Post by Robert Waller on Nov 26, 2023 16:23:35 GMT
Since 2005 there has been a Westminster parliament constituency called Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. It has had an interesting electoral history. For its first ten years it was represented by a man who was initially Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Labour’s Gordon Brown. Then it was gained in the 2015 SNP landslide by Roger Mullin; but it was one of six seats lost back to Labour (Lesley Laird) in the next general election just two years later. In December 2019 it changed hands again, despite the Nationalist candidate Neale Hanvey being disowned by his own party before election day for alleged prior antisemitic media posts, a rather astounding result that led to him being seated as an Independent. By 2020 Hanvey had been readmitted to the SNP’s ranks – but not for very long. In March 2021 he left the party to join the newly formed Alba. Joined by Kenny MacAskill of East Lothian, Neale Hanvey formally became the Alba party leader in the Commons. Altogether this added up to five changes of party representation for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath in less than six years between May 2015 and March 2021. It would be a very brave person who were to say that the changes in the stewardship in this part of Fife have stopped.
There are, however, some boundary changes – and, indeed, a name change, which must rank high in the incomprehensibility stakes. Over 80% of the content of the seat remains unaltered. The northern section around Lochgelly, Ballingry and Lochore is transferred to join the Glenrothes constituency, so its name is now paired with ‘Mid Fife’. In return, a tiny part of Glenrothes and about one eighth of the Dunfermline & West Fife ward around North Queensferry and Inverkeithing are brought in. However for some reason the order of the towns in the seat’s title is reversed to Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy. Here are a few factual points. The population of Cowdenbeath at the time of the 2022 Scottish census is around 12,000; that of Kirkcaldy at least 47,000 (more if Dysart and other environs are also included). The number of electors in Cowdenbeath ward as officially allocated by the Boundary Commission for Scotland is 11,462; the number in the three Kirkcaldy wards is 32,820 – and that is not including any in ‘Burntisland, Kinghorn and Western Kirkcaldy’. Finally, not even the whole of Cowdenbeath division is actually to be in this seat: over 5,000 of its electors (around Kelty, in its northern section) are placed in Glenrothes & Mid Fife constituency. It would be interesting to know what the official justification is for the primacy of the smaller town in the name, and what representations arose around it.
All that is not to dispute, of course, that Cowdenbeath is a community of note. For many years its football team attracted the support of all those who like backing underdogs, rather than bolstering their fragile egos by following and associating themselves with giant, wealthy, successful clubs – they finally dropped out of the lowest rank of the Scottish Football League in 2022 and were replaced by Bonnyrigg Rose. Cowdenbeath is a deeply gritty ex-mining town (that football team is nicknamed The Miners) which had pits such as Foulford, Dora, Mary, Comrie and Kirkford as well as NCB Workshops, the Fife Mining School and the headquarters of the Fife district of the miners union. Its political tradition followed; it was the home town of Aneurin Bevan’s wife, Jennie Lee, herself a Labour MP for 27 years. As a part of the Dunfermline Burghs then Central Fife constituencies, it was represented by Labour continuously from 1935 to 2015. The Nationalism of 2015-17 and 2019-date do seem something of an aberration for Cowdenbeath. In the most recent Fife council elections in May 2022, before the full extent of the problems that have best the SNP had been revealed, Labour still led in first preferences in Cowdenbeath ward, with a 38% share to36% for the Nationalists; they had led in 2017 and 2012 too, by larger margins.
Nevertheless, Kirkcaldy is clearly still the main town in this constituency, whatever the order of the names. The ‘Lang Toun’ of Kirkcaldy has a mile-long esplanade on the Firth of Forth, but the birthplace of Adam Smith and Robert Adam, and the childhood home of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown (still a fan of the local football team, Raith Rovers) is not really a seaside resort: it is an industrial, working-class town traditionally of solid Labour support. Even in 1955, the high-water mark of modern Conservatism in Scotland, when they won more than half the seats, they could get no closer than 7,500 votes behind Labour in the Kirkcaldy constituency. Once a port for the Fife coalfield and a centre of the linoleum industry, Kirkcaldy has diversified its range of employment sources: large retail parks such as Chapel Farm in is north=western corner, services such as MGt real estate investment, the NHS, Forbo vinyl floor coverings (a nod back to the lino), Whitworth’s flour millers, Smith Anderson paper making and Fife College - although its rate of joblessness has tended to be a little above the Scottish average and considerably higher than the British average. Its Labour heritage is still apparent in Fife council elctions. Even in 2022, when the SNP garnered the most first preferences in 13 Fife wards compared with Labour’s 4, the latter had the highest shares in Kirkcaldy North (very narrowly) and Kirkcaldy Central (with 41.6%, their highest share anywhere in the authority except for the Lochgelly based ward). Labour’s third highest share in Fife was in Kirkcaldy East, where the SNP had just 0.6% more.
