Thursday's council elections in Glasgow will be a stern test for both Scottish Labour and the SNP, with the party leaders most in the firing line
Gordon Matheson, Glasgow City Council leader, and a Labour candidate for the council in Glasgow go door to door at Dundasvale Court in Glasgow, Scotland Photograph: Murdo Macleod
The voting system may have changed but it seems the visceral nature of municipal politics in Glasgow remains the same: people in this city will fight hard to take or hold power.
In pre-proportional voting days, history records, that fighting stayed within the Labour group but now, with the Scottish National party challenging hard for dominance or perhaps parity in the city chambers on George Square, it has changed into an at times vicious two party battle.
This battle means more than just control of city chambers: for Scottish Labour it is a power base of great political and symbolic importance in its attempt to rebuild after losing both UK and Scottish elections in 2010 and 2011. For Alex Salmond, taking control of Glasgow would be the sweetest victory.
So much of this battle centres on personality – the personalities of the two group leaders in particular, and their apparently uncertain futures. In a city which is a by-word for ruthless machine politics, where the last Labour leader, Stephen Purcell, admitted cocaine abuse, this is a contact sport.
Where, cry Labour, is Allison Hunter, the kindly and respected but far from hardened SNP group leader? Her party has been accused of deliberately shielding her, of refusing to allow the media to meet her, after stumbling several times on air.
A close ally and former election agent to Nicola Sturgeon, the deputy first minister and MSP for Govan, Hunter was handed the group leadership after her predecessor, James Dornan, won Glasgow Cathcart in the SNP's near wipe-out of Labour in Glasgow at the Holyrood elections.
Several efforts by the Guardian to meet her, during reporting of the city's election campaigning, were rebuffed too. Requests to the party's campaign leader, Derek Mackay, and the SNP's head of media, Ross Ingebrigtsen, led nowhere. Phone messages on her mobile were not returned.
According to Mackay she has been misquoted when she said the council elections were "the stepping-stone to independence" – Labour retorts by offering a transcript of the BBC Radio Scotland "Brian's Big Debate" show on 6 April. The YouTube footage of Hunter failing to understand her own government's bus subsidies policies can be found here, while Labour also quotes back Hunter's admission several months ago she was not sure what the SNP's campaign policies would be.
Hunter, says Mackay, is the antithesis of the machine politician so disliked in Glasgow – for that, read all previous Labour leaders, and is not running a "presidential" campaign like Matheson whom he described as a "cross between the boy who cried wolf and Uriah Heep".
She told the truth when she said she couldn't know if she would be SNP leader after the election, since there was then to be a Glasgow party AGM, and the voters like someone with the human touch:
They want someone who represents them who is hard-working, decent, intelligent and who is not a calculating politician or do they want a calculating politician who's in it for himself, i.e. Gordon Matheson, and has lost the confidence of his whole group.
So much so, if he gets the whole group to vote one way, that's an achievement in Glasgow Labour. I personally think the campaign will be about what the parties offer for Glasgow. I find the personal attacks on Allison Hunter quite distasteful actually.
He said voters were concerned about policies.
I have never, never had when I'm out campaigning in Glasgow a member of the public ask me about who will be the council leader; they're asking about their community and what we will do for the city. And I think that the SNP's positive campaign has worked very well. I believe Allison's real human touch and the fact she's not a calculating politician, I think is to her credit.
For Matheson, this is a pretty bizarre position for the SNP to take, given their victories and ascendency are down to the highly centralised structures and dominant role played Alex Salmond and his close aides.
Under his leadership – he is lampooned by opponents for taking a quasi-presidential role to Scottish government – the SNP is arguably the most disciplined, heavily drilled party in British politics.
In fact, Matheson even admits to mimicking that style in Glasgow: exactly like Salmond in 2011, he is standing on the basis of his "record, team and vision". It is a direct complement to the first minister, he acknowledges.
In Glasgow, it's Labour that has the record, and the vision and the leadership to take Glasgow forward, whereas in 2011 Labour weren't perceived as winning according to those measures.
While the Labour group purged 20 sitting councillors and replaced them with new talent – he said more than 100 Labour members put themselves forwards for selection, the SNP has had to find double the number of candidates from the 22 who stood in 2007.
His leadership and Labour's slate "contrasts with a pitiful lack of leadership at city level from the SNP and a dearth at local level of talent" amongst its candidates.
I can think of a handful of front bench SNP ministers in the Scottish parliament who are very talented politicians but there's a shallowness to their base and when it comes to local level they don't have the leadership or the vision, and that's what a great city like Glasgow needs.
It also rather implies that the SNP don't need a strong leader in Hunter: most voters associate the party with Salmond, and it'll be him some may actually be voting for.
And Matheson may, like Hunter, have an uncertain future: the Sunday Herald recently reported he already has pretenders to his throne, assuming he holds onto his seat in Anderston/City.
Whether Labour wins or not in Thursday's elections, Matheson faces challengers from two senior party figures Paul Rooney or Stephen Curran. The paper reported:
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