WHETHER or not Scotland elects a pro-independence majority to the Holyrood parliament next year “matters for the future of politics”, Professor John Curtice has said.
Speaking during a live recording of the Holyrood Sources podcast in Edinburgh on Wednesday evening, the polling expert also warned it is “not inconceivable” that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK win an outright majority at Westminster at the next General Election.
Hours earlier, Electoral Calculus had published a Multi-level Regression and Post-stratification (MRP) poll of 5400 UK voters which projected that Reform UK would win 31% of the vote and 377 Westminster seats – none of which were in Scotland. Labour were projected to drop to just 118 MPs on 22%, and the Tories to just 29 MPs – below the LibDems on 69.
Curtice told the Holyrood Sources podcast that no UK party in the history of political polling had lost support as quickly after being elected as Keir Starmer’s Labour Party had.
He said that in 2024 Labour’s “essential appeal was, ‘well, we know you don't like the SNP, so you need to vote for us to send a message to them, and we know you hate the Tories, so you need to vote for us’.
“The trouble is that they are now in government – and the truth is one of the key messages of the 2024 election was that being in government sucks.”
Curtice added: “Then essentially the whole of the Scottish revival for Labour that began actually with Partygate, continued with Liz Truss, much like the case south of the border, and only latterly was to do with the difficulties of the SNP. All of that has gone.”
In Scotland, the University of Strathclyde professor said that Reform’s support was not as strong as south of the border because the party’s vote is “heavily embedded in those who voted Leave”. Scotland voted to Remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum by 62% to 38%.
However, Curtice said that Reform and Labour were both running at around one-fifth of the Scottish vote, adding that Farage’s party, “if they can run at that kind of level on the regional list vote, they will have a significant presence in the Holyrood chamber”.
“It's still possible, because of the way in which the electoral system operates and because the SNP – although they're only at 33%, are currently something like 14-15 points over everybody else – could get so much in terms of the constituency seats that we might still just get a pro-independence majority at Holyrood, and that matters, by the way, for the future of politics.
“But equally, it's also perfectly possible that we will get an SNP government that looks much closer to the one of 2007 to 2011 in terms of its position in the parliament.
“But of course the crucial difference between now and then is that there is no prospect of Russell Findlay being the person who keeps the SNP minority government going, which is what Annabel Goldie did between 2007 and 2011.
“So I think therefore managing that parliament could be – you talked earlier on about the SNP will still be in power. Well, they might still be in office. I think what's still at stake in this election is whether the SNP will still be in power.”
