After all the excitement of last month’s UK general election, we entered a sleepier summer period for politics in Scotland. It’s always a less active time but especially when polling firms are having to go away and look at their processes and tweak them to account for what happened on the day.
As we approach the end of what has barely felt like summer in much of Scotland, we’ve finally got our first post-election voting intention poll. This comes from our usual pairing of the Sunday Times (link to original writeup) and Norstat (link to tables), which is also why it took so long after the initial release of some numbers for this piece to go up: Norstat are always slow on the table uploads, alas!
The previous Norstat covered the 24th – 26th of June 2024. Changes are shown as (vs that poll / vs last election).
Regional Vote
Last month’s election may have been all change, but this part of the poll is almost all margin of error relative to the last one. A single point loss for Labour leaves them tied with the SNP on this vote, though obviously compared to 2021 that represents significant growth for the former and decline for the latter.
The Conservatives are similarly down a couple of points, which is likely accounted for with the substantial increase in Reform UK support. 2026 is still some way off, but at the moment I’d be inclined to suggest the “right of the Conservatives” genie is out of the bottle and they can expect some MSPs. The Greens and Lib Dems meanwhile are entirely unchanged on the last poll, though that’s progress since the election for the Lib Dems.
Finally, Alba are up a point but as ever, and I know they really don’t like me pointing it out, this is an outlier that’s limited to Norstat. No other pollster has had the party above 3% at any point this term, yet Norstat (formerly Panelbase) have tended to have them between 4-5%. Given the available evidence, I think it’s the other firms who have this right. Apart from anything else, avid followers of BBS can see the relative paucity of on the ground presence from the party by how few by-elections they’ve contested this year; of the 18 that have happened or closed nominations, just 2 have had Alba candidates.
Constituency Vote
The constituency side of things has some larger changes, likely because Reform UK have been broken out of “Others” here for the first time. The SNP, Labour and Conservatives all lose a couple of points, though that leaves the SNP a bit ahead of Labour still, whilst similar to the list vote Reform vault to fourth place. Again though, no changes in Lib Dem or Green support on this vote.
One point worth making early on is that some people are getting far, far too carried away about the prospect of widespread Reform UK constituency candidacies. The lazy assumption, rooted in consistently poor understanding of the voting system, is that this could be devastating for the Conservative.
In reality, these are likely to amount to next to nothing. The Conservatives already have very, very few constituency seats, so even in the case where the narrow loss of such seats triggers overhangs that throw off the proportionality, the potential for damage is extremely limited. Where the damage to the Conservatives – and other parties – is done is obviously on the list vote, where any decent share for Reform UK has to eat into the other parties.
Seat Projection
Projecting that into seats might give us something like this:
Please see this page for how projections work and important caveats.
Now this is a properly chaotic outcome! Although tied on the proportional side of things, an SNP constituency lead in the North East in particular estimates to a few seats over Labour. That’s what costs the Greens their North East seat, as well as locking out a second Reform UK MSP there. As someone pointed out on Bluesky, if this happened on the day and you lived in a Labour-held constituency in the West Scotland region, you’d be represented by a whopping 7 different parties.
Overall, this gives the Pro-Union parties a clear lead of 72 to 57 over the Pro-Independence bloc. However, that’s reliant on those 9 Reform UK MSPs, which is a sticky situation to be in. Given I’m expecting Reform to be featuring in seat projections for the foreseeable, and I often refer to possible governing arrangements in this section, I decided to add another little chart below to show some possible majorities.
It’s important to emphasise this is a majority of MSPs, not a majority government; I’m not suggesting all of these arrangements would be actual coalitions. Some of these would also be very hard to cobble together, which is exactly the point of including them, because if (as in this case) the only options are unthinkable, it suggests we’d be in for a very difficult period of governance.
Possible Majorities
Note: these majorities relate simply to passing a vote in the Scottish Parliament. They do not imply the formation of a full coalition government.
- Traffic Light: Labour, Lib Dem and Green
- Independence Bloc: SNP, Green and Alba
- Grand Coalition: SNP and Labour
- Union Bloc: Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem and Reform UK
As this is literally the first Westminster poll in Scotland since the election, take this with a huge pinch of salt. We don’t yet know what particular house effects may be arising, or what the polling trend is. All we can compare with is the election, and this shows Labour losing a just at the edge of margin of error level of support, whilst at a single point, losses for the SNP and Conservatives are firmly within that margin.
As in other parts of the poll, the big gains here go to Reform UK, who tie with the Conservatives in terms of support. We’ve had very little UK-level polling since the election either, but this chimes with what little we have had, which showed an increase in support for Reform – even the two conducted after the riots down south.
Having surprised slightly with their success last month, Lib Dem support has seemingly dipped a little, whilst the Greens are notionally up a point relative to their votes received, but in reality unchanged against what they’d have had with a full national slate. The same is broadly true of Alba, remembering that they got (a fraction under) 0.5% from standing in a third of seats.
It’s the same old story on the constitutional side of things: we’ve got some margin of error movement, which in this case reinforces the position of the Pro-Union camp. Yet despite the SNP’s crushing loss last month, and much reduced support at Holyrood relative to 2021, support for Independence remains relatively high. We should all know this, the point has been made repeatedly over the past 18 months, but currently support for Independence has become substantially unhooked from support for the SNP and other Pro-Independence parties for the first time since 2014.
The challenge for the Pro-Independence side is how they turn support for their constitutional preference back into party support. For the Pro-Union side, their challenge is to turn party support into backing for their constitutional preference. If neither side is able to rise to their respective challenge, we’re going to be stuck in this weird limbo of significant constitutional dissatisfaction but without any real outlet for a long while yet.
Hypotheticals
As ever, the last little bit of analysis concerns those hypothetical and more proportional voting systems that BBS likes to play about with. The use of pure FPTP at Westminster is an affront to democracy, and though Holyrood fares far better, AMS is still deeply imperfect. The examples here simply transpose the poll findings onto more proportional voting systems – the reality is that different systems would of course result in different voter behaviour.
RAMS patter.
Scandi patter.
Scandinavian Style Westminster
As we’re out of the Westminster election period, I’m back to my tradition of not bothering with FPTP seat projections for that parliament. If we used the kind of proportional system I outlined here, Labour would have a much narrower lead over the SNP in seats that FPTP delivers, and Reform UK would actually win seats to tie them with the Conservatives since that was the case in votes.
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