Yesterday we reported on the Ipsos MORI Scottish poll (for which full tables are now available) showing a 30% swing from Labour to the SNP since the 2010 general election. Today a YouGov poll (detailed tables here) carried out entirely after Johann Lamont’s resignationconfirms the dramatic threat to Labour in Scotland, albeit with a somewhat lower swing (19%). The effect is, according to Electoral Calculus, that Labour would retain 13 seats to 46 for the SNP whereas yesterday’s poll made it 4 to 54, a loss of 28 rather than 37 seats but still bad enough to ensure that Labour was incapable of winning the general election. Continue reading
Tagged with SNP
Four days of predicting a Blairite leader & poll points to Scottish Labour meltdown
The latest poll from Ispos-MORI is a devastating blow to Labour which underlines the desperate state in which the New Labour years (as well as the failure of Ed Miliband to put them behind us) have left the Scottish Labour party. The poll shows a 30% swing across Scotland from the 2010 general election, leaving the SNP with a 29% lead over Labour (52/23) compared with a 22% lead for Labour in what was the best result across the UK for Labour in 2010 (42/20). Labour would retain only 4 seats on this basis, a loss of 37 seats.
This poll demonstrates that the SNP clearly represent a significantly greater threat to Labour in next year’s general election than UKIP in England (where today’s YouGov has Labour inching into the lead again). Whereas UKIP could perhaps take a tiny number of seats such as Great Grimsby off Labour if its current surge is maintained in the real contest where a British government is at stake, the SNP could take large numbers. But whereas UKIP might actually help Labour win some marginals (though not all), in Scotland there’s no upside. Continue reading
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Scottish Labour repositions itself to the left of the SNP
Though the swirling waters of the River Tay looked freezing, the sun shone on Scottish Labour’s conference in Perth this weekend. And inside the conference hall, delegates seemed more confident than last year. Not necessarily that they will win the vote on independence – there is no complacency there – nor that they have got the better of the SNP, but that they have at least got it right about where they are now positioning the Scottish party. A clear and distinct Labour vision for Scotland within Britain. Firmly to the left of the SNP and with a clear commitment to more devolution, not only from London to Edinburgh, but within Scotland in opposition to the SNP’s centralisation. Continue reading
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Navigating to Welsh unity against austerity
The call was for ‘Plan B’ but unity was the dominant theme at Compass Wales’ panel debate in Cardiff this week. A fine array of speakers, led by Guardian columnist, John Harris, came together to debate Compass’s ‘Plan B’, their alternative to austerity.
Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood, the Green Party’s Anthony Slaughter and John McInally, vice president of the PCS union all spoke convincingly but it was Mark Drakeford who made the first challenge to the Compass project by claiming there is no alternative. Continue reading
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Scotland: at least Labour could oppose independence independently
In a part of Britain in which the population still gets overly excited about the ideological alignments of its football clubs, the British flag is not just a neutral patriotic symbol.
Thirteen-year-old Lee Heron was earlier this year sent home from his high school in Newton Stewart, Wigtownshire, for wearing a Union Jack T-shirt his mum had bought him at Primark. This attire, his teacher deemed, was likely to inflame sectarian tension among the pupils. Continue reading