Preston, Seton & Gosford: 20 January by-election preview

This week's featured local by-election is for the Preston, Seton & Gosford ward on East Lothian council.

The seat was last contested at the 2017 Scottish local elections and is a four-member ward. One of those seats is now vacant after the death of former council leader Willie Innis who had been a councillor for an incredible 33 years.

As most readers will be aware, Scotland elects local councillors under the STV system and the starting point for trying to work out who might win the single seat up this time is to check out the excellent BallotBox Scotland site.

They have re-calculated the result from 2017 for a single councillor election and come up with a Labour win (based on that 2017 vote) with the SNP in second place, who would have just edged out the Tories at the sixth elimination stage.

Recent events in Westminster probably aren't going to help the Conservatives very much, especially given the comments about the Scottish Conservatives made by Jacob Rees-Mogg. On the other hand, local election watchers will be very wary of over-estimating how much weight to give to national polling numbers.

Labour had a pretty awful set of results in the May 2017 locals and are clearly doing much better in the national polls now, so they have started off as fairly strong favourites to win this by-election. Still, it's probably not an easy job for their candidate Colin Yorkston to follow in the footsteps of such a long serving incumbent as Willie Innis. The SNP won the East Lothian Westminster seat back from Labour in 2019 and will no doubt be hoping that their candidate Janis Wilson can give Labour a run for their money here.

The Liberal Democrats and the Greens have had some impressive local by-election wins in England recently but it's hard to see either making much of an impression in this one. We've got a possible wild card here with the independent candidate Calum Miller who is running on the issue of a new ferry port and claims that "a win looms on the horizon".