How the north/south divide could decide Glasgow's newest constituency

Growing up in Partick in the 1980s, “I’d know your name, I’d know what you were up tae”, says the man in the camouflage puffer jacket holding a splooting pug on a lead. Things aren’t so anymore, and he doesn’t like the way they are now. This, in a nutshell, explains why he says this next: “Reform all the way, get that SNP tae fuck”. 

In Woodlands’ tenements, a different take. “All I care about is independence” says a Gaelic-speaking man, shortly followed by a woman in a separate flat saying her top issue is “immigration” — only, she wants “more of it”. 

These three conversations, taking place within a couple miles of each other, give you a pretty concise expression of the battlelines in Glasgow’s newest constituency: Glasgow Kelvin and Maryhill. 

The camo jacket man is among the old guard of disillusioned Glaswegians: struggling in the face of the cost of living and tempted by the new parties who promise to shake things up. He won’t give me his name, but he does inform me of The Bell’s likely fate if we were to name him in our pages (here he gestures with his hand to show a plane crashing).

The man believes that two things, political correctness and an atomised society, are to blame for his struggles. These struggles include feeling unsafe because of “illegal” migration, his budget cracking under the strain of living costs, and (his three friends who nod in agreement at this point) the NHS being “jiggered”. 

Metres away from him, students and young professionals bask in the Mansfield Park sunshine, stick and poke tattoos decorating their skin. The five I speak to are all voting, all voting left, and all voting for left-leaning nationalists. Their top priorities? Home ownership, women’s rights, and a move away from “Tory rule”, which a young wavy-haired male student says is being continued under UK Labour. 

In 2025, the Scottish parliament decided that parts of the old Holyrood seats of Glasgow Kelvin and Glasgow Maryhill and Springburn should be chopped up and stuck back together in a new seat. The result is an awkwardly agglutinated constituency. It has three areas in the top 1% most deprived parts of Scotland, and three in the richest 1%. In fact, the dividing line could hardly be clearer. If you follow Maryhill Road or the Kelvin river, you’ll see the seat dissected into blue or red clumps of those in the wealthier half of Scotland (south of the line) and those in the less wealthy half. 

There is a divide between the north and south of this seat, whether political or not. But now these two areas have merged and will be represented by one MSP, elected on Thursday. Who can bridge the gap? And how are they doing it? The polls suggest it’s a three-way battle. SNP, the Greens, and Labour, are the pollsters’ top three. 

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