As Scotland’s embattled First Minister continues to face backlash over his Hate Crime Act, his party has been hit with yet more bad news. New polling from YouGov suggests that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party will become the largest party in Scotland, taking 28 seats and pushing the SNP into second place. The Nats are predicted to lose almost 25 of their Westminster seats, retaining just 19, the next time the electorate head to the ballot box.
The MRP poll suggests that Labour will sweep up across Scotland’s central belt – widely regarded within the Scottish party as being ‘the first red wall to fall’ – and is even predicted to take some Glasgow constituencies. Na h-Eileanan an Iar is also predicted to elect its Labour candidate, former Daily Record journalist Torcuil Crichton, following the expulsion of the constituency’s current MP Angus MacNeil from the SNP last year.
But it’s not just the Nats that will find the new survey hard to stomach. Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross told The Spectator in October that he thought his party ‘could have a really good general election’. Well, he might have to think again. Instead of making gains, the poll predicts that the Conservatives will lose two of their seven seats north of the border. Scotland has previously been thought to be the one part of the UK in which the Tories could make gains at the next election, but this new poll suggests Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will face a worse defeat than John Major in 1997. More than that, 11 cabinet ministers are at risk of losing their seats, with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt and Science Secretary Michelle Donelan among them.
The long and short of it? While the Tories fear electoral wipeout, the SNP’s fortunes aren’t looking particularly promising either. The First Minister told his party conference in October that independence preparations would begin again if they won a ‘majority’ – 29 – of Scotland’s Westminster seats. If the Nats only hold on to 19 after the country goes to the polls, not only will they have lost over half of their Westminster MPs, they’ll have lost anything resembling an independence mandate too.
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