THE General Election exit poll has predicted a landslide victory for Labour, while the SNP are projected to win just 10 seats in Scotland.
Across the UK, the Ipsos survey predicted that Keir Starmer will enter Downing Street with 410 MPs, a huge Labour majority of 170.
The Conservatives meanwhile are set for a long night, with the exit poll predicting they will win 131 MPs in a result branded a "massacre" by former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson.
The LibDems were predicted to win 61 MPs, Reform 13, the Greens two, and Plaid Cymru four.
The number of people surveyed in Scotland and Wales means that some caution has to be applied to the SNP and Plaid Cymru results. However, the exit poll is known to be largely accurate.
In 2019, it predicted 368 seats for the Tories – who went on to win 365. It predicted 191 for Labour, who won 203, and 55 for the SNP, who won 48.
However, there are some odd results predicted in the Scottish constituencies that have put a question mark over the results in Scotland.
Aberdeen South, Stephen Flynn's constituency, is predicted to be won by either the Conservatives or Labour.
Dumfries and Galloway, where Alister Jack was the MP, is "too close to call" – with the exit poll predicting that it could be won by Labour, which seems vanishingly unlikely in reality.
The true results won't be known in full until Friday morning, with the first Scottish seats expected to begin declaring at around 1am, with the final ones doing so five or six hours later.
Professor John Curtice told the BBC: "Whilst we’ve got 133 polling stations across Britain as a whole where the exit poll is being conducted, we only have 16 in Scotland. We boosted the number because we knew Scotland was gong to be difficult, but there is inevitably a limit to that.
"If we have to some degree and only even mildly overestimated Labour’s advantage over SNP then maybe SNP’s figure will be higher than 10. That said we are going to have to be seriously wrong if it is anything other than Labour emerging with the most seats north of Border."
The poll – commissioned by Sky News, the BBC, and ITV News – is designed by an academic team of political scientists, led by Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University, and is carried out by the research company Ipsos at some 144 polling stations across the UK.
Curtice previously told the PA news agency: “Wherever possible we go back to the same places as last time. The method of the exit poll is that you compare the results in the selected polling stations this time, with the results of the exit poll last time.”
As well as the identical ballots, a replica ballot box is used as part of the process; Curtice said it’s done in this way to “maximise the confidentiality of people’s votes”.
He added: “To ask them to tell an interviewer [how they voted], then they might be reluctant to do that, so you’re trying to minimise the level of refusal, which is always an issue.”
The number of people approached at a polling station is known as a “systematic sample”, Curtice said, and the size of the samples varies according to the registered electorate for that area. In 2019, Ipsos surveyed more than 19,000 people to produce its exit poll.
