What happened last time?
Kirkcaldy has had just two MSPs since 1999. Marilyn Livingstone was elected for Labour until 2011, when David Torrance won the seat with a slim 182-vote majority. He has since nurtured that lead to 7,395 as of 2016, an 11-point swing even further in favour of the SNP.
In 2019 s UK General Election, locals swung away from Labour s Lesley Laird in favour of SNP-turned-independent-turned-SNP candidate Neale Hanvey. He has since defected to Alex Salmond s Alba.
Voters go to the polls on Thursday, May 6
Who is standing?
Kirkcaldy has five constituency candidates for 2020, each of whom is profiled below in their own words.
Who speaks for Scotland? newstatesman.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newstatesman.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Result in 2016: SNP 9 seats (9 constituency, 0 list), Labour 4 seats (0 constituency, 4 list), Conservatives 3 seats (0 constituency, 3 list) WHEN people say “the SNP don’t take any list seats in my region”, what they often really mean is that the SNP didn’t take any list seats last time around. It’s by no means always clear that history is bound to repeat itself. However, the reason the SNP don’t have any list seats in Central Scotland is that they won all nine constituency seats in the region in 2016. It would take quite an imaginative leap to suppose that the situation will change dramatically in this election, because Labour are in a reasonably distant second place in every one of the nine. The closest thing there is to a marginal is Coatbridge & Chryston, but even there the gap between SNP and Labour is 13.3%, meaning on a uniform swing that Labour would have to get within around ten percentage points of the SNP nationally to make the gain – and there’s
Why the SNP fears Alba is still a threat newstatesman.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newstatesman.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.