Edinburgh Council elections: Vote Conservative to stop another SNP-Labour coalition – John McLellan

With three months to go before the council elections, it’s a dead cert only members of political parties will be experiencing anything close to election fever, but already there are signs of delirium.

Edinburgh Council's coalition leaders: Cammy Day, of Labour, and the SNP's Adam McVey (Picture: Ian Georgeson)

On two occasions now, the Lib Dems have distributed leaflets in Inverleith which are meant for Cramond, maybe because the handful of Lib Dem councillors don’t know their own ward boundaries, or their distributors aren’t very good.

But perhaps they are hoping the good people of Inverleith won’t notice and start believing that “it’s only the Lib Dems or the SNP here” as the leaflet claims, when at the last council election the Conservatives took 37 per cent of the first preference votes, with the SNP a distant second on 19 per cent and the Lib Dem candidate third on 16.5 per cent.

So, whoever the Inverleith ward is between, it looks more like a distant tussle for second place behind sitting Conservative councillor Max Mitchell.

Across the city in 2017, Conservatives scored the highest number of first preferences and, with the steady exodus of disaffected councillors from the SNP, our group is now the biggest by two, despite the Nationalists picking up an extra seat at the Leith Walk by-election. There are now as many independents as Lib Dems.

With the very real possibility that Labour will seek to strike an unofficial deal with the SNP after the May election, there is only one realistic way to avoid repeating the mess of the past five years and it’s not voting Lib Dem.

John McLellan is a Conservative councillor for Craigentinny/Duddingston

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