LONDON — The scale of the opposition Labour Party's problems in Scotland was laid bare on Wednesday after an opinion poll showed it risks losing 35 of its 41 seats there to nationalists, a serious setback to its hopes of unseating David Cameron's Conservatives. The poll, funded by Michael Ashcroft, a British peer and former deputy chairman of Cameron's party, took a detailed look at 14 of Labour's Scottish seats in the British Parliament and found it was on course to lose all but one of them at a May 7 UK-wide election. The survey registered an overall swing to the rival Scottish National Party (SNP) of 25.4 percent with only 60 percent of voters who supported Labour at the last UK-wide election in 2010 saying they would do so again this year. Ashcroft said the seats examined were ones which had returned a strong yes vote for independence in Scotland's referendum last September, cautioning against drawing overly broad conclusions. But he said Labour would need to conduct a “vigorous” campaign if it was to fend off the SNP threat. “If a swing to the SNP of 21 percent, the smallest in this range, were to be repeated across the board next May it would endanger 35 of Labour's 41 seats in Scotland,” he said. More than 16,000 adults were interviewed for the poll by phone from Jan. 5-30 in 14 Labour seats and two Liberal Democrat seats. — Reuters
