Scotland braces for knife-edge election battle as SNP and Labour face off

The fight for Scotland is by far the closest thing we have to an unpredictable competition in this general election, ITV News Correspondent Peter Smith writes.

A heatwave hit the UK this week. Apparently.

I say “apparently” because we haven’t seen too much of that thing you call sunshine.

There’s been plenty of rain, low hanging cloud, and dreich days. Just in time for the poor Scottish school kids breaking up for their summer holidays.

And when it comes to forecasts, there is another significant difference between Scotland and the rest of Britain at the moment.

The polling has been so overwhelmingly favourable to Labour in this election, some have been so bold as to predict the race to Downing Street is a foregone conclusion.

In Scotland, the contest is much closer.

SNP have dominated Scottish politics for a decade, riding the wave of independence after the 2014 referendum.

It now looks like that high tide might be receding.

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Most polls have Labour in the lead to become the biggest party in Scotland. This would be a massive transformation of their fortunes given they only have one MP north of the border currently. The last time they won an election in Scotland was 14 years ago.

However, the fight for Scotland is by far the closest thing we have to an unpredictable competition in this general election and if you read the small print in many of these polls they have about a quarter of the seats marked as really being “too close to call”.

Almost a third of the nation’s seats could change hands with a swing of less than 5%. 37 out of 57 seats require a swing of just 10% or less.

Most of these are held by the SNP. In the central belt, especially around Glasgow, Labour have their eyes on changing the whole city from yellow to red. Enough seats are up for grabs in that densely-populated, urban area that it could have a huge say on who emerges as the winner in Scotland.

There are just so many marginal areas that it makes it especially difficult to predict a broader outcome.

We can’t rely too much on the MRP polls here either in the way we can elsewhere because the Scottish data is different. It’s a long story, but it partly comes down to a delayed Scottish Census providing out of date information on people.

Ultimately, if what you feed into an MRP is no good, it severely impacts what comes out. That is why there have been massive variations and some, shall we say, questionable projections for individual seat outcomes.

There’s also likely to be significant tactical voting in Scotland which MRPs don’t always reflect particularly well. Scotland is still to a large extent divided along constitutional lines and so people who want to stay in the UK will look for the party with the best chance of beating the SNP, even if that means changing from how they would normally vote.

At the last election, the MRPs for Scotland called about seven seats incorrectly, so these polls do come with a massive ‘health warning’.

What we can say for sure is that this election in Scotland is still on a knife edge in a lot of constituencies. The smallest swing either way could still do a lot to change the outcome here.

And so, in the next seven days, while you lot in other parts of the UK might be sweating from exposure to actual vitamin D, us Scots will have to console ourselves that at least our election campaign is going to heat up.

Expect the parties to throw resources and focus up north now because, the battle for Britain may be over; the battle for Scotland is about to begin.

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