Allister Hayman,
Regeneration & Renewal,
18 July 2008
The by-election in Glasgow East, seen as crucial to the survival of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, will be won on issues of jobs, poverty and regeneration, Labour's candidate said this week.
Margaret Curran, already an MSP and Labour's fifth choice candidate
after a troubled selection process for the 24 July contest, said she
would stand up for the people of Glasgow's deprived East End and make
their voices heard in Westminster.
John Mason, Curran's Scottish National Party opponent in what should be
a classic two horse race, has countered that Labour has had five decades
to stand up for Glasgow East - Labour's 25th safest seat - and has
failed to improve the lives of residents.
Mason will point to the fact that the seat, a mix of run-down inner city
and suburban areas straddled by the M8 and M74 motorways, has some of
the UK's worst social statistics. It has the highest proportion of
people of any UK parliamentary constituency on incapacity benefit or
disability allowance; the area has the second highest unemployment rate
in Scotland; it has the second highest proportion of social housing and
the third lowest proportion of owner-occupiers in Scotland; and the
average life expectancy for men in the constituency is 63 years, around
15 years below the UK average.
In 2006, the Scottish Government identified the seat as a regeneration
priority and it became the focus of the £1.6 billion Clyde Gateway
regeneration project. The 20-year initiative has been given new impetus
by Glasgow winning the 2014 Commonwealth Games: Celtic Football Club's
Parkhead stadium, in the constituency, will host the opening ceremony
and the athletes' village will be built just outside the seat on the
banks of the Clyde, with plans to turn it into an inner city
neighbourhood designed to trigger further regeneration.
But these are Holyrood schemes, not Westminster's. It is over the Labour
Government's record that the by-election is being fought and Mason says
it has taken Glasgow East's residents for granted.
Despite this, the SNP has a mountain to climb. Labour MP David Marshall,
whose resignation prompted the by-election, held the seat since 1979 and
was returned in 2005 with a majority of 13,500. An ICM poll last week
showed that the SNP had made up ground: with support for Labour at 47
per cent and the SNP on 33 per cent. This is a 15 per cent swing to the
SNP, but short of the 22 per cent swing it needs to snatch the seat.
Most pundits are predicting a low turnout (in 2005 it was 48 per cent)
and a Labour win by around 2,000 votes.
For their part, the Tories may be lucky to keep their deposit. Yet
arguably it is the Tories who have listened most to the people of
Glasgow East. It was a visit to the area's Easterhouse estate in 2002
that prompted Iain Duncan Smith to establish the Centre for Social
Justice, the think-tank behind many of the Tories' social policies, and
party leader David Cameron has used the by-election to argue that the
Tories, not Labour, are now the party of social justice. While a narrow
Labour victory may stave off calls for Gordon Brown's head, the party
may well lose more ground to the Tories on the issues Labour has long
considered its own.
