Monday, May 10, 2021

Voters in the Scottish constituency of Airdrie and Shotts are to go to the polls on May 13 to elect a replacement member of parliament (MP) to the United Kingdom House of Commons.

The outgoing MP for the seat is Neil Gray — a representative of the pro-independence Scottish National Party — was resigning to run in the Scottish Parliament election, which was to occur on May 6. Gray won the seat with 45.1% of the vote at the 2019 general election, winning 13.1% more than the second placed candidate Helen McFarlane of the Scottish Labour party, who received 32.0% of the votes.

One of the eight candidates running in this constituency is the leader, secretary, and immigration spokesman of United Kingdom Independence Party Scotland (UKIP), Donald Mackay. On their party website, UKIP says since their beginning in 1993, they have campaigned to take Britain out of the European Union, and claim “it was the efforts of UKIP that forced former Prime Minister David Cameron’s hand into holding an In/Out Referendum on 23rd June 2016”. After party leader Richard Braine’s resignation in 2019, Peter Walker, writing for The Guardian, wrote that UKIP was “now polling at less than 1%, having been largely supplanted by [Nigel] Farage’s new Brexit Party”, now Reform UK. Two polls conducted shortly after the resignation by Panelbase and Deltapoll showed UKIP at 0.499% and 1%, respectively, compared to the Brexit Party at 8% and 11%.

Wikinews spoke to Mackay about key political issues in the electorate.