IN 2017, Scottish Labour’s council campaign launch was overtaken by events.

Activists were heading to Edinburgh’s Our Dynamic Earth to hear from Kezia Dugdale when Theresa May walked out of Downing Street and shocked the country by calling for an early General Election. 

The Scottish Labour leader was forced to rewrite her speech, her local election event effectively becoming Scotland’s first General Election event.

One of the consequences of the unexpected national campaign was that it put a stink on the idea of coalitions.

So when Labour’s new councillors in Aberdeen negotiated a power-sharing deal with the Conservatives, just days after the elections in May and as the campaign for the Westminster election in June heated up, the party took the unprecedented decision to suspend them all. 

It was only late last year that the executive committee got round to doing something about it, saying that the councillors could stand again in this year’s elections. But for most of the last five years, the nine suspended elected representatives styled themselves as Aberdeen Labour. Labour without being in Labour.

In 2017, it was the SNP who were the biggest party, winning 19 councillors. However, they fell short of the numbers to form a majority administration. Discussions with the four LibDems came to nothing.

The Tories were the big winners in terms of gains, surging from three councillors to 
11. Labour’s nine councillors was a poor result given they had 18 going into the election.

Yet despite being the smaller party, the Tories agreed to let Labour have not just the provost, but also the Leader of the council. It was what then-Tory group leader (now Tory MSP) Douglas Lumsden described as “a Unionist coalition that will put the interests of Aberdeen first, not obsess over a second independence referendum.”

Given that Anas Sarwar has explicitly ruled out coalitions with any party, is that unionist coalition at an end, or could history repeat itself? 

But Aberdeen Labour is still some distance away from colleagues in the central belt. There was dismay in the northeast when Mr Sarwar put a windfall tax on oil and gas at the heart of his local government manifesto. 

The other big issue for voters in the northeast is the gigantic muddy hole in the city centre. It used to be Union Terrace Gardens, a Victorian oasis just off Union Street. The fate of the gardens has plagued Aberdonians for well over a decade. Plans to upgrade the park were first backed by the LibDem-SNP administration in 2007. 

The following year, businessman Sir Ian Wood said he would contribute up to £50 million towards a rival scheme to raise the gardens and develop a new street-level square.

Those plans were eventually rejected in 2012 by the newly-elected Labour administration. In 2016, the Aberdeen Labour-Tory coalition agreed to a £28m redevelopment and had planned on a “soft” reopening to the public last week. Anyone walking past can see there’s still – what the BBC described – as a “considerable amount of work” to be done. 

The question is: which party will voters want to finish the job?