Will the Greens surge or stumble in Glasgow Southside?

The constituency tour. The last-ditch gesture of clapped-out hacks and deadline-dreading political reporters the world over. And today, it is my turn: I am the constituency tourist. It’s a warm Sunday afternoon, 12 days before the election. My 12,000 steps — Google tells me this is six miles — starts at the Beirut Star on Paisley Road.  

Over the next three hours, I cross the M77, walk up Gower Street  – where, half-way, the houses abruptly turn from post-war semi to palatial – towards Hutchesons private school. (Fees per secondary term: £6665.) From there, I bypass Strathbungo and head down into Govanhill, the pride stickers and Palestinian flags slowly accumulating in tenement block windows. Govanhill Park is packed with families enjoying the blazing Scottish springtime heat. From Govanhill, I venture south along the arterial Cathcart Road, stopping briefly for a beer at the Brazen Head, then walk to the Citizens Theatre and onto the Central Mosque. Eventually, at about 3 pm, I hit the banks of the Clyde, my tour complete.

This rambling pilgrimage was an attempt to roughly circumnavigate the borders of Glasgow Southside, a Scottish parliamentary constituency home to 60,000-ish of the city’s residents. 

For decades, south Glasgow, like Glasgow as a whole, was a Labour fiefdom. After the creation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, a new constituency was created called Glasgow Govan. Govan was held for eight years by Gordon Jackson, the Scottish Labour lawyer, but snatched by Nicola Sturgeon in 2007. (Jackson went on to represent Alex Salmond in his legal case against Sturgeon’s government in 2021.) The SNP’s Stewart Macdonald took the Westminster seat from Labour in 2015. In 2024, Glasgow Provan, now called Glasgow South, returned to Labour. 

Today, two constituencies co-exist alongside one another: Westminster’s Glasgow South, held by Labour’s Gordon McKee, and Holyrood’s Glasgow Southside, which encompasses Bellahouston, Pollokshields, Shawlands, Battlefield, and Toryglen, among other areas, held by the SNP.

It’s perhaps Scotland’s least socially coherent burgh. There is wealth here and poverty. There are unionists and nationalists, hipsters and retirees, immigrants and hard-bitten locals alike. And a new political battle is unfolding on the streets, that pitches the SNP on one side against the insurgent Scottish Greens on the other. 

A lot rides on this. At stake for the Greens: their first ever constituency victory in Scotland. At stake for the SNP: a clean sweep of Glasgow’s Holyrood seats and, possibly, a standalone majority in the Scottish Parliament. Sturgeon stepped down from Holyrood at the end of the last parliamentary session having represented southern Glasgow in its various guises for 19 years. But the fact that this seat for so long belonged to the Scottish first minister and SNP leader makes it, by default, politically significant – and adds extra tension to the contest. So what will happen?