Kilmarnock: a barometer for Labour?

Once a stronghold, the cash-strapped Ayrshire town is now marginal as the SNP threatens Des Browne's seat

Four years ago Kilmarnock was named as one of the luckiest places in Scotland after a spate of lottery winners raised its profile as home to a new breed of millionaires.

However, outside the closed-down shops, pubs and clubs which are dotted around the centre of the town, few residents feel quite so fortunate today.

A Labour stronghold, and the seat of Cabinet Minister Des Browne, Kilmarnock & Loudoun is typical of many communities across Scotland where people are feeling the pinch of rising fuel costs, food prices and household bills. Many blame the UK government for their current predicament and admit they are looking towards the SNP administration in Edinburgh for answers.

'Everybody's moaning about the price of food, petrol and the general cost of living,' said John Gordon, as he waited outside Kilmarnock's train station for a taxi. Like many of the residents of the town, the 45-year-old IT engineer commutes around 40 minutes to Glasgow every day for work and admits he is worried about his job. 'Labour has been in power for too long,' he went on. 'I blame the [Westminster] government for the mess we are in.

'Like a lot of people I thought Labour would take care of people but look at what's happening. They say the problems are international and nothing to do with [Gordon] Brown and his cronies but they are the people who sat and took the credit when things were going well, so they have to take responsibility when it goes wrong. My firm works a lot with the financial industry so it's a worrying time - nobody knows if they will have a job by Christmas, never mind by the next election. I don't know who I'll vote for next time. I voted Labour at the last election but it's time for a change.'

With a little more than 44,000 residents Kilmarnock is the largest town in East Ayrshire ideally situated close to the M77, A71 and A76 for office workers heading for Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The area, once a manufacturing centre for the woollen and cotton industries, is now home to a number of call centres and light engineering, carpet manufacturing and food and drink companies.

Scotland's hero, William Wallace, is said to have been born in Riccarton, a suburb of Kilmarnock, and the area boasts links with Robert Burns and horror writer Edgar Allan Poe who, as a boy, used to copy inscriptions from gravestones in the old Laigh Kirk.

Residents are proud of their town's past but less optimistic about its future. 'There's nothing in the town anymore,' said Evelyn Murphy, 57, who has lived in and around the district for 27 years.

'A lot of the pubs and restaurants have closed down. Most people go into Glasgow for a night out or go to one of the big supermarkets out of town for their shopping. Even the bingo isn't as popular as it was as there's bigger prizes to be had down the road at Irvine. Mind you, there's not many who can afford to go out anymore. Everybody's getting worried about what will happen next.

'It was criminal what the government let happen to the Bank of Scotland after 300 years. People like me used to vote Labour because that's what our parents and our friends did. We were told Scotland couldn't manage on its own but now we have our own parliament hardly anybody thinks about Westminster except when there's a big cock-up like now and everybody's broke.'

A Labour stronghold for more than 60 years, Kilmarnock & Loudoun was until recently thought to be a safe seat. However, in the last couple of years the constituency has turned into a marginal as the nationalists have been pushing hard to make inroads and now there is a feeling that the seat could fall into the hands of the SNP, leaving Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, without a seat.

If he was alive to see it, Willie Ross, the former local MP who died in 1988, would be shocked. The former Secretary of State for Scotland was a diehard unionist with an instinctive dislike of the SNP and its policy of independence.

Ross held the seat for Labour for more than 30 years before standing down in 1979 in favour of William McKelvey who handed the baton over to Des Browne in 1997. However since 2005, when Browne held on to the seat despite a 5.5 per cent swing to the SNP, the nationalists have seen their popularity soar while Labour's has hit an all-time low. Among the town's population there is now a definite hope or fear, depending on their political views, that the nationalists could win the seat, if only to teach the current Labour administration a lesson.

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