Post by Robert Waller on Sept 4, 2023 12:42:34 GMT
Where should one go to find the greatest stronghold of Nationalism in Scotland? The north west coast, perhaps, with its Gaelic traditions still extant in the case of the language and culture? Or the west central belt, with its Irish and Catholic influences and economic problems following the decline of the great manufacturing industries such as shipbuilding? The heart of the Highlands? No, no, and again no. The answer, beyond any real doubt, is Dundee, long established as the fourth largest city in Scotland. In the 2014 independence referendum it voted Yes, with a higher percentage than any other authority: 57.3%. It has an overall majority of SNP councillors on the city council despite the electoral system being proportional STV. Dundee elected an SNP MP in 1979 and 1983 when the party only had two in total, a far cry from recent dominance north of the border. After the 2019 election, two of the three safest Nationalist seats in Scotland were the two named after Dundee.
The current Dundee West constituency includes more of the city than its neighbour to the east. Here are to be found most of the city centre, including the railway station and the modern city hall on North Lindsay Street, for example. Here is the renowned industrial cockpit of Lochee, once at the heart of the jute mills for which Dundee was known round the world. The grounds of both Dundee football teams glower at each other across a hundred yards or so of Tannadice Street. Within the constituency looms the Dundee Law, far less well known than Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, but still an impressive eminence, the remnants of a volcanic sill in the middle of the city. Here too is the West End, with its attractive residential streets along and off the Perth Road, the granite mansions of the jute barons, and the campus of the University of Dundee with associated ‘studentification’. Finally here too, in contrast, are some of Dundee’s council peripheral estates of ferocious aspect, at Trottick and Ardler (whose half dozen 17 storey tower blocks were demolished around the turn of the century), Brackens and St Mary’s. Five of the city’s large wards are mainly in West, only three in East, and there is much more extraneous territory included in East, even before the forthcoming boundary changes. Given all this, it may seem odd that Dundee West actually has a much shorter history of sending SNP MPs to Westminster than Dundee East, the first one not until 2015, after that pivotal referendum result.
One of the reasons is that the Labour vote was harder to crack in West, and also perhaps benefiting from a successful advance in a byelection in 1961 - when it was the SNP who made a dramatic surge in East in its own byelection in 1973. In any case Labour’s share in West was always higher than in East from 1973 onwards. It probably helped that West was more urban than East, which always included some of the more comfortable communities along the north side of the Tay. West has a far higher proportion of social housing – in fact the 45th highest in the United Kingdom. It has an exceptionally high proportion employed in the public sector, in health and social work especially. It is also far more cosmopolitan and less thoroughly Scottish, largely due to the university: it has a 20% student population, and relatively more black and Asian residents. This is also the reason why there is also much more privately rented housing in West than East, leaving owner occupation in a minority.
The SNP did make a mighty surge in 2015 in West, their share rising by 33% to 62%, and they have not looked back since. In December 2019 Chris Law polled more than twice the number of votes of his nearest opponent (Labour, who themselves got twice as many as the Conservatives in third place). Local Dundee City elections follow the same pattern. In May 2022 the SNP were ahead on first preferences in every ward wholly or partly in Dundee West except one. In each they obtained between 43% and 47%, with Labour approaching no nearer than the 7.4% behind they were in their own strongest ward, Lochee. In Maryfield and Strathmartine (the northern and north western edges of the city) it was close to two-to-one to the SNP over their nearest rivals. Nowhere did the Tories even approach 10% in 2022, a mark the Greens just reached in Maryfield, essentially the city centre ward.
That one exception that the SNP did not top was, not surprisingly, the West End ward; but there the leading place may raise some eyebrows. It went to the Liberal Democrats, who received an astonishing 40% of the vote to 31% for the SNP and the rest also-rans. Rather, it went to Fraser MacPherson, who clearly has a huge personal vote, having been a councillor in the West End since the turn of the century. The LDs took less than 6% of the vote in the last parliamentary contest in Dundee West and have never finished higher than a distant third in general elections.
