One-quarter of those planning to vote Labour are independence supporters, says new Survation poll

Firstly, the question of the hour: how many Yes voters have actually drifted to Labour and just how pro-independence is the current Labour vote?  Of people who would vote Yes in a new referendum (almost half the population, remember) and who are likely to vote in the general election, 70% have stuck with the SNP, 18% would vote Labour, 6% would vote Lib Dem and 3% would vote Conservative.  But Labour’s own vote breaks down as 23.3% Yes, 63.4% No, or 26.9% Yes, 73.1% No if only those who know how they would vote in a referendum are taken into account.  That means Labour have a much more complicated coalition of support in constitutional terms than any other major party.  The backbone of their support is unionist, and presumably includes at least some people who have previously voted Tory for unionist reasons and who would not be happy if Labour proved to be anything but a reliably Brit Nat party (they needn’t worry!).  But Labour’s hopes of seat gains largely depend on retaining a substantial minority of independence supporters, who might yet be susceptible to wooing from the SNP with a genuine offer on independence – an offer that shows no sign of materialising, admittedly.  Tokenistic discussion papers on culture in an independent Scotland aren’t going to cut it.

Intriguingly, the SNP may be gaining more traction than we thought by reminding people that they are much better placed than Labour to shut out the Tories.  When asked which party they would vote for if they wanted to wipe out the Tories in Scotland, respondents in the poll were almost evenly split between Labour (36%) and the SNP (34%).  

I couldn’t find voting intention figures for Alba yesterday, but they’re in the data tables and they’re not too bad – Alba are on 2% of the Holyrood constituency vote and 3% of the Holyrood list vote.

Of the leaders’ personal ratings, the two I couldn’t find yesterday were both Alba politicians – Neale Hanvey and Ash Regan.  It turns out that Neale Hanvey is on -14 and Ash Regan is on -25.  Mr Hanvey’s figure is affected by the unusually high percentage (39%) who haven’t heard of him, while Ms Regan’s surname is misspelled in the data tables as “Reagen”, which may imply that the same misspelling occurred in the questionnaire when respondents were interviewed.  Here is how the two slot into the wider league table.  Some of the figures have been very slightly adjusted since yesterday due to rounding issues.

As I noted yesterday, the public as a whole are opposed to the SNP remaining in coalition with the Greens, by a margin of 41% to 28%.  However, the data tables show that people who voted SNP at the 2019 general election take the opposite view, by a bigger margin of 52% to 22%.  The questions the SNP need to ask themselves, though, are just how scunnered is that 22%, and are those the very voters that need to be won back?

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