Edinburgh South: why Labour held on against the SNP tide

Bellwether states that always pick the US president, or parliamentary seats whose voting pattern and everyman electorate make them the country in microcosm.

Not Edinburgh South. On May 7 it was an outlier, a freak, the only Scots constituency to elect a Labour MP, an island of red above the SNP tsunami. But why?

Popping into Waitrose in Morningside, retired analytical chemist Bill Kerr offers a clue.

"I've always been a Conservative," explains the sprightly 81-year-old.

"But I so hated the idea of the SNP taking over, and because Labour was so close behind, I voted Labour for the first time and persuaded my wife to do the same. When the Labour chap came to the door he really brightened up when I said I hated the SNP."

Kerr cites Nicola Sturgeon's plan to scrap Trident and her "possessive" attitude to North Sea oil as key factors in his decision. He was not alone.

Miles Briggs, the Tory candidate in the seat, reckons one in five Tories did likewise.

"It was a real tactical vote to stop the SNP. I went into the election with 12,000 pledges, but came out with less than 9,000 votes. At the polling station people were chatting to me on the way in, then came out and said they'd voted Labour."

Edinburgh South was almost hand-crafted for tactical voting.

Taking in bits of both Edinburgh and Napier university, it has one of the most sophisticated electorates in Scotland, with large numbers of students, academics, finance sector workers, and NHS staff from nearby Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

At its centre are the Braid Hills, a rugged wind-swept park that splits the seat in socio-economic as well as geographical terms.

To the north and west are the bourgeois bastions of Marchmont, Merchiston, Morningside, the Grange (home of Scotland's most expensive street, Dick Place), Newington, Buckstone and Fairmilehead, while clustered in the south-east corner are the council schemes of The Inch, Moredun, Liberton, Gracemount and Gilmerton.

For years, the Tories and LibDems broadly dominated the former and Labour the latter, creating a three-way marginal in which the Nats barely registered.

In 2010, local Labour councillor Ian Murray squeaked in just 316 votes ahead of the LibDems, while the SNP recorded their lowest vote in Scotland, 7.7 per cent.

Murray's was Labour's smallest Scottish majority, but a blessing in disguise.

Unlike MPs in 'weight the vote' seats, Murray knew he had to graft from day one.

He held his first surgery five hours after getting elected, and never really stopped.

He held more surgeries than any other MP in the country, some 800, offered all 36,500 households a home visit, put 8000 constituents on his monthly mailing list, and assembled a team of staff and activists with the same Stakhanovite work ethic.

In his spare time, he became chair of Foundation of Hearts, the not-for-profit supporters group set up to buy Hearts FC after its administration.

Even his opponents concede he is diligent and conscientious.

A classic sign of low expectations, the SNP stood a virtual unknown against him.

Until 2011, Neil Hay lived in Barcelona, an ex-pat running homesick-sounding businesses such as Alba Wholesale and the Dundee Cake Company.

After the SNP won its Holyrood majority, he came home and joined the local SNP and the Yes campaign (ominously for him, Edinburgh South voted 65.3 per cent No).

But that wasn't all Hay did. Using the Twitter alias Paco McSheepie, he called Unionists "Quislings" and said some were old dears who "can barely remember their names".

On April 20, a Lord Ashcroft poll put him ahead of Murray by 37 to 34 per cent.

Three days later, Labour outed the tweets and denounced Hay as a Cybernat.

Unimpressed, Sturgeon said it was "up to the voters to decide" his fate.

The story soon faded, but it took the wind out the SNP's sails at a key moment.

"It made the campaign stall. It deflated morale," one SNP campaigner admits.

"If we hadn't had that issue it would have been a lot closer."

Murray increased his majority by 2321, up 4.4 per cent.

Labour's vote collapsed in its home turf and went to the SNP, but tactical voting by the huge reservoir of Tories and LibDems more than filled the hole.

The LibDem vote in particular suffered a spectacular crash: from 34 per cent to 4.

"There was a ton of tactical voting," says LibDem candidate Pramod Subbaraman, who lost count of supporters apologising for making an anti-SNP vote their priority.

"The major objective for people was not who was elected, but who was not elected. These are people who mostly voted No. It's as simple as that."

SNP MSP Jim Eadie, who won the overlapping Holyrood seat in 2011, adds: "If the LibDem vote had held up better we probably would have sneaked it."

Murray insists the vote was more nuanced, but doesn't deny a LibDem hand-up.

In the south east of the seat, "it was two to one for the SNP in some areas. Fifty-fifty at best. Our strongest area was South Morningside. There were a lot of one-off factors."

But in the end, he says it was his record as a hard-working local MP that tipped it.

"You might have thought 'Am I voting Nat? No, I want to keep the Union together. Tory? Can't win here. LibDem? No. Labour? Actually Ian Murray's done quite a bit of work for us and I know he's struggling a bit against the SNP, so maybe.'"

Looking ahead, former MSP Colin Fox, the local Scottish Socialist candidate, says Edinburgh South should be a klaxon for Labour rather than a comfort.

"Labour in Scotland has gone from Red Clydeside to Morningside," he laughs.

"The only place they have left is where they'd been saved by the middle classes.

"Their working class vote has evaporated. It took Miss Jean Brodie to rescue Ian Murray, and they can't survive on that ."