I’ve been having a bit of fun this week taking the mick out of Blair McDougall‘s always excellent Notes on Nationalism blog – a must-read for anyone interested in tackling the (until recently) dominant narrative in Scotland. This week’s post looked at Survation’s recent Scottish Polling – and the frankly astounding shift in voting intention (VI) Scotland has seen in just a few short months.

If you do a quick bit of maths with the Survation poll and try to relate the percentages below to the real votes previously cast it suggests that the SNP have lost just shy of 300,000 voters since the last General election with 200,000 of them going to Labour. 

There is a lot to take heart in the changes between the 2019 GE and how people would vote now. The SNP have only been able to keep 76% of their voters from last time (which is almost as bad an attrition rate as their Westminster group.

On the other hand, Labour has managed to keep nearly-90% of their 2019 voters, and picked up 15% SNP voters; 20% of Tories; about 23% of Lib Dems & nearly a 1/4 of those ‘other’ 2019 voters (which includes the Greens).

But, to keep things in perspective – these numbers only show how we got to where we are. And while where we are is good (miles better than anyone could have hoped for in January) – Labour is still in 2nd place in Scotland. We want to get to 1st. We want to win. But that’s why I think this next graph – and not the last one – is the most interesting finding from Survation this week!

This question asked voters how strong their support for their currently preferred party was. It’s not asking “Who do you prefer”, “On a scale of 1-10, how strong is that preference”. If you say 1-4, then it’s “weak” support (you’d vote for them if you had to); 6-10 it’s “strong” support (you have to vote for them). This isn’t just a “Rank these parties on a scale of 1-10”; it’s saying “How committed are you to the party you say you would vote for”?

Around 80% of Tories, Reform & Labour supporters strongly support their party, and over 70% for the Greens and Lib Dems. But that SNP number shows the extent of the shift Scotland has seen – just 45% of “Team SNP” voters feel strongly wedded to the team; and 48% don’t really care.

To put that into Simple Terms: nearly half of people who say they would vote SNP tomorrow, don’t really support the SNP that much. That means that if they had a dodgy (or even just a bad) SNP MP they were being asked to vote for – they might just stay at home. That means if they (unlike some of their party) can see the change a Labour Government would bring, and they wouldn’t mind Scotland being a part of that – they might just stay at home. But more, it means that if there was another party offering something to them – they might just not stay at home!

That’s the opportunity Labour now has in Scotland – we’re not just trying to be heard now; there’s a decent proportion of our prime target voters who might now actually be wanting to listen! It’s now up to us to put a clear, coherent vision for change to them and ask them to trust us to deliver.

That’s hard – spending hard-earned political capital and taking risks with it is hard. There are political calculations to be made, for sure, but with a 20-point lead in the UK polls now, perhaps, is the time to stick the head above the parapet and take a chance that people might be willing to take a chance on change…given where we are now.

Around 13% of all Scottish voters are looking for a reason not to keep voting SNP – it’s Labour’s chance to give them a reason to change.