GLASGOW, Scotland — Glasgow was once the world’s shipbuilding capital. The sprawling yards that ran for miles along the banks of the Clyde, employing tens of thousands, have been replaced by glass and steel apartment complexes.

Glaswegian politics has had a makeover, too. For decades, the city was synonymous with Labour, which has controlled the council from the Victorian splendor of Glasgow City Chambers for all but six of the past 65 years. But the days when it was said that a monkey with a red rosette could win a seat here are gone.

In Glasgow, and across Scotland, Labour is in steep decline. In the 2015 U.K. general election, the party lost all but one of its 41 Scottish seats to the Scottish National Party (SNP), including all seven in Glasgow. In 2016, the SNP won elections to the Scottish parliament for the third successive time, also claiming all the directly elected seats in Glasgow. And now Labour faces a double-drubbing — in local council elections this coming Thursday and again in Britain's snap general election on June 8.

“Glasgow is the last symbol, the last bastion for Labour. If this was 'Lord of the Rings,' it would be the last ring of Labour power,” says Gerry Braiden, a reporter at Glasgow's Herald newspaper. “They got gubbed [destroyed] here in 2015, gubbed in 2016 and they will get gubbed in 2017.”

The immediate — and most obvious — cause of Labour’s precipitous demise is the rise of Scottish nationalism. Three years ago, Glasgow voted Yes to independence despite Labour campaigning to maintain the three-centuries-old union with England and the rest of the United Kingdom.

“My mum and dad voted Labour. It was just the thing you did" — Scott McMullen, Green supporter

In Thornwood, a residential area in the city’s West End, a hammer’s throw from the shipyards, there is visible support for Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s calls for a second independence referendum in the wake of the Brexit vote. Canary-yellow Scottish National Party flags and starry EU standards fly in some of the windows of the Georgian sandstone tenements. As in the rest of Scotland, Glasgow voted to stay in the European Union.

“I used to vote Labour but now I’m SNP,” says Drew McConnell, an information officer at nearby Glasgow University. As well as independence, he is drawn to the nationalists’ center-left policy platform. “The SNP are for free prescriptions, social care for the elderly, the things you would like to see a government provide,” says McConnell.

'Load of rubbish'

It’s not just voters that are moving from Labour to the SNP. In the 1990s Deirdre Parkinson stood unsuccessfully for Labour in council elections in Wandsworth, south London. On Thursday, she is hoping to win a second seat in the West End for the SNP, in the process pushing the nationalists closer to the 45 seats needed to take overall control of Glasgow’s local government.

Parkinson is keen to stress local issues. She talks about the Scottish government’s scrapping of university tuition fees for Scottish students. But when talk turns to independence, passions rise. “The referendum really opened my eyes,” she says.

The independence campaign accelerated a shift from Labour to the SNP that began with Scottish devolution in the late 1990s but gathered pace after Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq. “Iraq was a big moment for me because I realized that what our government was telling us was a load of rubbish,” says Feargal Dalton, an Irish-born Royal Navy veteran elected as Glasgow SNP councillor in 2012.

Dalton’s wife, Carol Monaghan, is the local SNP MP, and we meet for coffee across the street from her offices. The café’s walls are exposed brick and the baristas sport sailor tattoos. Younger voters, in particular, are cutting the familial ties with Labour.

“My mum and dad voted Labour. It was just the thing you did. That’s changed. We are more educated now, people are paying more attention to what politicians say and what they do,” says Scott McMullen, an unemployed university graduate who intends to vote for the pro-independence Greens.

Certainly Labour’s travails in Glasgow — and across the west of Scotland, where they are set to lose control of a slew of local authorities — are partly the product of years of stagnation. Glasgow City Council has long been used as shorthand for an ossified political system that has, at times, bordered on the corrupt. After decades of industrial decline, Glasgow is reinventing itself but pockets of deprivation remain.

First-time Glasgow Labour council candidate Maggie McTernan admits “there is an argument that Labour became complacent in Scotland.” The challenge for the party now is to be heard at all. “Labour hasn’t been good at creating a narrative. The SNP has. We have the policies but we need to tell the story,” says McTernan.

