on first preferences in all three of the large Dunfermline wards, achieving 39% in North, just over 33% in Central and also South: a plurality, but nowhere near a majority, just like the 2019 general election, when the SNP share was 44%, an improvement on 2017 but still rather similar to Fife’s 45% ‘yes’ vote in the 2014 independence referendum. Labour obtained between 24 and 29% in 2022 in all three wards, being strongest in North. The Liberal Democrats also still took council seats, with a second place 24.7 % in Central and nearly 20% in South. Finally even the Conservatives held a council seat in North with a respectable 18%. Dunfermline itself is clearly still competitive and with a population estimated in 2020 at nearly 59,000 it is now the largest urban unit in Fife by some way, more populous than Kirkcaldy by almost 10,000 souls, and the dominant element in its constituency.
That said, this seat is called Dunfermline and West Fife, and the latter tradition also needs explication. At first sight the name of West Fife conjures a fascinating and unusual history. Sitting for a seat of this name were two famous Willies: Willie Gallacher (MP 1935-50) was the longest serving Communist ever in the House of Commons. By contrast, Willie Hamilton (1950 to its extinction in February 1974) though known as an implacable critic of the Royal Family was actually on most policies on the right of the Labour party. However it must be pointed out that the West Fife these formidable politicians represented included only a relatively small part of the seat under discussion here, being more the predecessor of Central Fife then Glenrothes, and to some extent the Dunfermline East then Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath represented successively by Gordon Brown. Its politics were largely a product of the Fife coalfield around Lochgelly, Lumphinnans (sometimes known as a ‘Little Moscow’), Kelty and Cowdenbeath (whose football teams have in the last two years swapped membership of the Scottish and Lowland leagues): communities which are not in this seat.
The ‘West Fife’ section of this constituency actually excludes most of the former coalfield, but rather two current Fife wards named Rosyth and West Fife & Coastal Villages. Rosyth, which saw the SNP lead Labour in first preferences in May 2022 by 39% to 26%, with the Tories third on 17% is fairly tightly centred on the port of that name, a planned community based on the HM Dockyard and founded in 1909. It has not been a royal naval base since 1994 or a ferry terminus since 2018, though the dockyard still exists in privatized (Babcock) form. West Fife & Coastal Villages is more disseminated and includes in the former category Steelend, Saline, Oakley and Blairhall, and in the latter Culross and Kincardine (not to be confused with the Kincardine(shire) further north up the coast associated with West Aberdeenshire (the noted WANK of other parts of this forum). These two Firth of Forth communities were strongly Labour before the creation of the STV wards, but likely see the SNP narrowly ahead nowadays – in 2022 the ward voted 36% SNP, 33% Labour and 17% Conservative.
The most upmarket section of the current constituency lies at the east end of its frontage on the Forth, Inverkeithing and North Queensferry. These communities have the closest connections across the Firth to Edinburgh and indeed form part of the Fife ward of Inverkeithing & Dalgety Bay which still returned a Conservative plurality in May 2022,
Rather oddly, in the initial boundary change recommendations of the Scottish Commission due to report in 2023, the name of Dunfermline would have disappeared despite the town’s numerical predominance, to leave a seat simply named "West Fife". The main change would be the transfer of 12% of the current seat to Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath, in the shape of Inverkeithing and North Queensferry. At the west end a very small section beyond Kincardine would have been transferred in from Ochil & South Perthshire. In the revised proposals published in November 2022 only a small geographic change was made, with the Perth and Kinross section removed and replaced by 3,225 voters within part of the Clackmannanshire East ward, currently in the Ochil and South Perthshire constituency, and centred on the small town of Dollar but also including Pool of Muckhart, Yetts of Muckhart and Rumbling Bridge. The name of the seat is now to be Dunfermline and East Ochils.
