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Most Scots support Scottish ruling party in next parliamentary election: poll

Xinhua, September 15, 2015 Adjust font size:

The ruling Scottish National Party (SNP) remains on course for another landslide in next year's Holyrood Scottish parliament election, new polling evidence showed Monday.

Most Scots (51 percent) are poised to vote for SNP led by Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon in the vote scheduled on May 5, 2016 to elect 129 members to the Scottish Parliament, according to the YouGov poll for British Newspaper The Times.

The result is up 2 percent since the last YouGov poll in May, while the Scottish Labour party is down 3 percent on 22 percent, showed the results.

A total of 16 percent of Scots say Labour is effective at holding the SNP government to account, lower than the Conservative's 19 percent, according to the poll of 1,110 Scots surveyed from Sept. 7 to Sept. 10.

The Scottish Conservative party's support was up from 15 percent to 18 percent, while the Liberal Democrats have dropped another 3 percent to 4 percent, showed the poll.

The SNP garnered a historic landslide of 56 seats out of 59 seats for Scotland in the British General election in May, a sharp increase from only six seats at Westminster British parliament in the last general election in 2010.

The SNP-led pro-independence Yes campaign gained 45 percent support in the Scottish Independence referendum held on Sept. 18, 2014, against the No campaign's 55 percent in the historic poll with a turnout of 85 percent and more than 3.6 million people across Scotland casting their votes.

Speaking ahead of the one year anniversary of last year's referendum, Sturgeon said the SNP's manifesto for the next Scottish parliament election will include a timescale for another vote on whether Scotland should break away from Britain, which she said could happen "in five years or 10 years or whenever" the "circumstances" are right.

However, British Prime Minister David Cameron had ruled out a second Scottish independence referendum before 2020, terming the 2014 referendum result as "decisive."

In the last Scottish parliament election in 2011, the SNP won 69 seats and formed the first majority SNP government since the opening of Holyrood in 1999. Endit