Aberdeen South: Stephen Flynn has a secret weapon to help him win his seat

This year, if Labor makes a decisive comeback in Scotland, they will seek to unseat a well-known SNP MP, which will be the icing on the cake. A prime target is the SNP's Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn, in Aberdeen South, which is unfortunately a potentially vulnerable seat.

However, Flynn has a secret weapon that has an excellent chance of saving his skin come July 4th. This weapon is the confusion of unionist voters.

If a voter's priority is to unseat Flynn, they may not know which Unionist party offers the best opportunity to do so.

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Aberdeen South is home to some of the wealthiest localities in Scotland and is therefore far from the archetypal Scottish constituency in which the Labor vote was weighed rather than counted for decades until the SNP suddenly broke through in 2015.

In fact, the seat changed hands between the two main unionist parties no less than five times between the 1960s and the 1990s, and it tended to lean more in favor of the Conservatives. Generally, Labor only won when it found itself in landslide territory in the UK, Scotland, or both. It was one of those episodes that gave future Prime Minister Donald Dewar the opportunity to cut his teeth as a parliamentarian when he was elected Labor MP for Aberdeen South during the Harold Wilson landslide in 1966.

But unsurprisingly, Dewar lost his seat when the Conservatives returned to power in 1970, and what is perhaps more telling is that the Conservatives retained it in the two general elections of 1974, both of which were won narrowly by Labor across the UK.

Two decades later, it was also the only seat in Britain won by the Conservatives directly from Labor in John Major's narrow electoral triumph in 1992.

So the Conservatives have a reasonably compelling story to tell to budding tactical voters in Aberdeen South. They can say that it is historically a Conservative-leaning seat, that the Conservatives' Ross Thomson was the most recent non-SNP MP there and that the Conservatives remained the clear main local challengers to the SNP in the 2019 election , winning more than three seats. times more votes than the third-placed Labor Party.

But Labor has an equally compelling counterargument. They may point out that the Conservatives' fall in the Scotland-wide polls makes it almost inconceivable that the Tory vote in Aberdeen South will increase this time around.

They can argue that although they need a much bigger change from the SNP than the Conservatives would need, it is nevertheless the only plausible way to defeat Flynn.

Voters therefore risk being fooled by contradictory leaflets featuring bar graphs purporting to prove that “only the Tories can stop the SNP in Aberdeen South!” and “only Labor can stop the SNP in Aberdeen South!” »

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There is no doubt that the Liberal Democrats will also join in. Their own argument for being the main Unionist challenger is less convincing, but they can never resist a good bar graph, and they will be able to point to their former Scottish leader Nicol Stephen's 12-year tenure as MP for the equivalent constituency of Holyrood.

Clearly, the easiest way for Stephen Flynn to defy the Unionist challenge would be for the SNP to recover strongly in the polls before polling day. But even if that doesn't happen, it's entirely possible that the Unionist parties will cancel each other out in Aberdeen South and the Unionist vote will be split in such a way that Flynn can hold on with reduced support.