In a town as large as Kirkcaldy, there are, of course, internal distinctions. The highest proportion of social rented housing is in the East ward, for example in large typically Scottish estates like Sinclairtown and Gallatown, the lowest in North, which has significant modern private housing estates like Dunnikier and Robert Adam Drive (detailed figures are from the latest available census, 2011, but are still useful as internal comparison). The professional and managerial occupation level is low throughout, nowhere approaching ever 20% but it was at its lowest in Kirkcaldy North (14%) and East (12%). The DE socio economic grade proportion was 35% in Kirkcaldy East, 34% in Central, and 28% in North where the highest number of C2 skilled workers was to be found, 27%. Here on the east coast the percentage identifying as Roman Catholic was low, around 10% in all Kirkcaldy wards, with over three times as many nominating a Protestant denomination and close to half of the whole saying ‘no religion’. As far as education is concerned, the proportion with no qualifications was highest in East (22%) and that with degrees highest in Central (also 22%). There are more desirable residential areas scattered within Kirkcaldy, such as near Ravenscraig Park on the road to Dysart, and in the old west end around Wemyssfield, in parts of Hayfield, as well as the modern private housing in the north west corner (as long as it is north of Chapel Level). But the Conservatives’ highest share in 2022 in any of the Kirkcaldy wards was 15% in North in 2022 and 17% in 2017.
There are other communities apart from Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath themselves in the constituency, such as Burntisland and Kinghorn, which are known as tourist attractions with sandy beaches on the Forth, along with port facilities and a shipbuilding tradition in Burntisland and fishing in Kinghorn, but even here the Tories only managed 21% in 2022, a distant third behind the SNP (38%) and Labour (29%). In fact the best Tory performance within the former boundaries in 2022 was in Cowdenbeath ward (28.9%, still well into third place). This was partly because of a personal vote for the active Fife councillor Darren Watt, who was the party’s candidate for the Cowdenbeath Scottish Parliament constituency in May 2021 (he came third with 14%), and partly because the ward, which extends well beyond the town itself, also includes less working class areas such as Crossgates and Mossgreen. Finally, the best Tory section of all will be the part added from the Dunfermline seat, Inverkeithing & Dalgety Bay, which oncludes the affluent North Queensferry, an upmarket commuting base for Edinburgh directly across the Firth of Forth. In 2022 the Conservatives took over 29% of the first references in that ward, but were still over 10% behind the SNP, with Labour a further 10% behind them in third place.
The Conservatives will not feature in the contenders to win Cowdenbeath & Kirkcaldy, although their vote is not negligible; indeed if some of it can be activated in the unionist interest, it may help Labour to a regain in a 2024 general election. They may not need tactical voting, though. With the decline of the SNP popularity seen not only in opinion polls but in local byelections and in the parliamentary byelection in Rutherglen & Hamilton West in October 2023, Labour must be favourites to win anyway. This is, essentially, one of the half dozen constituencies they gained in 2017. If Neale Hanvey stands again as an incumbent but in Alba party colours, the pro-independence vote must be split to some extent, even if he doesn’t surpass Alba’s low national opinion poll share very much. The new Labour candidate, Wilma Brown – no relation to Gordon but a UNISON activist and former nurse – was selected on October 2023 by the Herald as the no.1 likely new Labour MP to be worth profiling.
www.heraldscotland.com/news/23874439.scottish-labour-mp-hopefuls/
There is confidence that once again Kirkcaldy may be represented in Westminster by a Brown; although presumably the Scottish Commission would prioritise saying that Cowdenbeath will have that honour.
