Winner in 2016: Ivan McKee (SNP)
PROVAN was one of the Glasgow seats that Labour actually held on to in the SNP’s landslide year of 2011, and it wasn’t even especially close.
Paul Martin, son of the former speaker of the House of Commons, won by around 11%.
However, the post-indyref transformation was so total that any difference between the SNP-held and Labour-held parts of Glasgow vanished, and when the SNP’s Ivan McKee gained Provan in 2016 he did so by the wide margin of 20 percentage points.
The fact that he’s defending the seat this year as a one-term incumbent is almost irrelevant – it’s as good as unimaginable that Labour will take the constituency back.
However, there is the wild card of a Green intervention for the SNP to contend with.
There’s never been a Green candidate in the constituency before – they are fielding Dennistoun councillor Kim Long this time round – so the extent of the potential Green vote and its impact on the larger parties remains to be seen. It’s possible that the SNP will be hit to a greater extent than Labour, which could reduce McKee’s majority a touch.
Another candidate that will be watched closely is the Tories’ Annie Wells, who has been a list MSP since 2016 in spite of being thrashed in the Provan constituency vote that year, finishing a distant third with just 8.6% of the vote.
It’s that sort of result that leads to anger among independence supporters about supposedly “unelected” Unionists getting in via the “back door” of the list, but it must be remembered that the whole point of proportional representation is to give the same weight to all votes regardless of how geographically concentrated they are.
A few percentage points of support for the Tories in several constituencies can add up to a relatively large number of votes across a whole region – and it’s the region-wide list votes that elected Wells, not her paltry showing in Provan.
That said, a lack of constituency support must be a sore point for her, and she’ll presumably be hoping to poll better this time. On paper that should be perfectly achievable, because previous Tory candidates managed 7-8% in the predecessor constituency of Glasgow Baillieston at a time when the party was performing worse nationally than it has been since the Ruth Davidson surge.
It’s not unreasonable to suggest that Wells should be taking at least 10% of the vote this time.
And if she fails to do so, there may be question marks about her own appeal to voters and about the prospects of a Tory renaissance in Glasgow.
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