Overall, one feels that if the SNP should ever lose the dominant position they hold overall in Scottish politics, the Dundee seats would be among the last to abandon them. The boundary changes suggested by the Commission cannot in themselves mount a significant challenge. The initial proposals would already have increased the proportion of Dundee city included in West, as all the split wards would be fully included: this applies to Maryfield and a small section of Strathmartine. West does already include some rural territory outside the city boundaries, in the shape of the western and more thinly populated part of Monifieth and Sidlaw ward (that is, not Monifieth, but a few villages like Bridgefoot, Auchterhouse and Piperdam). In place of this it was initially recommended that the majority of the Carse of Gowrie ward, at present in Perth & North Perthshire, would be brought in, amounting to 7,500 voters. Carse means low lying and fertile land. It is actually exchanging some rural terrain from the Angus unitary authority for some from Perth & Kinross.
But then in the revised proposals released in November 2022 the Commission had a change of mind, and a change of tack. Instead of the Carse of Gowrie, it was now proposed that the electorate of West should instead be expanded by taking in even more of the city, in the form of slightly more than half of the electorate of the East End ward. This would leave the proposed Dundee East & Arbroath seat to contain from the city authority only the minority of East End, North East ward, and The Ferry (Broughty Ferry and New Ferry, which are regarded by many as not integral parts of Dundee, especially the former). Even the small rural section within Monifieth and Sidlaw ward already included in West would be removed.
Then in the final report of June 2023 the Scottish Commission made no further changes to the lines of the seats, but did come up with changes of name. Dundee West was renamed Dundee Central, which in a way is logical if one looks at the helpful map they provide (much clearer than those of the Commission for England and more individually accessible that those for Wales).
www.bcomm-scotland.independent.gov.uk/sites/default/files/dundee_central.pdf
One the other hand, since the name of the ‘other’ seat no longer contains any reference to Dundee – it is to be Arbroath and Broughty Ferry – a pedantic observation might be that the ‘Central’ is otiose, and indeed invites questions as to, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan in the otherwise forgettable film Kings Row, where the rest of Dundee might be.*
Therefore in essence Dundee West becomes the Dundee seat, and it is hard to see circumstances in which the SNP stranglehold will be anywhere near broken. Even if the Nationalists suffer for their recent alarums by losing a substantial number of seats in a general election in 2024, one feels that Dundee Central would be among the last to fall, just as it was an ‘early adopter’.
It is astonishing to think that Winston Churchill was MP for Dundee for 12 years, though it was as a Liberal that he was elected four times between January 1910 and 1918 (he had to contest a byelection in 1917 as he had been appointed Minister of Munitions after a break as a commander on the Western Front) and in a way even odder that one of his immediate successors was the three time winner Edwin ‘Neddy’ Scrymgeour of the Scottish Prohibition party (MP 1922-31). One feels that Liberals as well as Conservatives and Prohibitionists would get short shrift in the Dundee of the 2020s, at least outside the West End.
*If you really want to know, Reagan played a young man (this was 1942) in a romance of which her father disapproved. Being a surgeon, he (the father) took the opportunity, after Ron had an accident involving a train, to amputate both his legs unnecessarily. The future President, on waking up, notices an absence lower down the bed and exclaims ‘Where’s the rest of me?!’
