Difficult as it is to see beyond the fog of AV hype down south, in Scotland, the 5 May election just got far more interesting.
As Joe Pike reported for Total Politics earlier this month, until very recently Scottish Labour’s low profile leader Iain Gray looked set to lead his party into a minority administration or even a coalition in Holyrood.
However, the latest YouGov/Scotland on Sunday poll suggests that the SNP have surged ahead of Labour. They are now on course to win six seats more than their rivals. Gray struggles to be recognised alongside Salmond – as Joe notes in his piece, in a recent survey “only 20 per cent of 500 people surveyed recognised him when shown a photograph”. Even more worryingly for Gray, when asking who would be the best first minister, YouGov reports that 52% of respondents went for Salmond, opposed to 27% for Gray.
For a leader who pledged to fight this election on “politics not personality”, this is bad news. It would seem that as the poll gets closer, Scotland’s voters are swinging in favour of the personality they know – Salmond – in favour of Gray’s politics.
What’s so interesting about this poll, though, is what it reveals about the coalition’s electoral fortunes. The Tories lag behind in Scotland anyway, but it would seem that they aren’t experiencing much of a fallout from their leadership of the Westminster coalition. The Lib Dems, however, could even be facing “long-term oblivion” as Martin Kettle puts it. Tavish Scott is doing his best to disassociate the Scottish Lib Dems from their Westminster colleagues, but this polling and the drop in support they’ve experienced since the 2007 elections seems to indicate he hasn’t had much success so far.
It’s not all good news for Salmond, though. His party might at the moment look like they might sneak back into minority government, but their problems forming a coalition won’t have gone away. Also, one of the major criticisms levelled at the SNP is that they rely too heavily on the public profile of their leader. Just last month Salmond told Total Politics that he felt they had moved beyond this, and were now definitely an “orchestra” rather than a “one-man-band”. But this YouGov poll seems to indicate that they are very much still perceived as Salmond’s backing singers.
Read Joe Pike’s feature on the state of play at Holyrood, including interviews with all four party leaders, here.
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