Labour and Lib Dems face election bruising in Scotland, poll predicts

Labour’s general election campaign chairman, Douglas Alexander, and the Liberal Democrats’ economics spokesman, Danny Alexander, are two of the most high-profile projected casualties in Scotland at the general election, according to polling research by Lord Ashcroft that was prematurely released on Tuesday night.

The long-awaited polling in 16 constituencies in Scotland suggests a 21% swing from Labour to the Scottish National party (SNP). If the results were replicated across Scotland on 7 May, Labour would lose 35 of its 41 seats, making the prospect of an overall Labour majority at Westminster much more unlikely, and close to impossible.

The polling is the most detailed seat-by-seat assessment of the state of Scottish politics with just three months before the election.

In the Labour-held constituencies, the overall swing to the SNP was 25.4%. This ranged from 21% in Airdrie & Shotts to 27% in Dundee West and Motherwell & Wishaw.

Ashcroft said he did not expect the swing away from Labour to be that large since his polling has focused on areas with strong support for a yes in the independence referendum in September.

Ashcroft is a former deputy chairman of the Conservative party but his research into specific seats around the UK is generally regarded as objective. It suggests that the Scottish Labour party under its new leader, Jim Murphy, has still not yet found a way to stem the nationalist surge since the country voted in the referendum.

The research is focused mainly on Labour seats in areas that had a yes or close to yes vote in the independence referendum, and finds only the once rock-solid Labour seat of Glasgow North East as likely to stick with the party. Among the seven Glasgow seats polled, Labour is likely to hold on to only one.

“Douglas Alexander, Labour’s campaign manager and the shadow foreign secretary, would lose his Paisley and Renfrewshire South seat with a swing to the SNP of 25%,” Ashcroft writes on his website. He is behind by 48% to 40%.

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In Gordon, a Liberal Democrat seat held by Malcolm Bruce, who is standing down, the former Scottish first minister, Alex Salmond, is due to win the seat by a huge 43% to 26% majority.

“Chief secretary Danny Alexander would lose by 29 points since he is currently trailing by 50% to 21%,” the polling says.

In the Labour-held seats, only 60% of those who voted for the party in 2010 said they would do so again this year; more than one-third (35%) said they would support the SNP. While the Conservative vote (such as it was) has held up in these seats well, the Lib Dems have collapsed: only 12% of the party’s 2010 supporters said they would vote Lib Dem again; nearly half (47%) said they would switch to the SNP.

Pessimism about the economy appears to be driving some of the support for the SNP. Ashcroft writes: “Labour-SNP switchers were markedly less optimistic than most about the economy. Just 41% expected things to go well for the country as a whole over the next year, and 49% for themselves and their families, compared to 59% and 67% of those sticking with Labour.”

In a glimmer of hope for Labour, Ashcroft writes some of the SNP leads are not so vast as to be irrecoverable. He writes: “The Labour majorities in some of these seats are such that even a swing of this magnitude has not put the SNP far ahead – for example, just three points in Glasgow South West and Coatbridge, Chryston & Bellshill, and six points in Glasgow North West.

“With a vigorous Labour campaign there remains room for movement before May. For such a crucial battleground the campaign in these seats has yet to reach fever pitch – perhaps not surprisingly given the exhausting referendum campaign.”

The poll interviewed 16,007 adults by telephone from 5to 30 January 2015.

Jim Murphy warned that an SNP victory in the general election in Scotland would only benefit David Cameron and the Tories.

Giving his first reaction to the polls commissioned by Ashcroft, he said: ”These polls show that Scottish Labour is well behind and has a big gap to close.

“But in the end the only people who will benefit from these polls are David Cameron and the Tories. It is a simple fact that the single biggest party gets to form the next government.

“The more seats the SNP gets from Labour, the more likely it is the Tories will be the biggest party and David Cameron will get into government through the back door.

“That would be a terrible outcome for Scotland but it’s what might happen if Scotland votes SNP.”

After the Ashcroft figures were published, a senior Labour aide acknowledged that Cameron could scrape back into power by splitting the centre-left vote.

“There is a stark reality shown by the polls and a simple mathematical conclusion to be drawn,” he said. “What people need to realise that for every one Labour MP lost in Scotland there is a direct increase in the chance of a Tory government.

“We do recognise these polls show Labour is behind but the person who is going to benefit from this is David Cameron… We are not going to duck away from the idea there is a strong message in these polls. That strong message is that we have a big gap to close and the only people that will benefit from these sorts of numbers are Cameron and the Tories.

“Cameron’s last best hope of staying in government is to split the centre-left vote in Scotland. We are going to make sure people understand that and hear it.”

The SNP’s general election campaign director, Angus Robertson, welcomed the “excellent” results, but stressed that the party would be taking nothing for granted in the runup to May’s vote.

He said: “People can only make Scotland’s priorities Westminster’s priorities by voting SNP in May. While all the recent polls and our council byelection win in Gordon Brown’s seat indicate the potential SNP vote, they act as a spur to the entire party to work harder than ever before so that we can do better than ever before.”

Natalie McGarry, who has been selected by the SNP to stand against Labour’s Scottish secretary, Margaret Curran, in Glasgow East, where Ashcroft predicts a 25.5% swing to the nationalists, said: “The reason so many people in the East End of Glasgow feel disenfranchised is that Labour has taken them for granted for so many years.

“If you compare this to the referendum, where you had majorities for yes in places that had large Labour majorities, like Provan or Glasgow South West [another predicted SNP gain], obviously people want something different. Independence is not on the table of course, but people have expressed a desire for change and don’t think that the Labour party represents that change.”

McGarry suggests that the poor polling results for Labour in Glasgow reflects the way that the party disengaged from voters in in the city during the referendum campaign.

“It had taken a position that they decided was correct without consulting their members or voters. People in Glasgow had maintained their loyalty to Labour over many years, but that covenant to vote Labour and keep the Tories out has been broken. They used it very effectively in 2010, but a Tory government was elected anyway. People are wary now that Labour is a weak party in opposition.”

Scotland’s leading polling analyst and professor of politics at the university of Strathclyde, John Curtice, said: “What is striking is how even the movement is. The SNP vote is up by almost exactly the same across the piece, which suggests that the national polls are right.

“The nature of the political debate is different on the two sides of the border. I didn’t learn anything about why we are where we are that I didn’t know already. It simply demonstrates to people that, yes indeed, this is happening in every constituency. Hey guys, wake up and smell the coffee.”