2011 Census Dundee West, old boundaries
Age 65+ 16.2% 365/650
Owner-occupied 47.5% 590/650
Private rented 20.9% 110/650
Social rented 30.7% 45/650
White 93.0% 370/650
Black 1.3% 230/650
Asian 4.5% 251/650
Managerial & professional 23.2%
Routine & Semi-routine 27.0%
Employed in human health and social work activities 19.7% 3/650
Sales and customer services occupations 12.4% 12/650
Degree level 25.3% 333/650
No qualifications 26.3% 208 /650
Students 20.5% 29/650
2022 Census
Details not yet available
General Election 2019: Dundee West
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
SNP Chris Law 22,355 53.8 +7.1
Labour Jim Malone 10,096 24.3 -8.8
Conservative Tess White 5,149 12.4 -3.8
Liberal Democrats Daniel Coleman 2,468 5.9 +2.8
Brexit Party Stuart Waiton 1,271 3.1 New
CPA Quinta Arrey 240 0.6 New
SNP Majority 12,259 29.5 +15.9
2019 electorate 64,431
Turnout 41,579 64.5 +2.8
SNP hold
Swing 7.1 Lab to SNP
Boundary Changes
Dundee Central will consist of
93.8% of Dundee West
20.9% of Dundee East
Map
www.bcomm-scotland.independent.gov.uk/sites/default/files/dundee_central.pdf
2019 Notional Results on New Boundaries (Professor David Denver for Rallings and Thrasher)
The current Dundee West constituency includes more of the city than its neighbour to the east. Here are to be found most of the city centre, including the railway station and the modern city hall on North Lindsay Street, for example. Here is the renowned industrial cockpit of Lochee, once at the heart of the jute mills for which Dundee was known round the world. The grounds of both Dundee football teams glower at each other across a hundred yards or so of Tannadice Street. Within the constituency looms the Dundee Law, far less well known than Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, but still an impressive eminence, the remnants of a volcanic sill in the middle of the city. Here too is the West End, with its attractive residential streets along and off the Perth Road, the granite mansions of the jute barons, and the campus of the University of Dundee with associated ‘studentification’. Finally here too, in contrast, are some of Dundee’s council peripheral estates of ferocious aspect, at Trottick and Ardler (whose half dozen 17 storey tower blocks were demolished around the turn of the century), Brackens and St Mary’s. Five of the city’s large wards are mainly in West, only three in East, and there is much more extraneous territory included in East, even before the forthcoming boundary changes. Given all this, it may seem odd that Dundee West actually has a much shorter history of sending SNP MPs to Westminster than Dundee East, the first one not until 2015, after that pivotal referendum result.
One of the reasons is that the Labour vote was harder to crack in West, and also perhaps benefiting from a successful advance in a byelection in 1961 - when it was the SNP who made a dramatic surge in East in its own byelection in 1973. In any case Labour’s share in West was always higher than in East from 1973 onwards. It probably helped that West was more urban than East, which always included some of the more comfortable communities along the north side of the Tay. West has a far higher proportion of social housing – in fact the 45th highest in the United Kingdom. It has an exceptionally high proportion employed in the public sector, in health and social work especially. It is also far more cosmopolitan and less thoroughly Scottish, largely due to the university: it has a 20% student population, and relatively more black and Asian residents. This is also the reason why there is also much more privately rented housing in West than East, leaving owner occupation in a minority.
The SNP did make a mighty surge in 2015 in West, their share rising by 33% to 62%, and they have not looked back since. In December 2019 Chris Law polled more than twice the number of votes of his nearest opponent (Labour, who themselves got twice as many as the Conservatives in third place). Local Dundee City elections follow the same pattern. In May 2022 the SNP were ahead on first preferences in every ward wholly or partly in Dundee West except one. In each they obtained between 43% and 47%, with Labour approaching no nearer than the 7.4% behind they were in their own strongest ward, Lochee. In Maryfield and Strathmartine (the northern and north western edges of the city) it was close to two-to-one to the SNP over their nearest rivals. Nowhere did the Tories even approach 10% in 2022, a mark the Greens just reached in Maryfield, essentially the city centre ward.
That one exception that the SNP did not top was, not surprisingly, the West End ward; but there the leading place may raise some eyebrows. It went to the Liberal Democrats, who received an astonishing 40% of the vote to 31% for the SNP and the rest also-rans. Rather, it went to Fraser MacPherson, who clearly has a huge personal vote, having been a councillor in the West End since the turn of the century. The LDs took less than 6% of the vote in the last parliamentary contest in Dundee West and have never finished higher than a distant third in general elections.
Overall, one feels that if the SNP should ever lose the dominant position they hold overall in Scottish politics, the Dundee seats would be among the last to abandon them. The boundary changes suggested by the Commission cannot in themselves mount a significant challenge. The initial proposals would already have increased the proportion of Dundee city included in West, as all the split wards would be fully included: this applies to Maryfield and a small section of Strathmartine. West does already include some rural territory outside the city boundaries, in the shape of the western and more thinly populated part of Monifieth and Sidlaw ward (that is, not Monifieth, but a few villages like Bridgefoot, Auchterhouse and Piperdam). In place of this it was initially recommended that the majority of the Carse of Gowrie ward, at present in Perth & North Perthshire, would be brought in, amounting to 7,500 voters. Carse means low lying and fertile land. It is actually exchanging some rural terrain from the Angus unitary authority for some from Perth & Kinross.
