This is another sobering poll for Humza Yousaf. His ill-judged Interflora moment (“you send the abject subservience, we’ll send the flowers”), together with the extraordinary revelation that he told SNP parliamentarians that disloyalty to Sturgeon was incompatible with SNP membership, has put paid to any notion that he’ll ever be anything more than Sturgeon’s handpicked continuity leader. That ties his fate inextricably to his predecessor’s – if she comes out of the current process OK, so might he, but if she doesn’t, he could well lose his job before the general election simply because he backed her so unreservedly.
However, in one sense the damage is already done for Nicola Sturgeon. You live by the sword and you die by the sword – she and her allies directed Yes supporters and the public to regard Alex Salmond’s acquittal as a meaningless technicality, and to view the process against him as sufficient reason for him to lose his reputation and his political career. Judging from the personal ratings in the new Savanta poll, she’s starting to suffer from the same brutal principle herself. Earlier polling suggested her popularity was holding up astonishingly well during the police investigation, but the fact that she has now been personally arrested, rather than just people close to her, may have made the decisive difference. (In fact, only some of Savanta’s fieldwork took place after the news of her arrest broke, so future polling could be even worse for her.)
Net personal ratings of senior politicians (Savanta / The Scotsman, 9th-14th June 2023):
Kate Forbes (SNP): +2
Anas Sarwar (Labour): -1
Keir Starmer (Labour): -3
Nicola Sturgeon (SNP): -7
Humza Yousaf (SNP): -10
What can you even say about Yousaf’s dismal showing here? He’s foolishly hitched his wagon to a yesterday’s leader whose popularity has plummeted, and yet he’s still more unpopular than her anyway. It’s rare to find yourself in a situation where someone who is dropping like a stone still has the theoretical capacity to drag you upwards (slightly). And given the extent to which the SNP leadership election boiled down to a two-horse race between Yousaf and Kate Forbes, party members can be in no doubt that they made the wrong choice in March. If they had picked Forbes, leadership would currently be an asset for the SNP and would give them an advantage over Labour – as it is, the total opposite is true. They may wish to reverse that mistake before too much damage is done at the general election next year.
Now for the good news: this poll adds further to the already considerable weight of evidence that Yousaf’s unpopularity with the public, and the ongoing Sturgeon soap opera, is not damaging support for independence. If anything, the trend for Yes is slightly upwards.
Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes 49% (+1)
No 51% (-1)
The National have got into the habit of accompanying any front page headline about good polling news for Yes with a photo of Humza Yousaf, as if he was personally responsible for independence support increasing or holding up. Which is a touch comical in a way, because the evidence is now overwhelming that it’s happening in spite of him rather than because of him. The trend on independence has become completely decoupled from the SNP’s own polling fortunes, which as you’ll see below look markedly different.
Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election:
SNP 38% (-1)
Labour 34% (+1)
Conservatives 17% (-2)
Liberal Democrats 7% (+1)
Seats projection (current boundaries, with changes measured from 2019 election result): SNP 27 (-21), Labour 22 (+21), Conservatives 5 (-1), Liberal Democrats 5 (+1)
So the Humza emergency deepens – if this poll is right, the SNP are on course to relinquish their majority among Scottish seats in the Commons. They would be left with 27 seats and the unionist parties in combination would have 32. In practice it would probably be even worse than that, because we’ve yet to go through the election campaign, which like all Westminster campaigns will be an ‘away fixture’ for the SNP and a ‘home fixture’ for Labour and the Tories. The SNP slipping back into second place is very much on the cards unless appropriate action is taken (by which I mean replacing Yousaf as leader, or restoring the de facto referendum plan, or both). Individual SNP MPs who stand to lose their seats on these numbers include Anum Qaisar, Tommy Sheppard, Deidre Brock, Alison Thewliss, this week’s Question Time star David Linden, Anne McLaughlin, Stewart McDonald and Angela Crawley.
Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:
SNP 40% (+1)
Labour 33% (+1)
Conservatives 16% (-3)
Liberal Democrats 8% (+1)
Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:
SNP 28% (-5)
Labour 28% (-2)
Conservatives 18% (-)
Greens 13% (+3)
Liberal Democrats 11% (+4)
Seats projection (with changes measured from 2021 election): SNP 50 (-14), Labour 34 (+12), Conservatives 21 (-10), Greens 12 (+4), Liberal Democrats 12 (+8)
The pro-independence majority in the Scottish Parliament would be lost on these numbers, although admittedly it would be a closer-run thing than suggested by some recent polls from other firms. The SNP and Greens in combination would have 62 seats, and the unionist parties combined would have 67.
It’s the drop on the list vote that’s really killing the SNP here. I know there’s a perception that the SNP don’t need list votes, but that theory goes totally out of the window when their constituency lead over the second-placed party drops to as low as seven points. In that scenario they need to offset their constituency losses with list seats, and that’s obviously not going to happen on 28% of the list vote, especially when that puts them level-pegging with Labour.
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