The man we meet on the wasted highlands of Glasgow East has retained one tangible thing from his working-class roots: he keeps racing pigeons. In his thirties, he does not work and he does not vote. But he loves his “doos”, which he keeps, against all the odds, in a tall, shuttered, sentry box on the rough ground near his own, besieged council house. It is like some cruel pastiche of those gentle, cloth-cap dramas of the past.
“What's the point in voting?” he said. “Whatever I do won't make any difference. I've been waiting a year for a new house.” He does not want to give his name, and nor does he want to admit that if he moves, he might have to leave his pigeons behind. Implicitly, in a hostile world, they are what keep him alive.
The biggest challenge for the campaigners will be people like him. It will not be a case of getting them to vote; it will be convincing them to stir from their Sky box and their sofa to do anything. What's in it for them? Much of the electorate in this most deprived of city constituencies feels marginalised and disenfranchised - even by the Labour politics which is theirs by birthright.
Here, in a contest that could make Henley or Crewe and Nantwich look like a warm-up, the Government faces the possibility of losing a seat it regards as one of its fortresses (Glasgow East is ranked as its 25th most secure in Britain).
In 2005, 60 per cent of the vote cast was for Labour. Three years on, what has electrified the situation is the arrival of the SNP as a credible alternative. After a year of being in power at Holyrood, Alex Salmond, that most charismatic and opportunistic of politicians, has turned the party into a force capable of overturning Labour's hegemony. People accustomed to no choice now have somewhere different to go. There are now several SNP local councillors in the area. Even Ladbrokes is backing the chances of a SNP win, which requires a 22 per cent swing.
Sandy Weddell, the minister of Easterhouse Baptist Church, whose work in the area encouraged Iain Duncan Smith to set up his Centre of Social Justice think tank, has noted a definite change in the area. “My own particular view, purely subjective, is that Labour could be in for a shock. I think a lot of people will vote SNP even though they are not nationalist. The difference now is that there's a viable alternative to Labour. And that's very much in people's minds.
“There is the real sense that Labour has moved away from where people are.”
David Cameron, the Conservative leader, who will visit the constituency to cherish a negligible Conservative vote, can sit back and watch the SNP do the job of demolishing Gordon Brown.
But the law of unintended consequences decrees that a resurgent Conservative Party at the next general election would make an independent Scotland more likely, something Mr Cameron does not want to happen.
So there is much at stake in a part of the world that no one has given two hoots about for decades - indeed, since after the Second World War, when the city's poor, including many of the Irish immigrants from the previous century, were decanted from inner-city squalor to shiny new satellites in the east. As the heavy industry that sustained their jobs died, so these communities failed. Housing rapidly turned to slums; lives to dust, alcohol and drugs.
It is by no means a story unique to Glasgow, but what makes it so powerful is the sheer scale and persistence of the poverty. The constituency boasts all kinds of grotesque records: low life expectancy; unemployment of up to 50 per cent in pockets; the highest number of people in the UK on incapacity benefit; deprivation at the top of the UK indices; a violent gang culture. Indeed, in Parkhead, which is a stone's throw from Celtic's football stadium, where the stars won't roll out for less than £10,000 a week, 63 per cent of children live in homes that survive on benefits. Along the road at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, the accident and emergency staff are world leaders in the treatment of stab wounds.
Much and generous has been the recent regeneration of the area - up to £150million of new schools and housing in the past five years, with £1.5billion in private investment.
“We have a good story to tell about what Labour has delivered. There is real ambition and confidence in this part of the city,” Steven Purcell, the Labour leader of Glasgow City Council, has said.
Recent developments, including the promise of apprenticeships for every school leaver and the spin-off in housing and amenities that will come with the Commonwealth Games in 2014, are indeed an admirable template for what can be done.
But away from the bus routes and the through roads, down carless drives and round grey corners, there are still slums that are breathtaking. Poverty ravages faces and souls. Yesterday Davena Rankin - three times disadvantaged in Glasgow East as non-white, female, and the Conservative candidate - was greeted with cries of “Too many Asians around here” from the loitering junkies.
Speak to constituents about politics, and you note most of all divisions of age. Roseanne Curran, 63, a retired shopworker from Parkhead, out with her great-grandchildren, was old school; loyal to her fingertips to the status quo. “I have always voted for Labour. My mum and dad just kept it going. I don't think they have given the Prime Minister a chance. Labour knows what's right. The Government is trying its best.”
But Mrs Curran conceded that the bills were harder to pay these days.
Another woman, a 20-year-old with a child in buggy, was dismissive, bored with the question even as it was asked. “I've never voted. I just don't know anything about that kind of thing. I'm going to sit down with my boyfriend and he's going to tell me.”
Outside the Forge shopping centre in Parkhead, Robin Gallagher, 18, a politics student, promised fresh thinking. “I haven't decided who I'm voting for yet. I'm going to see who's going to benefit this area the most - this end of Glasgow needs a lot.”
She said that her friends did not take any interest in politics, but she knew her vote counted. “I can see the SNP benefiting. It will be interesting to give the SNP a chance and see what they can do. I have met Alex Salmond and he's got big plans. I was impressed by him. At the end of the day you have to give him a chance.”
Indeed, that energy, against the apathy that Labour now engenders in some quarters, could be key. “Labour, if they could get all their sympathisers out, would walk away with it, but that's not been happening,” Mr Weddell said.
“I have been in the constituency for 28 years and I have always voted for the sitting MP, David Marshall, for the quality of him as a man, but I don't know if I will vote Labour again.
“I don't recognise a lot of the Labour Party. And it's not that we are raving socialists. Labour was always the champion of the poor, but I'm not sure that many folk I know associate Harriet Harman with that sentiment.”
iam a resident in glasgow east and the feeling is labour will hold on to the seat quite comfortabley there is still a lot of support for labour round here
jim armstrong, tollcross glasgow, uk
We have a political representative for every 34,300 voters on 2006 figures. The USA has one for every 572,000, 16 times less. You would have thought they could have lots of bodies up there getting the vote out but I suppose they are too busy completing their expense claim forms.
R Mason, London, UK