YouGov have rushed out the data tables from their new GB-wide voting intention poll much quicker than usual, and I’m not surprised, because it’s a poll that probably deserves the term “historic”. Although I’m old enough to remember many, many polls showing similarly humungous Labour leads in the 1990s, almost all of them came after we had practically started factoring in a Labour government in 1997 as a near-certainty. Until very recently, there was no particular expectation of a Labour government, but now it suddenly seems hard to imagine any other outcome in the 2024 general election – and it’s taken just this one landmark poll to get us to that new reality.
GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 28th-29th September 2022):
Labour 54% (+9)
Conservatives 21% (-7)
Liberal Democrats 7% (-2)
Greens 6% (-1)
SNP 5% (+1)
Reform UK 4% (+1)
Scottish subsample: SNP 44%, Labour 38%, Conservatives 10%, Greens 4%, Liberal Democrats 2%, Reform UK 1%
I said the other day that YouGov’s Scottish subsamples are sometimes an early warning system for new trends in Scotland. There was absolutely no sign of a possible new trend in the previous poll, but there absolutely is in this new one. But the operative word is “possible” – although YouGov seem to structure and weight their Scottish subsamples correctly, the sample size is still very small (around 150), so the margin of error is considerable. And even if the Labour surge in Scotland is real, remember that the circumstances have been very favourable for the party this week, with the Labour conference taking place and Starmer’s keynote speech being (inexplicably) lavished with praise in the mainstream media. Not every week will be like this one for Labour.
However, I hope certain parts of the independence movement might view these numbers as a wake-up call, and realise that there is no room for little luxuries or indulgences when we’re trying to win a mandate for independence in a plebiscite election. Pro-independence parties between them have 48% of the vote in this subsample, so a mandate on the popular vote is absolutely possible – but what will that count for if Labour win a majority of Scottish seats, as they’d be very close to doing on 38% of the vote? We can’t afford to play silly buggers – we need to get behind one pro-independence candidate in each constituency to ensure we contain any Labour surge.
And as far as the Britain-wide picture is concerned, it now seems clear that the public have made up their minds about Liz Truss and she has already passed the point of no return. She is quite simply unelectable. If the Tories are to have any chance of retaining power in 2024, they need not only to remove her from power, but to do it in such a way that whatever comes afterwards feels like a wholly new government (an impression that, in fairness, both Boris Johnson and Truss herself managed to pull off).
There’s also a new Survation poll tonight which shows a similar trend at GB level (albeit with not quite such an enormous Labour lead), but thankfully with a much more reassuring Scottish subsample.
GB-wide voting intentions (Survation, 29th September 2022):
Labour 49% (+6)
Conservatives 28% (-5)
Liberal Democrats 11% (-)
SNP 5% (+1)
Reform UK 2% (-3)
Greens 1% (-2)
Scottish subsample: SNP 51%, Labour 29%, Conservatives 11%, Liberal Democrats 7%, Greens 1%
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