Margaret Ferrier

Life and career

Ferrier was born and raised in the King's Park district of Glasgow, attending Holyrood Secondary School. After living with her family in Mallorca for two years, she moved to Rutherglen from 1972 to 1990 and then resided in Darnley. She has lived in the Halfway district of Cambuslang since 2000, where she joined the Rutherglen branch of the SNP in 2011 (in her youth she had been a Scottish Labour Party member).

Before her election to Parliament, she was a commercial sales supervisor for a manufacturing construction company in Motherwell.

Prior to her successful election to Westminster, she had previously been a defeated candidate for the Rutherglen South ward of South Lanarkshire Council in a 2013 by-election (following the death of Cllr Anne Higgins). The councillor voted in ahead of her on that occasion was Gerard Killen.

She was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Rutherglen and Hamilton West after winning the seat at the United Kingdom general election 2015; she achieved 30,279 votes, 52% of the total cast and a 31% swing from the previous incumbent and their party. She was the first female MP, and the first for the SNP, to be elected in the Rutherglen/Cambuslang portion of the constituency or its predecessor; Winnie Ewing had previously served a short spell as representative of the original Hamilton constituency for the same party.

She claimed £43,000 in expenses during the 2015/16 financial year, a lower figure than several MPs in the neighbouring Glasgow and South Lanarkshire areas.

In April 2017 Ferrier helped to ensure that the Broadband Internet access to the Newton Farm area of Cambuslang (which had been insufficient due to the large number of new homes built in a previously rural location) was upgraded as a priority matter, after correspondence with the Openreach operator.

Ferrier lost the seat in the June 2017 election to Gerard Killen of the Scottish Labour Party after losing 15% of her vote total.