Talk Elections

This is a placeholder for now. But I hope to have 1999-2007 council maps up, Cencus 2001 analysis and finally maps showing councillors from 1920-1973

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Don't worry I will put up a ward key.

1999 and 2003 comparison

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I don't know Edinburgh very well - there are some Tory wards where I wouldn't expect them to be, though probably anyone who knows Edinburgh would expect them there...

Is that a Green ward in Leith in 1999? Is yellow/orange LD or SNP or are they two different colors? Also, what's that area at the far northwest of the city and why was it included in the city limits at all?

The 1999 and 2003 maps show 'Lib Dems Win Here' in action really well. They consolidate their support in the areas of the west such as Gyle, Queensferry and Corstorphine and in south central Edinburgh in Merchiston, North Morningside. In 2003 you can see how alot of deep red becomes pink just to the north of that (close to University of Edinburgh campus). The SNP collapsed in 2003 where they were the challengers. They also lost their only ward. However in 2007, thanks in part to STV but also due to a genuine upswing in support the SNP were propelled to 12 seats and 1 constituency

If we break down the 2007 results (which I hope to soon) the areas of relative strength remain similar except for Labour v SNP areas.

That wonderful blue blob of wards just south of Leith is the grand Georgian are around Stockbridge and New Town. This formed the bulk of pre-'83 seat of Edinburgh North. It was however carved up in the re-warding for 2007.

I will post the usual employment/industry maps as well as a wonderful Scottish v English born :)


Sorry; should have included the key. I'm using Al's colour scheme here. Green represents the SNP and the orange/yellow spectrum show the Lib Dems.
The are to the north west of the city, on the coast is South Queensferry. It was as the name suggests, the 'ferry' point for Edinburgh to Fife and now includes to approaches to the Forth Rail and Road bridges. It was included in Edinburgh during the 1970's reorganisation giving the city a quite expansive hinterland to the west (though it's borders to the east are tight)

Ah right, heard that name. Still weird to include it in the city.

Could have thought of that re color scheme. (slaps head)

Fascinating :)

Is a ward map of the 2007 elections possible?

Yes. I'm working on one. As they are STV elections it won't quite show similar trends

Interesting - diolch, etc. Must ask about another dark blue ward - the one in the east. Like I said, I don't know Edinburgh so apologies if this seems laughably obvious.

I did once do maps (long since lost) of the 2007 elections in Edinburgh out of curiosity - I seem to remember that the Labour and SNP patterns looked amusingly alike.

On the colour scheme issue, I started liking purple a while ago though don't think I've ever used it. Might cause problems if you were doing maps of the '80's, what with purple being the obvious SDP colour. Oh well.


You should know by now not to expect much sanity in local government boundaries in Britain. Actually, Edinburgh's is fairly reasonable. Have a look at the local authorities covering the Yorkshire cities.

Is the roughly horizontal boundary between the red and blue areas downtown Princes Street? (Or somewhere in the Gardens, which would come to the same thing?)

I took it to be the railway line. Anyways, yeah that's definitely the boundary between Old Town and (macro) New Town. The fairly large red ward west of the one Al's asking about is that sizable because of Holyrood / Arthur's Seat in it.

The ward in the east was Duddingston held by Ian Berry OBE an 'Edinburgh Conservative' (The Tories did not stand anyone here) and councillor from 1977-2007. It was a local vote that did not hold up (The Tories didn't win a seat in the Craigentinny/Duddingston ward in 2007)

With the exception of the Lib Dems 'gate crashing' local politics in the 1990's, Edinburgh is interesting because of how stable local politics has been. The city is tremendously bourgeois; what was rich 80 years ago is rich now. The city has not suffered from the migration of the middle classes that Glasgow has done. There are few 60's estates barring those in the south east and Sighthill sandwiched between Corstorphine and the Pentlands due in part to Livingstone and Glenrothes taking the overspill. Edinburgh has also not suffered from 'clearances' in the manner that Glasgow has and is still a high density city.


The line is essentially Princess Street running west down Shandwick Place. You're correct in that it is the physical and social divide in Edinburgh though the whole area is currently unpassable due to the tram works :P

Speaking of which if you were..I dunno say a Labour group of politicians wanting to build a tramline where would you put it? If you were Lib Dem junior partners who might just might get line built later if the first one is successful where would you beg for it to be put?