2011 Census, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, old boundaries
Age 65+ 18.1% 228/650
Owner-occupied 61.6% 454/650
Private rented 10.0% 577/650
Social rented 27.1% 82/650
White 97.7% 159/650
Black 0.4% 432/650
Asian 1.5% 411/650
Managerial & professional 26.5%
Routine & Semi-routine 32.7%
Degree level 21.4% 462/650
No qualifications 29.7% 102/650
Students 6.2% 442/650
General Election 2019: Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
(Ind)SNP Neale Hanvey 16,568 35.2 −1.1
Labour Lesley Laird 15,325 32.6 −4.2
Conservative Kathleen Leslie 9,449 20.1 −3.2
Liberal Democrats Gillian Cole-Hamilton 2,903 6.2 +3.8
Scottish Green Scott Rutherford 1,628 3.5
Brexit Party Mitch William 1,132 2.4
(Ind) SNP Majority 1,243 2.6
Turnout 47,005 64.5 +1.0
(Ind) SNP gain from Labour
Swing 1.6 Lab to SNP
Boundary Changes
Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy consists of
80.2% of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath
12.9% of Dunfermline & West Fife
2.5% of Glenrothes
Map
www.bcomm-scotland.independent.gov.uk/sites/default/files/cowdenbeath_and_Kirkcaldy.pdf
2019 Notional Results on New Boundaries (Professor David Denver for Rallings and Thrasher)
There are, however, some boundary changes – and, indeed, a name change, which must rank high in the incomprehensibility stakes. Over 80% of the content of the seat remains unaltered. The northern section around Lochgelly, Ballingry and Lochore is transferred to join the Glenrothes constituency, so its name is now paired with ‘Mid Fife’. In return, a tiny part of Glenrothes and about one eighth of the Dunfermline & West Fife ward around North Queensferry and Inverkeithing are brought in. However for some reason the order of the towns in the seat’s title is reversed to Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy. Here are a few factual points. The population of Cowdenbeath at the time of the 2022 Scottish census is around 12,000; that of Kirkcaldy at least 47,000 (more if Dysart and other environs are also included). The number of electors in Cowdenbeath ward as officially allocated by the Boundary Commission for Scotland is 11,462; the number in the three Kirkcaldy wards is 32,820 – and that is not including any in ‘Burntisland, Kinghorn and Western Kirkcaldy’. Finally, not even the whole of Cowdenbeath division is actually to be in this seat: over 5,000 of its electors (around Kelty, in its northern section) are placed in Glenrothes & Mid Fife constituency. It would be interesting to know what the official justification is for the primacy of the smaller town in the name, and what representations arose around it.
All that is not to dispute, of course, that Cowdenbeath is a community of note. For many years its football team attracted the support of all those who like backing underdogs, rather than bolstering their fragile egos by following and associating themselves with giant, wealthy, successful clubs – they finally dropped out of the lowest rank of the Scottish Football League in 2022 and were replaced by Bonnyrigg Rose. Cowdenbeath is a deeply gritty ex-mining town (that football team is nicknamed The Miners) which had pits such as Foulford, Dora, Mary, Comrie and Kirkford as well as NCB Workshops, the Fife Mining School and the headquarters of the Fife district of the miners union. Its political tradition followed; it was the home town of Aneurin Bevan’s wife, Jennie Lee, herself a Labour MP for 27 years. As a part of the Dunfermline Burghs then Central Fife constituencies, it was represented by Labour continuously from 1935 to 2015. The Nationalism of 2015-17 and 2019-date do seem something of an aberration for Cowdenbeath. In the most recent Fife council elections in May 2022, before the full extent of the problems that have best the SNP had been revealed, Labour still led in first preferences in Cowdenbeath ward, with a 38% share to36% for the Nationalists; they had led in 2017 and 2012 too, by larger margins.
Nevertheless, Kirkcaldy is clearly still the main town in this constituency, whatever the order of the names. The ‘Lang Toun’ of Kirkcaldy has a mile-long esplanade on the Firth of Forth, but the birthplace of Adam Smith and Robert Adam, and the childhood home of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown (still a fan of the local football team, Raith Rovers) is not really a seaside resort: it is an industrial, working-class town traditionally of solid Labour support. Even in 1955, the high-water mark of modern Conservatism in Scotland, when they won more than half the seats, they could get no closer than 7,500 votes behind Labour in the Kirkcaldy constituency. Once a port for the Fife coalfield and a centre of the linoleum industry, Kirkcaldy has diversified its range of employment sources: large retail parks such as Chapel Farm in is north=western corner, services such as MGt real estate investment, the NHS, Forbo vinyl floor coverings (a nod back to the lino), Whitworth’s flour millers, Smith Anderson paper making and Fife College - although its rate of joblessness has tended to be a little above the Scottish average and considerably higher than the British average. Its Labour heritage is still apparent in Fife council elctions. Even in 2022, when the SNP garnered the most first preferences in 13 Fife wards compared with Labour’s 4, the latter had the highest shares in Kirkcaldy North (very narrowly) and Kirkcaldy Central (with 41.6%, their highest share anywhere in the authority except for the Lochgelly based ward). Labour’s third highest share in Fife was in Kirkcaldy East, where the SNP had just 0.6% more.
