The SNP is having a very normal election: its first really normal one in a long time. It’s just short of a decade since the party nearly swept away all traces of other political parties in the 2015 election, leaving just three non-nationalist MPs in place. Many of the candidates who won back then are now in the fight of their lives to hold on.
In Scotland’s Central Belt, most seats are on what the candidates themselves describe as a ‘knife edge’. The various MRP polls are predicting Labour wins in many SNP constituencies, including my local ones of Livingston, currently held by Hannah Bardell, and Linlithgow and Bathgate, where Martyn Day is the MP. Both were first elected as SNP MPs in 2015. Both use the words ‘knife edge’ a lot when talking about how they see the result.
These two constituencies in West Lothian include former mining communities, and the landscape is dominated by huge, pink, ‘bings’ – big spoil heaps of shale from the oil mining industry which have largely been left to nature.
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