Scottish politicians have a tendency to go on 'jollies' (usually to Dublin), see something they like and try to introduce it. So the then Lab/Lib coalition in Edinburgh saw trams and thought 'lets have those'. With the cancellation of EARL; the Edinburgh Airport Rail Link the tram takes its place going from the Airport, to a new interchange at Gogar, through the centre past Murrayfield, Waverley Station and then heading north east towards the Firth and the Port of Leith. Which follows a wonderful line right the way through all those red Labour wards. And just to demonstrate that the Lib Dems really were Labour's 'bitch', the planned (and probably shelved) second extension which is supposed to fund itself, takes a sweep through the Lib Dem wards to the west :P

Infact 2/3rds of the line shadows the existing rail line between Haymarket and Edinburgh Waverley. The areas most in need of decent transportation are the south and south east of the city. But that is 'Toryland' to the south and ignores the rock solid Labour estates which when the realised they had been sold a pup swung to the SNP propelling a certain Mr Macaskill to Holyrood...

Public transport in Edinburgh as pre-tram was far too depressing to be even called a bad joke. Same goes for Dublin - it probably was the worst in Western Europe.
A tram is cheaper - and a lot less disruptive - to build than a subway (though they might have gone for tunnelling under the Old Town's hill, running the same trains as a tram elsewhere in the city. But then you'd've had subway entrances on the High Street.) They're slower, too, of course, but as you point out Edinburgh is dense enough to be almost walkable anyways.
Now, maybe they planned a few lines too few. But you can always add more later on. (And yeah, just looking at the map, the southeast looks like the place the next line ought to be built after that. Not sure how necessary a more northerly parallel line is - certainly makes sense on the map, but I'm not sure if there's enough people who actually want to travel that way?)

Oh dear... :-[

A Scottish City?


A map of where residents were born.

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More to follow. There is even enough statistical variation to allow a decent map of where 'North Americans' live....

Edinburgh Haves

The first of the professional/economic maps

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I shouldn't be jumping about as much as this

2007 results

This was reached by adding all the party candidates first preferences together giving the total 'party' vote.

SNP are yellow in one and 'green' in the other :P

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Back to the Past! Ward Key map for 1920-1938

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Hm, so who lives in the Old Town now? Student slum? It's not the proletariat anymore as until 40 years ago or so (as see also the English-born map :) ) but it seems not as solidly boboified (why is French the only language with a decent word for it?) as I would have assumed, either.

Not quite student slum (I'll try and get a good map for this) but some of the wards have 40%-50%+ aged 16-24 (i.e students) The houses here are not cheap to rent. Bearing in mind this is the hub of the University of Edinburgh campus you (or your parents) have to be quite well off or in serious debt to afford to rent here, even in multiple occupancy homes and flats.

Btw, what's up with the relatively bourgeouis, and certainly Tory voting in 99 and 03, ward in the western half of what once used to be West Leith ward. Leith has its own ancient middle class west side - it was once a burgh in its own right after all - , or is that dockland-style hardcore gentrification?

That is Trinity; it's a very desirable area of the city and is a 'mansion house' district. It is part of Leith, and you're right; it was the then autonomous Leith's answer to similar districts in Edinburgh.

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First up the interesting 'transition' period for Edinburgh. This map is from 1960 to 1973, the last year of the authority before re-organisation.

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What happened in '68?

The Wilson government was extremely unpopular by that point, and Labour did extremely badly in local elections just about everywhere (that is, even worse than the worst of the round just finished has been for the current government and even worse than the worst of local elections were for the Major government), though the scale differed from place to place - Labour didn't win a single ward in Birmingham that year, but held up fairly well in Coventry (much to the relief of Richard Crossman). London (which had then (and still does) all-out elections) in particular was a total disaster with Tory majorities (I think quite lopsided ones too) elected in such unlikely places as Islington and Hackney - there were significant longterm consequences of that as the old right-wing Morrision machine in the inner London boroughs was devastated to an extent that similar machines in other cities weren't, meaning that it was easier for various New Left groups to take over local Labour parties in London than elsewhere.

Old right-wing Morrison machine?

Now I'm interested. You must go on.

The political machine built by Herbert Morrison, basically. It dominated the politics of the LCC and of the boroughs within it from 1934 until the GLC elections of 1967 and the borough elections of 1968. It was structurally very different from other right-wing* municipal Labour machines (which were, and are, usually dominated by local Unions and people close to them - Birmingham Labour is a classic example - and which have rarely had more than a handful of individual Party members) in that it was a centralised mass-membership party. In each borough it tended to be dominated by Alderman and other senior councillors who had the same level of control over the Party in their own borough as Morrision (and later Isaac Hayward**) did over them. 1968 basically destroyed the machine because the organisation revolved around the Alderman and senior councillors - most of whom lost their seats that year. At the same time, individual membership of all political parties was dropping like a stone, removing the foundations of the system as well.

