CLOSE-UP: LIVE ISSUE - SCOTTISH AND WELSH ELECTIONS. Scottish parties tackle apathy with advertising.

The SNP goes for Labour's jugular in Scots Assembly elections.

It's round two for the Scottish and Welsh Parliamentary elections this week and the occasion has brought out some good, old-fashioned mud-slinging. Well, in Scotland at least. The Welsh parties barely seem to have made an advertising whimper this time around.

A key lesson learned from the inaugural Scottish elections was that it wasn't the 'safe' Labour seat as had been thought and this has upped the ante on the advertising strategies used this time to swing more voters.

The elections use a mixture of the first-past-the-post system, to elect 73 members, and a second vote where 56 seats are allocated to parties based on the proportion of the overall vote each party gets.

A tangible chance to land a seat - as the first Green and a Socialist candidate did in 1999 - through proportional representation has encouraged 32 parties to contest the elections this time round. Alongside the four main parties - the Scottish National Party, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Conservative - voters can find the likes of the Fishing Party, four hospital campaign parties and two pensioners' parties on the ballot.

This freedom to vote has opened the door for SNP. In 1997, there were only four seats where Labour had less than a 20-point lead over a second place SNP candidate. Now there are 34. It has launched an aggressive advertising campaign on the back of this.

The first election in 1999, represented a clean slate that saw Scotland vote in its first Parliament for 300 years. In 2003, Labour now has a four-year track record and the other parties, the SNP in particular, have predictably concentrated on perceived Labour shortcomings in their advertising.