On the biggest issue facing Scotland — its constitutional future —Labour’s story still wants for clarity. Scottish party leader Kezia Dugdale’s calls for a federal Britain have not been backed by her U.K. counterpart Jeremy Corbyn. Privately, Labour figures concede that as long as the question of Scottish independence remains unresolved, the party’s decline will continue.

“We are caught in this constitutional vice, between nationalists and Conservative/unionists,” said a well-placed Labour official. “People don’t join the Labour Party so they can have a big rammy [fight] over the constitution.”

Scots voted in 2014 to remain part of the U.K. and polls suggest a majority of people in Scotland still hold that that view. But beneath the headline figures, there has been a perceptible hardening of constitutional attitudes, particularly among unionists.

During the referendum campaign, the pro-union side often focused on economic issues. Flag-waving, with a few exceptions, was the preserve of the populist fringes of the nationalist movement. Increasingly, however, the unionist message comes wrapped in red, white and blue. “We have seen a more strident, aggressive British nationalism emerge since 2014,” says the Glasgow Herald’s Gerry Braiden.

Tory bounce

Conservatives have been the undoubted beneficiaries of this shift. The Tories have long been toxic in Scotland, blamed for the mass unemployment that scarred swathes of the country during Margaret Thatcher’s deindustrialization. The Conservatives hold just one Scottish seat at Westminster.

Recent polls have put support for the Scottish Tories as high as a third, raising the possibility of the Conservatives taking a number of the record 56 Scottish seats won by the SNP. Even in Glasgow, where the Tories hold only a single council seat, there are hopes of a breakthrough in a city identified as “the least Conservative place in Britain" based on previous election results.

Glaswegian taxi driver Eddie Johnson has supported both the SNP and Labour in the past but is planning to vote Conservative this time around. “All Nicola Sturgeon is interested in is independence. The SNP has done a lot for Scotland but I am tired of listening to all this talk of independence.”

Ironically, Labour in Glasgow could yet be saved from a complete nationalist rout by an electoral reform it once bitterly opposed.

Adam Tomkins, professor of constitutional law at Glasgow University and a Tory member of the Scottish parliament, says pro-union feeling is coalescing around the Conservatives. “There is a crystallizing going on in Scottish politics around parties that have strong constitutional positions and away from parties with weaker constitutional positions,” says Tomkins.

Conservatives are hopeful of garnering votes from among the more than a third of Scots who voted to leave the European Union, a figure that includes an estimated 400,000 independence supporters. While the SNP has solidly supplanted Labour in post-industrial central Scotland, a number of once-safe nationalist seats in the north and east of the country could be vulnerable to a rising Tory vote.

“We will target 10 [seats] and what we will be hoping to achieve is to win more than half of those,” says Tomkins. The Tories could make local gains, too, on Thursday.

Scotland’s complex council structure was erected by the Conservatives in the early 1990s. Smaller, more affluent councils were carved out of suburban Glasgow in an attempt to retain some pockets of power. That failed but those areas could now provide a base for Tory gains.

East Renfrewshire, which compromises much of Glasgow’s middle-class southside, swung from Labour to the SNP in 2015. “If it was in England, it would be a Tory seat,” says Tomkins. “It is not the kind of place that should be returning a nationalist MP to the House of Commons.”

Ironically, Labour in Glasgow could yet be saved from a complete nationalist rout by an electoral reform it once bitterly opposed. In 2003, the then Labour First Minister Jack McConnell reluctantly accepted the introduction of the single transferable vote (STV) system as the Liberal Democrats’ price for re-entering a coalition in the Scottish government. Now, Glasgow Labour insiders believe STV will ensure the party has some representation in a city that, for decades, it had completely controlled.

“If it was first past the post in Glasgow, we would have no seats,” the Labour source said. “Even on a bad day, we will get 20-odd seats. That is still a base to work on.” Labour is unlikely to be so fortunate in June’s general election.