(Bloomberg) — Labour overtook the Scottish National Party in polling in Scotland for the first time since the region’s independence referendum a decade ago, a YouGov survey found, adding fuel to the prospect of the UK’s main opposition regaining power at a general election expected later this year.
Most Read from Bloomberg
Keir Starmer’s Labour is preferred by 33% of Scottish voters, up 1 percentage point from six months ago, while the SNP has slipped two percentage points to 31%, YouGov said on Wednesday. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s governing Conservatives fell six points to 14%.
The survey is a boost to Starmer, who’s seeking to guide Labour to power for the first time in 14 years at the next general election, which Sunak must hold by the end of January. While Labour leads the Tories by 20-odd points in most national polls, the opposition has never previously bounced back from a defeat on the scale of the 2019 election to win the following national vote. That makes a recovery in Scotland — a former stronghold — critical to success.
YouGov’s survey is also damaging to Humza Yousaf’s SNP, which has seen its support drop after the party became embroiled in an accounting scandal and charismatic former leader Nicola Sturgeon stepped down. Both Sturgeon and her husband Peter Murrell were arrested last year as part of a police probe into the SNP’s finances, and were subsequently released without charge. The investigation into the party is ongoing.
While the SNP lost its bid to guide Scotland to independence in a 2014 referendum, in the vote’s aftermath, the nationalists soared in popularity as it appealed to the 45% of Scots who had voted to leave the UK by continuing to campaign for more devolved powers. That led the party to overturn the previously dominant Labour Party’s fortunes in Scotland.
As recently as 2010, Labour won 41 of Scotland’s 59 seats in Westminster. But the SNP snatched victory in all but three Scottish constituencies five years later, with Labour sinking to a solitary win — a result it replicated in 2019. Now, one in five of the SNP’s voters from 2019 say they’ll vote Labour at the next general election, according to YouGov.
In its bid for power, the opposition is now seeking to win back a chunk of lost ground in Scotland: a UK-wide YouGov poll of more than 18,000 people last week put Labour on track to win 28 Scottish seats, against 19 for the SNP. Labour is also seeking to win back the so-called red wall seats in northern and central England that it lost to the Tories in 2019, while making inroads into more typically Conservative parts of southern England.
For its latest survey, YouGov polled 1,100 Scottish adults from March 28 to April 2. Voting intention for the Green Party, with whom the SNP shares power in the Scottish Parliament, was flat, while the pollster explained the Tory decline in part to the rising fortunes of the Reform UK Party founded by Nigel Farage — whose share in Scotland rose five points to 7%.
While Labour has taken a narrow lead in polling for the UK Parliament in Westminster, YouGov found that the SNP retains a small lead of its own in terms of voting intention for the regional Scottish Parliament, leading Labour by 34% to 32%.
(Updates with voters switching from SNP to Labour in sixth paragraph. An earlier version of this story was corrected to amend the party name in the first paragraph.)
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
EMEA Tribune is not involved in this news article, it is taken from our partners and or from the News Agencies. Copyright and Credit go to the News Agencies, email [email protected] Follow our WhatsApp verified Channel
