THE CONTENDERS
LABOUR: George Foulkes, 55, former Edinburgh councillor who has held the seat since 1979 and is making his fifth title defence.
CONSERVATIVE: Alasdair Marshall, 28, PhD student at Glasgow University and former Kyle and Carrick councillor.
SNP: Christine Hutchison, over 21, former Dumfries and Galloway councillor and mother of four.
SLD: Derek Young, 21, law graduate studying for diploma in legal practice at Strathclyde University.
PERHAPS there was a time when the Labour candidate in a mining area just had to step forward and make the right noises, and Westminster would be the next port of call.
Those days are over, not least in one of Scotland's largest constituencies - Carrick, Cumnock, and Doon Valley.
It would perhaps be easy for Mr George Foulkes to sit back on a majority of 16,666 and see it all as a foregone conclusion, yet it is clearly not the intention of one of Scotland's most outspoken MPs to do anything of the sort.
Instead, he is taking seriously the threat from all of his opponents, in an area which benefited - if that is the right word - from the addition of more than 10,000 new voters under boundary changes.
The changes have hurt neighbouring MP Phil Gallie, who has lost many potential Tory supporters in Alloway and Doonfoot, and have made Mr Foulkes pay a little extra attention to the possible effects.
He said: ''It would be easy to sit back and think the result is a foregone conclusion but I have been around too long to fall into that trap. As well as the new voters in parts of Ayr, there are many living in new housing developments around Mauchline and Cumnock who may be undecided as to which way they wish to vote.
''There is no deep mining here anymore and the replacement jobs have been painfully slow to come. I have to persuade people that they will continue to come in increasing numbers under Labour.''
It is a vast constituency, stretching over 900 square miles and including two former mining areas - Cumnock and Auchinleck in the north, Patna and Dalmellington in the south - where thousands of jobs have disappeared with the demise of deep mining.
There is opencast mining, environmentally suspect and scarcely labour intensive, allied to a number of manufacturing jobs in new industrial units.
Conservative candidate Alasdair Marshall, a former councillor in nearby Kyle and Carrick, points to the minimum wage as a threat to the already scarce employment in the constituency.
He said: ''With pockets of unemployment touching almost 20%, the people have to ask what damage the imposition of a minimum wage may have on future investment. I fear that the good of the many may be sacrificed for the wages of the few.''
Mr Marshall pointed to Scottish Office regeneration programmes, such as the rural partnership programme, and a non-sectoral approach to investment as important to local people, and said that while voters moved from Phil Gallie's constituency may help he realises that the real battle lies in the traditional Labour centres of the constituency.
For the SNP, Mrs Christine Hutchison stressed that she was under no illusion that she is coming in to contest what is a strong ''Old Labour'' seat. She added: ''But let us not forget that it is just that - Old Labour - and I am not convinced that many of the voters are sold on the idea of New Labour or Mr Blair.
''We will be working hard to convince them that we have the best solutions for the undoubted problems of the area. I believe we have a broad appeal and that will be something to build on.''
Mr Derek Young, for the Scottish Liberal Democrats, is the youngest candidate in Scotland and plans to look for as wide a support as possible among young people.
He said: ''I have lived in Doonfoot for most of my life and would anticipate good support there but it is in the heart of the constituency that the hard work will be done. I will spend as much time as other party duties allow getting the message across.
''If I am not returned to Parliament this time, though, I am sure someone will be waiting to allow me to put my new-found legal qualifications to good use.''
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