Previewing the Kilwinning, North Ayrshire by-election of 9th May 2024
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
One by-election on 9th May 2024:
Kilwinning
North Ayrshire council; caused by the death of Conservative councillor John Glover.
Welcome to the municipal year of 2024–25, which is normally a busy time of the electoral cycle for council by-elections. However, at some point in this municipal year there will be a general election for the House of Commons — something which often prompts a flurry of council by-elections timed to coincide with a larger poll and thereby save cost and effort for everyone involved. Andrew’s Previews will produce an “Undercard” preview for those by-elections in due course, while leaving the main event to be mostly covered by pundits who are actually paid for their punditry.
The repeal of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, with general elections now callable on the Prime Ministerial whim at 25 working days’ notice, has resulted in extensive headaches and unrelievable stress for everyone involved with organising elections. Every returning officer in the land is in limbo, faced with the task of recruiting staff and booking scores or hundreds of polling places within their bailiwick at extremely short notice so that they can put this show on for your benefit. Not to mention the bride whose long-planned wedding reception might get bumped in favour of election counters, or the kids who could see their nativity play cancelled so their school hall can be a polling station.
The returning officers of Scotland have a particular problem with the general election date, because the next Westminster election will be the very first poll in Scotland which requires voter ID. In England and Wales we have had one or two cycles of local elections or a set of Police and Crime Commissioner elections to sort out issues with the introduction of voter ID and the training of polling staff to handle those rules; but the Holyrood parliament has not legislated for voter ID in Scottish Parliament or Scottish local elections, presumably because they think it’s a waste of time and money, and Scotland doesn’t have elected police and crime commissioners (or indeed regional police forces). The only electoral events in Scotland to date which required voter ID were the recall petition and subsequent Westminster by-election in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West constituency last year. For the rest of the country, it’s all going to have to work right and flawlessly first time.
In the UK, parliamentary by-elections have to be called by the Crown sending a writ to the relevant returning officer on request of the House of Commons; the relevant Commons motion is traditionally moved by the chief whip of the defending party and customarily agreed without debate. In England and Wales, local by-elections also have to be called: this is done by two electors (ten electors in the case of a parish council) writing to the returning officer to request an election. Receipt of the writ or of the two (or ten) letters, as the case may be, starts the electoral clock ticking for the returning officer.
Scottish local by-elections use a different system in which the returning officer, once notified of a vacancy, will then organise a polling date on his own initiative within three months of the vacancy occurring. One effect of that is that this column gets more notice of Scottish by-election dates, because the council can put out a press release to inform voters of the intended polling day a week or two before the official notice of election has to be published. More time to get the administration and preparation right also normally means a better-run election. But Westminster elections are organised on a shorter timescale than that.
Combine this with the voter ID rules for Westminster and PCC elections and you have a godawful mess. When we look at recent decisions by returning officers in Wales, we see some extreme lengths being taken to try and avoid any possibility of combining a poll which requires voter ID (Westminster or PCC) with one that doesn’t (Welsh local elections). Pembrokeshire council organised a Tuesday by-election in March; Cardiff made the voters of Grangetown ward turn out two weeks in a row. Last week’s PCC elections in Wales would normally be an excellent opportunity to save costs and drive up PCC election turnout by organising a simultaneous council by-election; but not a single council by-election was combined with it. Will we see Scottish returning officers going through similar contortions over the next few months?
The returning officer for North Ayrshire clearly thought that 9th May was an unlikely date for a Westminster election, and his gamble has paid off. This brings us to the town of Kilwinning, traditionally referred to as the Crossroads of Ayrshire thanks to its location at the lowest crossing-point of the River Garnock. Roads and railway lines radiate from here north up the valley towards Paisley and Glasgow, west to Ardrossan and south to Irvine New Town. Kilwinning benefited from some of the New Town growth, and manufacturing is a major sector of the local economy.
Traditionally Kilwinning was a religious centre: the name refers to a cell or church founded by St Winning, an obscure figure of the early 7th century. The town has also long been home to the original lodge of Scottish freemasonry: on the roll of the Grand Lodge of Scotland, Lodge Mother Kilwinning is registered as number 0. In more recent times Kilwinning was the birthplace of the composer Sir James MacMillan, much of whose output is religious. Despite MacMillan’s Catholic faith, his choral anthem Who shall separate us?, based on text from the Epistle to the Romans, was commissioned for and first performed at the funeral of that noted Anglican Elizabeth II.
