Kilmarnock & Loudoun.

Kilmarnock and Loudoun is an East Ayrshire seat of around 95,700 people, median age 45, built around the town of Kilmarnock with smaller communities through the Irvine Valley and south towards Cumnock and New Cumnock. The seat is anchored by that one town rather than a network of equals, though the rural and former mining settlements to the south give it a mixed character. Local services across all eight of the seat's wards are run by a single authority, East Ayrshire Council, a Scottish council authority.

The ward picture has been competitive rather than settled. Across the latest result in each ward, the Scottish National Party holds the largest share, ahead of Labour, with the Conservatives and independents trailing; those seats were last fought in 2022, predating the later swing at Westminster. At the 2024 general election Labour won on 44.9 per cent, the SNP runner-up on 32.8 per cent -- a reversal of 2019, when the nationalists took just over half the vote. Lillian Jones has held the seat for Labour since, with no whipped dissent on the record in recent months.

The direction of travel, on the figures available, is a seat that has moved from SNP to Labour at parliamentary level while remaining contested beneath it, the underlying ward arithmetic still favouring the nationalists. Recent local coverage has tended to centre on Kilmarnock town-centre regeneration, where the tone has at times been impatient about the pace of progress, set against more routine council reporting. Taken together, this reads less as a settled seat than as one in flux.