Overall there would be no significant impact on the main contest in this constituency, which is now between the SNP and Labour. In 2015 the SNP gained Dunfermline and West Fife in spectacular fashion with a 40% surge in share from 10% to 50%. A corresponding devastating fall afflicted the Liberal Democrats: Willie Rennie had failed to hold on to his 2006 byelection gain in 2010, but did poll a very respectable 35%. Five years later his successor as LD candidate managed just 4% and lost her deposit. In 2017, as in many of the seats they had lost in Scotland in 2015, Labour recovered and only just were beaten again, the SNP majority being reduced from over 10,000 to just 844. By 2019, though, the lead was back up to five figures, and that will remain the case if and when notional figures are authoritatively produced for the new ‘West Fife’. The 2022 local results suggest that Labour had closed the gap, maybe halved it, but not caught the SNP, and that the Conservatives have fallen back somewhat from the 20% plus shares achieved in 2017 and 2019.
Kings may be buried in Dunfermline rather than sit there drinking wine nowadays, but it is still effectively the monarch of this constituency, ‘East Ochils’ or no. Its eventual survival in the title may just have been clinched by its elevation in May 2022 as part of the Platinum Jubilee as one of seven new cities in the United Kingdom. Some may be inclined still to moan and groan about sops and appeasement while others may say, ‘decline, what decline’. The disparity of view and emphasis is politics – and life.
www.fife.gov.uk/news/2022/dunfermline-granted-city-status-by-queen#:~:text=Dunfermline%20is%20celebrating%20its%20new,Queen's%20platinum%20jubilee%20in%202022.
2011 Census
Age 65+ 15.2% 438/650
Owner-occupied 70.0% 219/650
Private rented 9.8% 586/650
Social rented 19.3% 240/650
White 96.0% 119/650
Black 0.3% 454/650
Asian 1.3% 438/650
Managerial & professional 30.9%
Routine & Semi-routine 28.1%
Degree level 24.7% 357/650
No qualifications 24.3% 280/650
Students 6.1% 471/650
2019 general election: Dunfermline and West Fife
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
SNP Douglas Chapman 23,727 44.4 +8.9
Labour Co-op Cara Hilton 13,028 24.4 -9.5
Conservative Moira Benny 11,207 21.0 -3.7
Liberal Democrats Rebecca Bell 4,262 8.0 +2.1
Green Mags Hall 1,258 2.4 New
SNP Majority 10,699 20.0 +18.4
2019 electorate 76,652
Turnout 53,482 69.8 +2.4
SNP hold
Swing 9.2 Lab to SNP
Drinking a blood red wine,
"Where can I get a good sea captain
To sail this ship of mine?"
Sir Patrick Spens sounds like the name of a Tory knight of the shire from the 1950s, but aside from being the doomed figure of a Scottish ballad from (at least) the 18th century, one thing that Dunfermline has never sought has been a Conservative MP. The seat in which the town is located has had a Scottish Nationalist member since 2015, was represented by Labour for most of the period between 1922 and that date. However it has had a Liberal Democrat MP in the shape of Willie Rennie as recently as 2006-10, following a much more distant tradition that saw Coaltion Liberals win in 1918 and 1931, and even before then, when Dunfermline was part of the Stirling District of Burghs, was solidly represented by Liberals – indeed it was Campbell-Bannerman’s seat from 1868 to his death very shortly after leaving the office of Prime Minister in 1908.
All this is despite Dunfermline having a truly distinguished and indeed royal history. For 500 years Dunfermline was in effect Scotland’s capital, and in its fine abbey is buried a national hero, Robert the Bruce, among eight kings, five queens, six princes and two princesses of the royal Scottish house. It was also the birthplace of the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, whose statue still stands in Pittencrieff Park, and extensive oasis of green just west of the town centre below the abbey. There tends to be dissent when I stress what a distinguished set of historic buildings Dunfermline has in its centre. Some prefer to agree with the jeremiads of the former Independent on Sunday and Granta editor Ian Jack, who went to the high school here, when he lamented the loss of the Opera House theatre, the linen mills that had formed the core of Dunfermline town’s industry from the mid 19th century to the first decade of the 21st, and the ruins of the Cooperative store in Randolph Street.