But then in the revised proposals released in November 2022 the Commission had a change of mind, and a change of tack. Instead of the Carse of Gowrie, it was now proposed that the electorate of West should instead be expanded by taking in even more of the city, in the form of slightly more than half of the electorate of the East End ward. This would leave the proposed Dundee East & Arbroath seat to contain from the city authority only the minority of East End, North East ward, and The Ferry (Broughty Ferry and New Ferry, which are regarded by many as not integral parts of Dundee, especially the former). Even the small rural section within Monifieth and Sidlaw ward already included in West would be removed.
Then in the final report of June 2023 the Scottish Commission made no further changes to the lines of the seats, but did come up with changes of name. Dundee West was renamed Dundee Central, which in a way is logical if one looks at the helpful map they provide (much clearer than those of the Commission for England and more individually accessible that those for Wales).
www.bcomm-scotland.independent.gov.uk/sites/default/files/dundee_central.pdf
One the other hand, since the name of the ‘other’ seat no longer contains any reference to Dundee – it is to be Arbroath and Broughty Ferry – a pedantic observation might be that the ‘Central’ is otiose, and indeed invites questions as to, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan in the otherwise forgettable film Kings Row, where the rest of Dundee might be.*
Therefore in essence Dundee West becomes the Dundee seat, and it is hard to see circumstances in which the SNP stranglehold will be anywhere near broken. Even if the Nationalists suffer for their recent alarums by losing a substantial number of seats in a general election in 2024, one feels that Dundee Central would be among the last to fall, just as it was an ‘early adopter’.
It is astonishing to think that Winston Churchill was MP for Dundee for 12 years, though it was as a Liberal that he was elected four times between January 1910 and 1918 (he had to contest a byelection in 1917 as he had been appointed Minister of Munitions after a break as a commander on the Western Front) and in a way even odder that one of his immediate successors was the three time winner Edwin ‘Neddy’ Scrymgeour of the Scottish Prohibition party (MP 1922-31). One feels that Liberals as well as Conservatives and Prohibitionists would get short shrift in the Dundee of the 2020s, at least outside the West End.
*If you really want to know, Reagan played a young man (this was 1942) in a romance of which her father disapproved. Being a surgeon, he (the father) took the opportunity, after Ron had an accident involving a train, to amputate both his legs unnecessarily. The future President, on waking up, notices an absence lower down the bed and exclaims ‘Where’s the rest of me?!’
2011 Census Dundee West, old boundaries
Age 65+ 16.2% 365/650
Owner-occupied 47.5% 590/650
Private rented 20.9% 110/650
Social rented 30.7% 45/650
White 93.0% 370/650
Black 1.3% 230/650
Asian 4.5% 251/650
Managerial & professional 23.2%
Routine & Semi-routine 27.0%
Employed in human health and social work activities 19.7% 3/650
Sales and customer services occupations 12.4% 12/650
Degree level 25.3% 333/650
No qualifications 26.3% 208 /650
Students 20.5% 29/650
2022 Census
Details not yet available
General Election 2019: Dundee West
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
SNP Chris Law 22,355 53.8 +7.1
Labour Jim Malone 10,096 24.3 -8.8
Conservative Tess White 5,149 12.4 -3.8
Liberal Democrats Daniel Coleman 2,468 5.9 +2.8
Brexit Party Stuart Waiton 1,271 3.1 New
CPA Quinta Arrey 240 0.6 New
SNP Majority 12,259 29.5 +15.9
2019 electorate 64,431
Turnout 41,579 64.5 +2.8
SNP hold
Swing 7.1 Lab to SNP
Boundary Changes
Dundee Central will consist of
93.8% of Dundee West
20.9% of Dundee East
Map
www.bcomm-scotland.independent.gov.uk/sites/default/files/dundee_central.pdf
2019 Notional Results on New Boundaries (Professor David Denver for Rallings and Thrasher)
| SNP | 26437 | 56.5% |
| Lab | 11126 | 23.9% |
| Con | 5161 | 11.1% |
| LD | 2586 | 5.5% |
| Brexit | 1191 | 2.6% |
| Oth | 241 | 0.5% |
| Majority | 15221 | 32.6% |
