IT is impossible to get lost in Cumbernauld, perhaps the best sign-posted town in Scotland.

As soon as you step off the train, you are instructed by a sign on one of its famous underpasses that the town centre is a 14-minute walk away.

As you go, other signs give you near minute-by-minute updates on your progress – 10 minutes away, now only five minutes away.

Some even have fun facts about the town: did you know it is twinned with Bron in France?

You wonder if the town planners expected Cumbernauld to become a major tourist destination. 


 

I meet the SNP incumbent Stuart McDonald at a drive-thru Costa Coffee near the town’s infamous central shopping centre.

With relish he tells me about the plans for its demolition.

Walking through the centre – a hotchpotch of charity shops, hairdressers, banks, lawyers’ offices, vape shops, a butchers, a community radio station and one shuttered fruiterers – an artist’s impression drawing outlines plans for a new “town hub”, with mixed-use housing schemes nearby.

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McDonald has held the seat since 2015 and hopes he can see off a challenge from Labour’s Katrina Murray to make it four consecutive wins in the North Lanarkshire constituency.

But he admits this time around he has a bigger challenge on his hands than at the last election, were he won a comfortable majority of 28%.

“It definitely feels closer,” he says. But like many of his party comrades, he does not believe Labour’s message in Scotland will resonate with voters.


 

He adds: “It seems to me almost what the Labour Party are saying is, ‘It doesn’t really matter whether you agree with us, just vote for us because we’re probably going to win.’

“Which is ridiculous because if you don’t believe in austerity and you don’t believe in Brexit, then you’re not having an MP influencing on your behalf anyway – and that’s if you even believe for a minute that a backbench Labour MP in a Labour Party government of 450 MPs is going to have any remote influence on the direction of Keir Starmer’s government.

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“It’s nonsense. Far better to have a party that stands up for what people believe in.”

But later, as I spoke to members of the public outside the shopping centre, I found little in the way of enthusiasm for any party. The levels of voter apathy were depressing, if not entirely surprising.

This is the fourth time in a decade people have been called to vote in Westminster elections. The results speak for themselves.

One thing that used to be able to move the dial for the SNP among Scottish voters disillusioned by Labour and resolutely anti-Tory was the independence pitch.

Will that make a difference this time around? McDonald makes a defensive argument, not completely in line with John Swinney’s assertion that the SNP winning a majority of seats constitutes a mandate to repeat requests for a second referendum.

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Instead, the candidate fashions the argument into a warning to Yessers: “If we get a bad result then the Unionist parties will attempt to use that to say that the argument is finished and we can’t allow that to happen.”

He adds: “Of course that’s what they’re going to portray it as.”

But like the First Minister, McDonald insists the 2021 Scottish Parliament election results, which delivered a pro-Yes majority in Holyrood, constitute a mandate for independence.  

“We can’t allow them to brush that under the carpet and say that never happened,” says McDonald.  

Back at the shopping centre, if voters are bothered at all, they want to get the Tories out. Or more accurately, they think the Tories are on their way out already and there is little enthusiasm for whatever comes next.

Voters tend to talk about voting as something other people do, as if their votes count for nothing.

Yet in Cumbernauld, their votes carry a lot of weight.

They could be the difference between the SNP being able to claim another mandate for independence or the Unionist parties saying the question had again been settled. The trouble is, they just don’t seem to care.

Labour’s candidate Murray was not available to be interviewed for this piece.