*a relative term of course... and sometimes less than that. Style, structure and sociology having as much to do with the label as politics in some cases.

**the longest serving head of elected London government; he was the leader of the LCC from 1947 until it was abolished in 1965.

So, then, it was an American-style machine?

No - it wasn't reliant on patronage (which is the key feature of classic American political machines) but on a large number of Party members. Though it was more like one than most right-wing municipal Labour machines (including the one in West Ham - which was only formally added to London in the '60's and was thus outside Morrison's influence. Labour control there goes back to the end of the 19th century) were and are.

If the LCC had remained, would Labour have been defeated in 1968?

The GLC elections were in 1967, but probably. However, they wouldn't have been defeated in 1977 (also a Tory landslide).

If the government was so unpopular, how did Labour do so well at the 1970 general election?

Well a lot of the reasons for the government's unpopularity were pretty superficial (devaluation for example) and when they went away...
Though, reading diaries and memoirs of Labour politicians from the time is hilarious - they were for the most part genuinely amazed at the sudden upturn in the Party's poll ratings and struggled to explain it.

But now we should probably end this threadjack ;D

To return this thread back on topic... details on the Moderates would be nice :). I have a rough idea of what they were, but not much more than that.

Yeah, what's up with the Moderates in old Scottish local politics? I think Afleitch also referred to them in Glasgow back in the days.

I'm taking a jaunt to Edinburgh to enlighten myself on this :D The Moderates/Progressives etc were essentially businessmen/shop owners/solicitors who sat on the council and were elected under that banner. You could say they represented the employer while Labour represented the employed. The Moderates also represented the 'not Labour' vote and were broadly more successful when Labour was weak. Their seats were often not contested.

The councillors (and most of their voters) generally identified with the Unionists (later Conservatives) nationally and were often party members, but the Tories were not organised locally until the 1960's when most of the previous Moderates ran under the Tory banner.

And it all went downhill from there...

Just noticed something strange from parliamentary results in Edinburgh in the interwar period; the first is that West was actually won by Labour in 1929 (obviously on a split vote, but 38% in that part of that city in that year seems surprising) and near won in 1945. But the really interesting thing is this...

Edinburgh Central, % majorities

1918: Lab 2.6
1922: Lab 15.8
1923: Lab 35.8
1924: Lab 21.0
1929: Lab 35.2
1931: Con 23.1
1935: Con 12.6 (note: Labour gained East, previously much weaker than Central, that year)
1945: Lab 21.0

...which produced a reaction of "wtf". I'm wondering whether slum clearance in the Old Town (if there was any; I don't know much about Edinburgh's municipal history during this period) might explain it. The electorate in 1918 was a tad under 31,000, peaked at about 41,000 in 1929 (the first election after the equalisation of the franchise) and was down to 33,000 in 1945.

And the guy who won in 1945 also ran in 1935. I don't think there was a boundary change during the period?

I know there's a smallish council estate right southwest of Holyrood Castle (and southeast of the new Parliament) that was built on top of a razed early 19th century slum, and initially tenanted by the very same people that had been living in the slum (presumably it was built in stages?) I think that was in the 1950s, though.

The only boundary changes during the period were in constituencies that had become too large, so, no.

I'm going to have a look at that in some detail as I've got some residency figures from that period. I have a feeling about the 1930's figures...and that may have something to do with religious politics and city politics wrapped up in a big ball of bad. It's worth checking out.

On closer inspection. (And i'll post up some supporting local government maps soon)

Interwar Edinburgh West was not as 'west' as we would now assume

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This is Edinburgh in 1925

You may spot the blob of Fettes College, then out on it's own and now circled by housing. Also worth noting is the obvious seperation (for now) between Edinburgh and Leith

West was composed of Dalry, Gorgie, St Bernards and Haymarket. Dalry and Gorgie were rocksolid Labour and the race was really a turnout battle. However in 1929 there was a strong 3rd place showing for the Liberals. Their candidate was Vivian Phillips, former MP for the area and former teacher at Fettes. It was the first 'women under 30' election so a strong Liberal showing plus alot of working lassies voting for Labour may have swung the result. The Liberals didn't stand after this point.

Ah, that would explain things somewhat. Anything on the weird results in Central?

Working on that. Something happened when it came to demographics. There's some good housing stock in there but as time moved on I think alot of the occupants did too...and the 'people per room' stats look interesting as you head into the 30's.