•Swing to lose: 0.16%
The road to an SNP majority runs straight through seats like Dumbarton, as do Scottish Labour’s hope of forming the main opposition in Holyrood.
Jackie Baillie, Scottish Labour Health spokesperson, is fighting to retain the seat of Dumbarton. Picture: John Devlin
Jackie Baillie has held the seat at every single Scottish Parliament election since 1999. But after returning with a comfortable majority of more than 6,500 in 2003, Ms Baillie’s grip on Dumbarton has been slipping ever since.
The rising tide of SNP support in the constituency vote threatens to wash away what remains of her majority. The Labour Party veteran came ahead of her 2016 SNP challenger by just 109 votes, making the seat the most marginal in Scotland.
Scottish Election 2021: Simple guide to Mid Scotland and Fife regional list
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Winner in 2016: Daniel Johnson (Labour) SCOTLAND may not have become an independent country back in 2014, but it did mark the point at which the southern part of Edinburgh declared its independence from voting trends in the rest of Scotland. While the bulk of the country was swinging decisively against Labour and towards the SNP, this affluent corner of the capital suddenly decided that it really, truly loved Labour as never before. Not only was the Westminster constituency of Edinburgh South the only Scottish seat Labour retained in the 2015 and 2019 General Elections, it also mind-bogglingly gave Labour a bigger vote share in 2019 than it had even in the first Blair landslide of 1997.
Result in 2016: SNP 9 seats (9 constituency, 0 list), Labour 4 seats (0 constituency, 4 list), Conservatives 3 seats (0 constituency, 3 list) WHEN people say “the SNP don’t take any list seats in my region”, what they often really mean is that the SNP didn’t take any list seats last time around. It’s by no means always clear that history is bound to repeat itself. However, the reason the SNP don’t have any list seats in Central Scotland is that they won all nine constituency seats in the region in 2016. It would take quite an imaginative leap to suppose that the situation will change dramatically in this election, because Labour are in a reasonably distant second place in every one of the nine. The closest thing there is to a marginal is Coatbridge & Chryston, but even there the gap between SNP and Labour is 13.3%, meaning on a uniform swing that Labour would have to get within around ten percentage points of the SNP nationally to make the gain – and there’s
Alex Salmond has claimed his Alba party is being censored by the BBC and STV.
The former first minister said the broadcasters “are simply failing in their democratic duty” because Alba has been excluded from the televised debates featuring leaders of parties who currently have MSPs at Holyrood.
Mr Salmond took umbrage with the media organisations after they did not cover an Alba campaign event in Edinburgh on Monday.
Ahead of another Alba campaign event in Stirling, he said: “We are clearly the story of the election and yet the doleful duo of Scottish broadcasting pretends we don’t exist.
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