Better Nation

It’s time for month four of our rolling sequence of polls, conducted as usual by Survation, in partnership with the Daily Record and Dundee University’s 5 Million Questions. The May figures are here, and the Record have written up the indyref results here. The headline there is 47% Yes, 53% No, which is the best score for Yes that we’ve recorded since this polling project began.

That same Record story has the answer to another question: it shows Scots voters would go 54/46 for independence if they were sure Cameron was going to win, which is interesting although a) no-one will know the May 2016 election result in advance and b) no matter how much one may hate Cameron, that’s a poor basis for a vote for independence.

Anyway, onto the Holyrood numbers. Usual background: I’m comparing vote shares to the previous month’s figures: but seat numbers are still shown as the change on the 2011 result. Seat projections are again from Scotland Votes, who don’t include UKIP in their methodology. The ‘kippers are again scoring at a level where they should expect to win a small number of regional list seats, but it is again unclear at which party’s expense those gains would come. Probably more from those parties who are strongest on the list, i.e. overwhelmingly Labour, then Greens and then the rest. If our pals at Weber Shandwick want to keep that tool accurate, regrettably they will need a UKIP entry in their table. With all that in mind, here are this month’s figures.

This would be another very strong result for the SNP: to be within striking distance of 50% in the constituencies, with your nearest rivals almost 20% behind? Few governments seven years into office can have retained this level of support. 65 seats would be a peculiar number to win – technically the barest majority, but theoretically vulnerable: not a position from which coalition would ever make sense for a junior partner, functionally more like a super-minority administration (edit: and unlike now, without a former SNP MSP in the PO’s chair). If 47 generally felt comfortable between 2007 and 2011, this would be a doddle (again, remember they might be one short of this depending on the impact of the ‘kippers).

Labour’s result here looks like a flatline, but they’d actually regard it as a further falling back. Just eight constituencies would go their way: the lists would bring another group of more unknown quantities into Holyrood to swell the Labour delegation, and winning more than 50% of all the list seats would be likely (on these numbers) to make Labour the most vulnerable to any ‘kippers off the lists: the real figure could well be 35 or 36 if this result were the real figure for UKIP in 2016. Whatever John McTernan thinks, this would start to look like SNP hegemony to Labour activists. The demoralising effect would be hard to overstate.

Which brings us to the third-largest group in the Chamber on these numbers: the Greens. Sure, the Tories are a scant 0.4% ahead of the Greens on the list, but the unhelpful (for them) concentration of their vote in South wouldn’t help them in terms of seats, and the Greens show as one ahead of them. In fact, we’d see the Tory group drop by a third, with just four MSPs more than the Lib Dems, who appear to have hit a floor of around 6% for now. All these parties might lose one of these seats to UKIP, obviously. But even 9-10 Green MSPs would be an extraordinary breakthrough for the party.

Looking at all of this as a piece, this is my favourite Survation poll yet, even if the Holyrood election remains in the unpredictable zone beyond the independence vote. A win in #indyref vote, though, which is the next time Scots voters have their say, is now clearly in touching distance. With a strong ground game and some improved messaging, we could even see a moderately convincing win for Yes.