PROFESSOR John Curtice has laid out the “most likely” way that he believes a second Scottish independence referendum will be held.
The polling expert was speaking at an All Talk event with broadcaster Iain Dale at the Edinburgh Fringe when he was asked about the likelihood of the SNP winning a majority at the 2026 Holyrood election.
Curtice said it was “quite conceivable” that John Swinney’s party would pick up the “vast bulk of the constituency seats” – however he suggested the [[SNP]] winning an outright majority was an outside bet.
“It is frankly all pretty much on a knife edge,” the University of Strathclyde professor said. “The optimistic scenario for the [[SNP]] is not winning a majority on their own – that's very optimistic.
“It's still conceivable given where we are at, that we might just get a pro-independence majority at Holyrood, i.e. the SNP and the Greens and if anybody from Alba manages to get elected, they might just get 65 [seats out of the 129 in the Scottish Parliament].”
Curtice went on: “That matters because if there isn't a majority for independence at Holyrood, there is no way there's going to be an independence referendum.
“If there is a majority at [[Holyrood]], then the 2029 Westminster election becomes crucial – because if the [[SNP]] were to have leverage in a hung parliament, that in my view has always been the most likely way in which a referendum could happen, sooner rather than later.”
Curtice, who was appearing at the Fringe alongside journalists Michael Crick and Brian Taylor, said that a two-party UK political system no longer existed, with traditional demographic ties such as the working class to Labour or the middle class to the Conservatives having “disappeared” in the 2019 General Election.
“It has not returned,” he added. “The fundamental traditional anchors of the two-party system demographically are no longer with us.”
Noting that Keir Starmer’s attempt to “reconnect with the working class … got absolutely nowhere at all”, Curtice further said that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK are “the one and only party now in our society who are more popular amongst working-class voters than middle-class voters”.
The polling expert said that Scottish Labour’s vote was “less left wing” than the party’s vote south of the Border, which makes Anas Sarwar’s group more vulnerable to Reform UK.
He said there are “two crucial aspects about Reform”.
“One is that it's taking votes almost entirely from the Unionist parties in Scotland – virtually nobody who voted for the SNP last year is now saying they're going to vote for Reform.
“I can show you that the proportion of 2024 Labour voters in Scotland who say they will now vote for Reform is higher than the equivalent figure for the south of the Border, and that's because last year, Labour were relatively successful at picking up support from people who voted Conservative in 2019 as compared with Labour south of the Border, not least because there was quite a lot of anti-SNP tactical voting in action.”
While Reform is eating into Unionist party’s support from the right, Curtice was also asked about the potential of a new party under Jeremy Corbyn to do so from the left, creating an even more fractured political landscape.
However, the polling expert said that Labour were already losing votes on the left to the Greens, adding that a new Corbyn-led party “actually risks fracturing that challenge”.
Curtice was speaking just one hour before First Minister John Swinney took to another Edinburgh Fringe stage across town.
The SNP leader, speaking at a Herald Unspun event, said that he intended to make it “crystal clear” that a vote for his party in 2026 would be a vote to make Scotland independent.
He further dismissed proposals from the [[SNP]] grassroots to treat the [[Holyrood]] list vote as a de facto referendum, saying that any strategy without the UK Government's legal agreement was "not going to work".
