Why Jezza should beware of Nicola bearing gifts
SNP General Election target seats
LAB’s going to struggle to win the next GE unless there’s a rapid improvement in Scotland
Last night Nicola Sturgeon said the SNP would back a Commons no confidence motion against the government if one was tabled by Labour.
I’d suggest that Nicola Sturgeon and her team would not be asking for another election now unless it was pretty confident that it would do as well or even better than the 35 Scottish seats that it won in 2017 and the main prospect for gains, as the table above shows, is from Scottish Labour.
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Currently four of the seven Scottish LAB seats are held with majorities requiring swings of less than 1% and targets five and six have very narrow majorities. Only one Scottish LAB seat, Edinburgh South, with a 16.2% swing required looks safe.
A massive challenge for Labour in a new general election is its failure to recover in Scotland where Gordon Brown’s party won 41 of the 59 seats at GE2010. It is hard to see the party winning unless there’s a dramatic turnaround and the polling suggests that Labour in continuing to struggle. As this table of latest Scotland only polls show Labour is polling north of the border worse than it did at GE2017 and the chances are that it would go into a new general election on the defensive.
Latest Westminster Scottish voting intention polls
That post Scottish 2014 IndyRef surge by the SNP was almost totally at the expensive of Labour and there’s almost no sign of a recovery. In August Corbyn visited Scotland with the express intention if trying to turn things round. The polling points to that having zero impact.