Democratic Party. United Kingdom On 6 April 2010, the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) estimated that going into the 2010 general election, of the 650 constituencies, 382 (59%) were safe seats. Some of these seats have since been lost by the parties that held them at the time, notably most of the Liberal Democrat seats and some Labour seats, meaning they can no longer be considered "safe". Examples of safe seats for the Labour Party are in major urban areas and the industrial centres, such as the North West (Liverpool, Manchester); the North East (Newcastle, Sunderland); South and West Yorkshire, the Valleys of South Wales; the West Midlands county and parts of Inner London (e.g. Hackney and Newham). Many areas of the Central Belt of Scotland, such as Glasgow and Edinburgh, were seen as safe Labour seats until the 2015 election, when the Scottish National Party took all but one Labour seat in Scotland (Edinburgh South). Safe seats for the Conservative Party tend to be in rural areas: the Home Counties (e.g. Surrey, Buckinghamshire), the shires (e.g. North Yorkshire and Cheshire) and affluent areas of London (e.g. Chelsea and Fulham). The safest seat in the 2017 general election was Liverpool Walton, where Labour received 86% of the vote, giving them a 77% majority over the second-placed Conservatives (at 9%). Christchurch is a safe Conservative seat; in 2017 the party gathered 69.6% of the vote there, giving it a near-50% majority over Labour. (The seat, however, did get taken by the Liberal Democrats in a by-election in 1993, but reverted to the Conservatives in the following general election.) At the 2015 general election, seven out of eight of the Liberal Democrats' remaining seats were marginal, with their soon-to-be leader Tim Farron's seat of Westmorland and Lonsdale being the only one considered safe. Orkney and Shetland has been held by the Liberal Democrats and their predecessor party, the Liberal Party, continuously since the 1950 general election, but was almost lost to the Scottish National Party in the latter's national landslide. The seat of Sheffield Hallam was notable in the run up to the 2015 general election, when opinion polls were forecasting a Labour gain despite the incumbent MP, Nick Clegg, being the party leader and Deputy Prime Minister. The seat was, however, held by Clegg, albeit with a much reduced majority of just 2,353 (4.2%). In 2017, several Lib Dem MPs either regained