www.theguardian.com/books/2006/feb/18/featuresreviews.guardianreview11?CMP=gu_com
It is true that in 2022 the long narrow High Street has adjacent branches of Poundland, Savers, Poundstretcher and betting shops. But as with every other town there are a variety of residential neighbourhoods. In the days of the smaller wards before Scotland moved to STV for local elections, the Liberal Democrats were very strong in areas such as Garvock & Carnegie in the north east of the town, Pitcorthie to the south east – both heavily owner occupied - and Dunfermline Central. Meanwhile Labour traditionally held the council estates ubiquitous in Scottish towns, such as the interwar semis of Bellyeoman, the dour post war Abbeyview and Headwell, and the brutalism of Touch in the former Woodmill ward and Elizabeth Street nearer the centre. Dunfermline’s centre of gravity has gradually moved eastwards, rather like say Baton Rouge and Memphis in the American South, and is still doing so; this is connected with the decline of the High Street noted above. The newest residential neighbourhoods are stretching to the east: Masterton and Duloch just inside the M90, and here too are the Tesco and Aldi superstores, and Dunfermline’s largest employers in the 2020s – Sky TV and Amazon. Dunfermline town thus holds many examples of urban transformation in concrete form, and also demonstrates a pattern of economic decline and renewal – that is, partial decline and partial renewal. Plenty of evidence for each can be found to support whichever thesis being advanced.
In the 2022 STV local elections for the Fife unitary, the SNP candidates led on first preferences in all three of the large Dunfermline wards, achieving 39% in North, just over 33% in Central and also South: a plurality, but nowhere near a majority, just like the 2019 general election, when the SNP share was 44%, an improvement on 2017 but still rather similar to Fife’s 45% ‘yes’ vote in the 2014 independence referendum. Labour obtained between 24 and 29% in 2022 in all three wards, being strongest in North. The Liberal Democrats also still took council seats, with a second place 24.7 % in Central and nearly 20% in South. Finally even the Conservatives held a council seat in North with a respectable 18%. Dunfermline itself is clearly still competitive and with a population estimated in 2020 at nearly 59,000 it is now the largest urban unit in Fife by some way, more populous than Kirkcaldy by almost 10,000 souls, and the dominant element in its constituency.
That said, this seat is called Dunfermline and West Fife, and the latter tradition also needs explication. At first sight the name of West Fife conjures a fascinating and unusual history. Sitting for a seat of this name were two famous Willies: Willie Gallacher (MP 1935-50) was the longest serving Communist ever in the House of Commons. By contrast, Willie Hamilton (1950 to its extinction in February 1974) though known as an implacable critic of the Royal Family was actually on most policies on the right of the Labour party. However it must be pointed out that the West Fife these formidable politicians represented included only a relatively small part of the seat under discussion here, being more the predecessor of Central Fife then Glenrothes, and to some extent the Dunfermline East then Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath represented successively by Gordon Brown. Its politics were largely a product of the Fife coalfield around Lochgelly, Lumphinnans (sometimes known as a ‘Little Moscow’), Kelty and Cowdenbeath (whose football teams have in the last two years swapped membership of the Scottish and Lowland leagues): communities which are not in this seat.
The ‘West Fife’ section of this constituency actually excludes most of the former coalfield, but rather two current Fife wards named Rosyth and West Fife & Coastal Villages. Rosyth, which saw the SNP lead Labour in first preferences in May 2022 by 39% to 26%, with the Tories third on 17% is fairly tightly centred on the port of that name, a planned community based on the HM Dockyard and founded in 1909. It has not been a royal naval base since 1994 or a ferry terminus since 2018, though the dockyard still exists in privatized (Babcock) form. West Fife & Coastal Villages is more disseminated and includes in the former category Steelend, Saline, Oakley and Blairhall, and in the latter Culross and Kincardine (not to be confused with the Kincardine(shire) further north up the coast associated with West Aberdeenshire (the noted WANK of other parts of this forum). These two Firth of Forth communities were strongly Labour before the creation of the STV wards, but likely see the SNP narrowly ahead nowadays – in 2022 the ward voted 36% SNP, 33% Labour and 17% Conservative.
