In time for the tenth anniversary of the Independence Referendum, a fair few firms have had polling in the field. Only some of it has had a full suite of voting intention attached, as in the case of this effort by Opinium (link to tables) for the Times. I wrote a bit myself about reflections at this milestone point, at length here on BBS itself and a shorter version for the Herald.
Opinium are a very infrequent pollster for Scotland, this being only the third time we’ve heard from them since the 2021 Holyrood election. Those have all been in early September, oddly enough, so it’s a shame there wasn’t one in 2022 or we’d actually have a nice annual series to look at. Ah well! From the outset, I’m going to say I found aspects of this poll to be “spicy”, which in this case means I don’t really believe it, similar to the final pre-GE Savanta that put the SNP ahead of Labour.
The previous Opinium covered the 4th – 14th of September 2023. Changes are shown as (vs that poll / vs last election).
Regional Vote
Although it’s the top two I have queries about overall, on this vote in isolation there’s not really anything remarkable about them. This is at the upper end of the SNP’s recent range and the lowest of Labour’s, but it’s not completely out of kilter either way. SNP leads do look a bit odd at the moment, but they do crop up, even if they are usually much narrower than this.
The Conservatives meanwhile are on a joint worst share of the term here, and tied with Reform UK. I’m still not massively convinced by the idea that the current Scottish political climate has the two parties of the Right equal in sum to where they were in 2021, and this is the best Reform UK figure thus far, but again it’s not unbelievable in comparison to other pollsters.
The Greens are completely static, as they have been in every Opinium poll; they don’t go up, they don’t go down, and here that ties them with the Lib Dems, who are up on 2021 at least. Whilst 8% certainly isn’t unbelievable at the moment, albeit on the lower end of their current spread (which is about 7-11%), I do find it eyebrow raising when set alongside two First Past the Post shares, but we’ll get onto that in the next section.
Constituency Vote
This is where things start to unravel in my view. It’s not that I’m surprised to see an SNP lead on this vote, as of the three (Regional, Constituency, Westminster) this is where they have consistently been most likely to come ahead, with just four polls so far where they weren’t on top. Instead, it’s that 25% feels far, far too low for Labour. Nobody else has had them below 30% on this vote since November, even if the two polls prior to this (Survation and Norstat) were bang on 30%, never mind this far down. Labour haven’t had much of a honeymoon period, sure, but this feels exaggerated even with that in mind.
Just like the list side of things, the Conservatives have a joint-worst share of the term so far, and tie with Reform UK. I haven’t yet fully incorporated the possibility of Reform UK constituency contests into my calculator, which at this point may be making a difference of a couple of seats in my projections overall. I’m intending on doing so over Christmas and New Year, by which point we’ll have lots of transfer data from by-elections that I can use to decide where to take Reform UK votes from, because whilst they’ll come largely from the Conservatives, it won’t be exclusively.
The Greens were also polled for this vote this time and end up just behind the Lib Dems, and indeed only 1% short of their list intention. That’s what’s making me so dubious about the Green figures here, as we know they do better in proportional votes than under FPTP (I’d say about 2-3% at Holyrood, and even more at Westminster) and that if anything pollsters tend to underestimate their Holyrood constituency share. In short, I think one of two things has to be the case here: either the list vote is too low, or the constituency vote is too high. It’s impossible to say which, and my guesstimate would be it’s about a 2% difference either way, but that’s the difference between a national slate and still missing South if it is on the List.
Seat Projection
Projecting that into seats might give us something like this:
Please see this page for how projections work and important caveats.
The natural consequence of that much weaker than expected Labour share is that they don’t actually do particularly well, and the SNP do very well compared to all other recent polls. In fact, that last time Labour did worse than this in my seat projection was the previous Opinium, whereas the SNP haven’t had a better tally since January’s Ipsos, another pollster that tends to find the SNP higher than average. This is also the first time the Conservatives haven’t been in third place (though I have at least two prior polls where they tied with the Greens), and again I’m not entirely buying the scale of the Reform UK success in this poll.
The relative strength of the SNP and that stunning Reform UK figure therefore creates an incredible difficult parliament, which of my table of scenarios only gives two possibilities for a majority vote: the SNP-Labour Grand Coalition, or the whole Union Bloc in which Reform UK would be the second strongest party.
It’s important to acknowledge though that the below table isn’t exhaustive – for example, you could get a majority of 67 in this case with the SNP plus any two of Greens, Lib Dems, Reform and Conservatives. Or, you could get 66 with Traffic Light and Reform, and whilst you’re at it you could take your kids to the zoo to visit the flying pigs. It’s not intended to present all possible scenarios, just a selection of the most likely or most talked about, some of which are themselves very hard to make work.
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
I mean, the Labour figure here is just nonsense, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, Labour have had a rocky start to government and what little polling we’ve had is generally showing them down. But by a massive 10%? Leaving them 7% behind the SNP? I don’t buy it, I just don’t. The thing is, most of the other figures would be fine in isolation.
I wouldn’t be hugely convinced by an SNP uptick but it’s within margin of error and I suppose a rough patch for Labour would be to the SNP’s benefit. Similarly, the Conservatives are only very different to July, and both Reform UK and the Lib Dems have had equivalent shares with other pollsters. Just as with the Holyrood constituency figure, I’m not sure I buy the Greens on 7% for Westminster when they are on 8% of the Holyrood list; either the list is too low or this is much too high, their Westminster performance generally being lower even than their Holyrood constituency figures.
Usually on this question I’m using a phrase like “not much movement”; this time around though, there is much movement. The previous Opinium was a bit of an outlier in the field when it suggested that Independence was in the lead. That’s been roughly reversed here, with the pendulum swinging narrowly back behind the Union. Given that this was an IndyRef Anniversary poll, it nonetheless feels important to point out that is still a better result for Yes than in 2014, reminding us all that this question hasn’t been put to bed just because Labour have beaten the SNP in one election.
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.
Scandinavian Style Westminster
Although I am back to my default position of not doing Westminster projections on FPTP because that system is awful and unpredictable, I did consult Electoral Calculus for this poll out of curiosity. It reckons despite an SNP lead of 7%, Labour would still win one more MP, a reminder of how absolutely completely and utterly useless FPTP is as a voting system at actually reflecting the views of voters. By contrast, my much fairer system actually gives a result that’s the correct way around, as well as ensures fair representation for the huge pools of Reform and Green voters that FPTP ignores.
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