Scottish Revival for Labour?

In the rush to figure out what the local election results a few weeks ago might have meant if there had been a general election, one crucial piece of the jigsaw was missing, namely Scotland which did not have council elections.

YouGov however this week sought to rectify this, with modelling which would spell bad news for the SNP and good news for Scottish Labour.

According to the new Multi-level Regression and Post-stratification (MRP) model, the SNP are on track to win 27 seats in Scotland in the House of Commons at the UK general election, down from the 48 it won in 2019. Scottish Labour meanwhile appear on course to win 23 seats, up from the 1 it won at the last election. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats meanwhile are on course to win 4 seats each in Scotland.  

However, the modelling comes with an important health warning. As YouGov notes: “With any projection of Scotland must come a large slice of caveat cake: Scotland has one of the highest concentrations of marginal seats in the UK. This is an extremely difficult political environment in which to forecast, and indeed no fewer than 22 of the 59 projected seats are ‘called’ in this model with winning margins of less than 5%.”

Meanwhile, as MPs begin their Whitsun recess, they will have the latest Opinium poll for The Observer to include in their reading list.

When it comes to headline voting intentions, it puts Labour on 43%, unchanged since two weeks ago whilst the Conservatives are down 1 point on 28%.

Rishi Sunak now has a net approval rating of -16, compared to -19 a fortnight ago, whilst Keir Starmer is on -4, as compared to -5 two weeks ago.

When it comes to who those polled feel would make the best Prime Minister, Keir Starmer leads Rishi Sunak by 5 points. 30% say Starmer would make the best PM compared to 25% saying Sunak.

Opinium’s twitter feed goes on to note: “We also asked about the recent National Conservatism conference. Among the 30% who claim to have heard anything about it, most said that it reflected negatively on the various people and parties involved.”

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