As in much of Scotland, the Scottish National Party represents Kilwinning at both Westminster and Holyrood. The Kilwinning ward, which takes in all of the town plus some of its hinterland to the east and north-east, is within the Cunninghame South constituency of the Scottish Parliament which has been represented since 2007 by the SNP’s Kenneth Gibson who is the convenor of Holyrood’s finance and public administration committee. His wife Patricia Gibson was elected in 2015 as the SNP MP for North Ayrshire and Arran, and she will soon seek re-election for a fourth term of office. The Boundary Commission have left all four Ayrshire constituencies completely unchanged, which means that Kilwinning ward will continue to be split between Westminster seats; the village of Benslie, the Eglinton country park and most of Kilwinning town east of the Garnock are part of the SNP-held Central Ayrshire constituency.
The name of Cunninghame in the Scottish Parliament constituency name refers to a historic bailliery of Ayrshire, whose name was revived in 1975 for a district of what was then the Strathclyde region. In the 1996 Scottish local government reforms Cunninghame district was renamed as “North Ayrshire” but otherwise left intact.
Kilwinning ward was created for the 2007 elections and returns four members of North Ayrshire council by proportional representation. All four ordinary elections here to date have been won by Labour, who have consistently won two of the ward’s four seats; the SNP have won one seat at every election, with the other seat in Kilwinning going to the Lib Dems in 2007, an independent in 2012 and the Conservatives since 2017. Shares of the first preference vote here at the last Scottish council elections in May 2022 were 46% for Labour, 35% for the SNP and 16% for the Conservatives, with the Conservatives’ John Glover beating the second SNP candidate Sheila Gibson for the final seat by 1,029 votes to 944 thanks to Lib Dem transfers. The excellent Ballot Box Scotland blog has recalculated the 2022 numbers for a single-seat contest and found that Labour would beat the SNP by the wide margin of 2,955 votes to 2,007. This Labour dominance is unusual for North Ayrshire where the SNP are the largest party on the council, which they run as a minority with 12 out of 33 seats.
This by-election will be defended by the Conservatives following the death of their councillor John Glover in February, following a long period of ill-health for which the council had granted him leave of absence. Glover had first been elected here in 2017 following a career in his family’s agricultural business.
It will be hard for the Conservatives to defend this seat from third place, and it also looks an uphill struggle for the SNP to gain given the strong Labour lead in Kilwinning ward and the party’s consistently poor national polling. Not to mention the SNP’s consistently poor record in actual elections since 2022: the party lost every single by-election they entered during the leadership of Humza Yousaf. John Swinney, who took over as First Minster yesterday, has a bit of a job to do to steady the good ship Scottish National Party.
Defending for the Conservatives is Chris Lawler, who runs a gardening business in the town and also commutes from here to Partick to work in a scuba diving shop. He’ll be hoping that the Conservative vote doesn’t plumb the depths. The Labour candidate Mary Hume is a retired headteacher. Returning from 2022 is the losing SNP candidate from last time Sheila Gibson, a former biomedical scientist who is now a support foster carer. Completing the ballot paper are another returning candidate from last time, the Lib Dems’ Ruby Kirkwood, and Ian Gibson for the socially-conservative Scottish Family Party. Counting will take place on Friday. The Alternative Vote is in use for this by-election, votes at 16 apply, and intending voters for the SNP and the Scottish Family Party are advised to check carefully which Gibson they want to give their first preference for.
Looking forward, my list of council vacancies after today currently has seventeen entries of which only four have dates scheduled. So Andrew’s Previews columns for the next month or so will be short affairs, and there is nothing at all in the diary for next week so I will be taking a well-earned break. Normal service will resume on 23rd May with one by-election in rural Leicestershire.
Westminster constituency: North Ayrshire and Arran (most), Central Ayrshire (Benslie area)
Westminster constituency (from next general election): North Ayrshire and Arran, Central Ayrshire (Benslie area)
Holyrood constituency: Cunninghame South
ONS Travel to Work Area: Kilmarnock and Irvine
Postcode districts: KA12, KA13, KA15, KA20, KA21, KA24
Ian Gibson (Scottish Family Party)
Sheila Gibson (SNP)
Mary Hume (Lab)
Ruby Kirkwood (LD)
Chris Lawler (C)
May 2022 first preferences Lab 2556 SNP 1939 C 867 LD 191
Previous results in detail
If you enjoyed these previews, there are many more like them — going back to 2016 — in the Andrew’s Previews books, which are available to buy now (link). You can also support future previews by donating to the Local Elections Archive Project (link).
Andrew Teale