The most upmarket section of the current constituency lies at the east end of its frontage on the Forth, Inverkeithing and North Queensferry. These communities have the closest connections across the Firth to Edinburgh and indeed form part of the Fife ward of Inverkeithing & Dalgety Bay which still returned a Conservative plurality in May 2022,
Rather oddly, in the initial boundary change recommendations of the Scottish Commission due to report in 2023, the name of Dunfermline would have disappeared despite the town’s numerical predominance, to leave a seat simply named "West Fife". The main change would be the transfer of 12% of the current seat to Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath, in the shape of Inverkeithing and North Queensferry. At the west end a very small section beyond Kincardine would have been transferred in from Ochil & South Perthshire. In the revised proposals published in November 2022 only a small geographic change was made, with the Perth and Kinross section removed and replaced by 3,225 voters within part of the Clackmannanshire East ward, currently in the Ochil and South Perthshire constituency, and centred on the small town of Dollar but also including Pool of Muckhart, Yetts of Muckhart and Rumbling Bridge. The name of the seat is now to be Dunfermline and East Ochils.
Overall there would be no significant impact on the main contest in this constituency, which is now between the SNP and Labour. In 2015 the SNP gained Dunfermline and West Fife in spectacular fashion with a 40% surge in share from 10% to 50%. A corresponding devastating fall afflicted the Liberal Democrats: Willie Rennie had failed to hold on to his 2006 byelection gain in 2010, but did poll a very respectable 35%. Five years later his successor as LD candidate managed just 4% and lost her deposit. In 2017, as in many of the seats they had lost in Scotland in 2015, Labour recovered and only just were beaten again, the SNP majority being reduced from over 10,000 to just 844. By 2019, though, the lead was back up to five figures, and that will remain the case if and when notional figures are authoritatively produced for the new ‘West Fife’. The 2022 local results suggest that Labour had closed the gap, maybe halved it, but not caught the SNP, and that the Conservatives have fallen back somewhat from the 20% plus shares achieved in 2017 and 2019.
Kings may be buried in Dunfermline rather than sit there drinking wine nowadays, but it is still effectively the monarch of this constituency, ‘East Ochils’ or no. Its eventual survival in the title may just have been clinched by its elevation in May 2022 as part of the Platinum Jubilee as one of seven new cities in the United Kingdom. Some may be inclined still to moan and groan about sops and appeasement while others may say, ‘decline, what decline’. The disparity of view and emphasis is politics – and life.
www.fife.gov.uk/news/2022/dunfermline-granted-city-status-by-queen#:~:text=Dunfermline%20is%20celebrating%20its%20new,Queen's%20platinum%20jubilee%20in%202022.
2011 Census
Age 65+ 15.2% 438/650
Owner-occupied 70.0% 219/650
Private rented 9.8% 586/650
Social rented 19.3% 240/650
White 96.0% 119/650
Black 0.3% 454/650
Asian 1.3% 438/650
Managerial & professional 30.9%
Routine & Semi-routine 28.1%
Degree level 24.7% 357/650
No qualifications 24.3% 280/650
Students 6.1% 471/650
2019 general election: Dunfermline and West Fife
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
SNP Douglas Chapman 23,727 44.4 +8.9
Labour Co-op Cara Hilton 13,028 24.4 -9.5
Conservative Moira Benny 11,207 21.0 -3.7
Liberal Democrats Rebecca Bell 4,262 8.0 +2.1
Green Mags Hall 1,258 2.4 New
SNP Majority 10,699 20.0 +18.4
2019 electorate 76,652
Turnout 53,482 69.8 +2.4
SNP hold
Swing 9.2 Lab to SNP
