General election 2024: All you need to know about Edinburgh South West

Joanna Cherry won Edinburgh South West for the SNP in 2015 after Labour’s Alistair Darling stood down as the MP.

She held the seat - which includes Gorgie, Sighthill and Wester Hailes as well as Colinton, Craiglockhart, Currie and Balerno - at the following two elections and is “cautiously optimistic” about doing so again.

SNP candidate Joanna Cherry says she is "reasonably confident" of holding her seat. Labour's Scott Arthur says the seat is a marginal. | collage

Ms Cherry is well known for her strong stance against gender self-identification and for leading the legal action that stopped Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament at the height of the Brexit controversy. But she was sacked from her role as SNP home affairs spokeswoman and was a persistent critic of Nicola Sturgeon.

“We are reasonably confident I’m going to hang onto the seat,” she says. “I’m standing on my record as an effective MP who has been high profile at Westminster, but also well known in the constituency and a local champion. I also have a reputation as someone who is independent-minded and a person of integrity, and I think that’s quite a big issue in this election.”

She points out that the Tories were forecast to take the seat in 2017, but she held on by just over 1,000 votes and then increased her majority to nearly 12,000 in 2019, adding that Labour were “a distant third”. She expects “a much closer contest” this time and says Labour could finish second but adds they “have a long way to come” to win the seat. And she warns against ever writing off the Tories here.

“The majority of the polls predict I will hang onto the seat and I’m not finding anything on the doorsteps to suggest otherwise. I think SNP supporters continue to back me, but I’ve got really good cross-party support from people who might not traditionally have voted SNP but they support me because of my personal reputation.

“This is a pretty mixed constituency with people from different backgrounds and I think they don’t want just another Labour backbencher who is going to do as he’s telt by Keir Starmer; I think they quite like to have somebody like me who does her own thing and stands up for what’s right.”

Labour’s candidate is Scott Arthur, Edinburgh’s transport and environment convener and councillor for Colinton/Fairmilehead since 2017.

He points out that some polls have Labour ahead in Edinburgh South West. “My hope is we’re close and hopefully close in the right direction. It has gone from being a seat which was going to be incredibly difficult for us to one which I think everyone accepts is a marginal seat between ourselves and the SNP. We think it is really close and every vote will count.”

Hot topics on the doorstep, he says, are the cost of living crisis and the economy and the NHS. “In Balerno people want pubic transport to move a bit faster; in Currie there’s concerns about repeated attempts to have a field developed. But health is the thing that comes up most - it’s a devolved issue, but it’s what people are talking about.

“There is a real anger with the Conservatives - I was speaking to a lady in her 80s who said she had voted Conservative all her life, but she’s not going to do it this time, so she’s voting for me. Ex-SNP voters feel let down rather than angry - they feel a lot was promised but it wasn’t delivered.”

In his role as transport convener, Cllr Arthur is associated with often controversial policies, like closing roads to through traffic. “Some people say they won’t vote for me because of my support for public transport and all the rest of it, but our system shows that most of the time those people were never voting for me anyway. And the canvassers say that it’s more a positive than a negative.”

Tory candidate Sue Webber, who is a former city councillor and now a Lothians MSP, says she is getting a good response on the doorstep. “But you do get a sense everyone is a bit disillusioned with politics at the moment - and frankly, who can blame them? You feel a bit like that yourself some days.”

Potholes are one of the favourite topics people want to talk about - five out of the ten worst roads for potholes are in the constituency. But she says, perhaps surprisingly: “No-one’s raising the cost of living with me.” And she says she gets a lot of positive feedback about accessing GPs in the constituency, but people are frustrated about hospital waiting times. And anti-social behaviour is another concern.

She admits it’s “not easy being a Conservative right now”. “It’s great to see back inflation back down, but I still don’t know if that’s going to break through. We have a lot of families that send their kids to the independent schools who are not that keen on education being taxed and that’s making them think twice about voting Labour.”

Lib Dem candidate Bruce Wilson stood in Edinburgh North & Leith at the last general election, when he was living in that constituency, but now he has moved to Balerno and so is standing in South West. The ex-Marine, who now works for a small tech firm, says the issues which voters are concerned about are the “bread and butter” ones of the cost of living and money in people’s pockets.

But he also points to the Water of Leith, which runs through the constituency, and the Lib Dems’ focus on the problem of sewage discharges. “The story of sewage in England of corporate greed is a very different one here of pure government incompetence, which means there is sewage going into waterways and we don’t even gather the data. We know there were 21,000 cases of sewage going into rivers in Scotland but none of that can be attributed to Edinburgh, not because it doesn’t happen but because they don’t monitor it.”

The Green candidate, Sighthill / Gorgie councillor Dan Heap, says he is getting a good response from voters and even when they do not plan to vote Green very few say the climate crisis is not important. “This is my sixth election and I don’t think I’ve ever seen from voters quite as much recognition of the seriousness of climate change.”

He says people have raised a wide range of issues with him - from Brexit to Gaza to pensions to the state of the UK government, not to mention the condition of the roads. And he highlights the high level of poverty in the constituency, which exists alongside high levels of wealth. “One of the primary drivers of that has been changes to the benefits system - and the other parties are not talking enough about that.”

There are three other candidates - Ian Harper, who sells and maintains commercial catering equipment, is standing for Reform UK, which he says represents “real British values and common sense”; Richard Lucas is leader of the pro-marriage, anti-abortion Scottish Family Party; and Marc Wilkinson is co-founder of Edinburgh People, a new political grouping which wants to replace career politicians with local peole.

Candidates

Scott Arthur - Scottish Labour Party

Joanna Cherry - Scottish National Party (SNP)

Ian Harper - Reform UK

Dan Heap - Scottish Greens

Richard Crewe Lucas - Scottish Family Party

Sue Webber - Scottish Conservative and Unionist

Marc Richard Wilkinson - Independent

Bruce Roy Wilson - Scottish Liberal Democrats

2019 result

Joanna Cherry SNP 24,830 47.6 per cent

Callum Laidlaw Con 12,848 24.6 per cent

Sophie Cooke Lab 7,478 14.3 per cent

Tom Inglis Lib Dem 4,971 9.5 per cent

Ben Parker Green 1,265 2.4 per cent

David Ballantine Brexit Party 625 1.2 per cent

Mev Brown Social Democratic Party 114 0.2 per cent