In a town as large as Kirkcaldy, there are, of course, internal distinctions. The highest proportion of social rented housing is in the East ward, for example in large typically Scottish estates like Sinclairtown and Gallatown, the lowest in North, which has significant modern private housing estates like Dunnikier and Robert Adam Drive (detailed figures are from the latest available census, 2011, but are still useful as internal comparison). The professional and managerial occupation level is low throughout, nowhere approaching ever 20% but it was at its lowest in Kirkcaldy North (14%) and East (12%). The DE socio economic grade proportion was 35% in Kirkcaldy East, 34% in Central, and 28% in North where the highest number of C2 skilled workers was to be found, 27%. Here on the east coast the percentage identifying as Roman Catholic was low, around 10% in all Kirkcaldy wards, with over three times as many nominating a Protestant denomination and close to half of the whole saying ‘no religion’. As far as education is concerned, the proportion with no qualifications was highest in East (22%) and that with degrees highest in Central (also 22%). There are more desirable residential areas scattered within Kirkcaldy, such as near Ravenscraig Park on the road to Dysart, and in the old west end around Wemyssfield, in parts of Hayfield, as well as the modern private housing in the north west corner (as long as it is north of Chapel Level). But the Conservatives’ highest share in 2022 in any of the Kirkcaldy wards was 15% in North in 2022 and 17% in 2017.
There are other communities apart from Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath themselves in the constituency, such as Burntisland and Kinghorn, which are known as tourist attractions with sandy beaches on the Forth, along with port facilities and a shipbuilding tradition in Burntisland and fishing in Kinghorn, but even here the Tories only managed 21% in 2022, a distant third behind the SNP (38%) and Labour (29%). In fact the best Tory performance within the former boundaries in 2022 was in Cowdenbeath ward (28.9%, still well into third place). This was partly because of a personal vote for the active Fife councillor Darren Watt, who was the party’s candidate for the Cowdenbeath Scottish Parliament constituency in May 2021 (he came third with 14%), and partly because the ward, which extends well beyond the town itself, also includes less working class areas such as Crossgates and Mossgreen. Finally, the best Tory section of all will be the part added from the Dunfermline seat, Inverkeithing & Dalgety Bay, which oncludes the affluent North Queensferry, an upmarket commuting base for Edinburgh directly across the Firth of Forth. In 2022 the Conservatives took over 29% of the first references in that ward, but were still over 10% behind the SNP, with Labour a further 10% behind them in third place.
The Conservatives will not feature in the contenders to win Cowdenbeath & Kirkcaldy, although their vote is not negligible; indeed if some of it can be activated in the unionist interest, it may help Labour to a regain in a 2024 general election. They may not need tactical voting, though. With the decline of the SNP popularity seen not only in opinion polls but in local byelections and in the parliamentary byelection in Rutherglen & Hamilton West in October 2023, Labour must be favourites to win anyway. This is, essentially, one of the half dozen constituencies they gained in 2017. If Neale Hanvey stands again as an incumbent but in Alba party colours, the pro-independence vote must be split to some extent, even if he doesn’t surpass Alba’s low national opinion poll share very much. The new Labour candidate, Wilma Brown – no relation to Gordon but a UNISON activist and former nurse – was selected on October 2023 by the Herald as the no.1 likely new Labour MP to be worth profiling.
www.heraldscotland.com/news/23874439.scottish-labour-mp-hopefuls/
There is confidence that once again Kirkcaldy may be represented in Westminster by a Brown; although presumably the Scottish Commission would prioritise saying that Cowdenbeath will have that honour.
2011 Census, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, old boundaries
Age 65+ 18.1% 228/650
Owner-occupied 61.6% 454/650
Private rented 10.0% 577/650
Social rented 27.1% 82/650
White 97.7% 159/650
Black 0.4% 432/650
Asian 1.5% 411/650
Managerial & professional 26.5%
Routine & Semi-routine 32.7%
Degree level 21.4% 462/650
No qualifications 29.7% 102/650
Students 6.2% 442/650
General Election 2019: Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
(Ind)SNP Neale Hanvey 16,568 35.2 −1.1
Labour Lesley Laird 15,325 32.6 −4.2
Conservative Kathleen Leslie 9,449 20.1 −3.2
Liberal Democrats Gillian Cole-Hamilton 2,903 6.2 +3.8
Scottish Green Scott Rutherford 1,628 3.5
Brexit Party Mitch William 1,132 2.4
(Ind) SNP Majority 1,243 2.6
Turnout 47,005 64.5 +1.0
(Ind) SNP gain from Labour
Swing 1.6 Lab to SNP
Boundary Changes
Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy consists of
80.2% of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath
12.9% of Dunfermline & West Fife
2.5% of Glenrothes
Map
www.bcomm-scotland.independent.gov.uk/sites/default/files/cowdenbeath_and_Kirkcaldy.pdf
2019 Notional Results on New Boundaries (Professor David Denver for Rallings and Thrasher)
| SNP | 17122 | 36.3% |
| Lab | 13902 | 29.5% |
| Con | 10482 | 22.2% |
| LD | 3048 | 6.5% |
| Green | 1655 | 3.5% |
| Brexit | 939 | 2.0% |
| Majority | 3220 | 6.8% |
