Bathgate & Linlithgow.

Bathgate and Linlithgow is a central-Scotland seat of around 94,000 people, with a median age of 42, strung across a chain of West Lothian towns rather than dominated by a single centre. Bathgate, Linlithgow, Bo'ness, Armadale, Whitburn and Blackburn each anchor their own ward, giving the constituency the character of a network of former mining and county towns rather than a rural-scattered or single-town seat. Local services are run by two Scottish unitary councils: West Lothian, which covers four of the seat's wards, and Falkirk, which accounts for one. A seat split across two councils is a meaningful fact about how the area is governed.

Politically, the area is a close Labour--SNP contest fought ward by ward. Across the fifteen most-recent ward results, Labour took seven and the SNP six, with single wins for an Independent and the Liberal Democrats, so neither main party has pulled decisively clear at council level. The parliamentary picture is firmer: at the 2024 General Election -- the first contested on these 2023 boundaries -- Labour won on 47 per cent, with the SNP runner-up some twenty points back on 27 per cent. Kirsteen Sullivan, of the Labour and Co-operative Party, has held the seat since that contest and has shown no whipped dissent in recent months.

The direction of travel, on the figures available, is a seat that leans Labour at Westminster while remaining genuinely competitive in its wards. Recent local coverage has had a markedly administrative, service-delivery character, dwelling on parking, bus provision and town-centre regeneration rather than on national controversy. For now the seat looks settled at parliamentary level but contested below it, with the council arithmetic offering little comfort to either of the two largest parties.