Exclusive: Poll suggests Scottish Labour will lose 29 of the 41 seats Gordon Brown won in 2010, with Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP still way out in front

Labour is on the cusp of losing control of Scotland, according to a Guardian/ICM poll, which suggests that three months of Jim Murphy’s leadership has failed to dent the Scottish National party’s support .

Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP is way out in front on 43%, exactly the same level of support it enjoyed in ICM’s last Scottish poll for the Guardian in December.

Election 2015: Afzal Amin says he was victim of 'year-long sting' – live Read more

Meanwhile, Scottish Labour languishes 16 points behind on 27%, an advance of only one point since Christmas and the arrival of their new leader. The Liberal Democrats are on an unchanged 6%, while the Scottish Conservatives inch up one to 14%.

On a uniform swing since the last general election, the ICM figures would see the SNP leap from its current six MPs to take 43 of Scotland’s 59 seats.

Labour would surrender 29 of the 41 Scottish seats that Gordon Brown won in a strong 2010 performance, being reduced to a rump of just 12 MPs – a performance that makes it virtually impossible to walk into No 10 without the support of the SNP.

On Sunday, Alex Salmond, the former SNP leader, said he would only be prepared to support Labour on a “vote by vote” arrangement.

The Tories would keep their one current seat, and the crop of Scottish Lib Dem MPs would shrink from 11 to three, with casualties including the chief secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander.

Of the other parties, the Scottish Greens drop one, to 3%, reflecting a national softness in the Green vote. Ukip stands still on 7%, about half the level of support it enjoys nationally.

The data also shows that Ed Miliband is more unpopular than David Cameron in Scotland. The prime minister’s net personal rating is -33, while the Labour leader’s is -39.

Further analysis for the Guardian suggests that the dire headline figures could be an underestimate of the catastrophe confronting Scottish Labour.

ICM used postcodes to place its 1,002 respondents into individual seats, which were then lumped into four categories – including “Labour heartland” (where the 2010 lead over the SNP exceeded 25 points) and “more marginal Labour”.

Prof John Curtice, of Strathclyde University, Scotland’s pre-eminent psephologist, calculated the post-2010 swing in each class of constituency, and concluded that Scottish Labour could be wiped out in all but two seats.



On Curtice’s alternative projection, which takes into account the SNP’s disproportionate surge in Labour’s heartlands, the SNP would snatch 53 of Scotland’s 59 seats.

The three other parties would split the remaining six equally – with two seats apiece. The extraordinary implication is that Scottish Labour would be left with no more representation than the Scottish Tories, who have been semi-extinct at Westminster since 1997.

Curtice cautions that the numbers are only rough estimates, since the polling sub-samples in some of the classes of seat are relatively small. But, after undertaking similar analysis of the last Guardian Scottish poll in December, which likewise suggested Scottish Labour would be reduced to three seats, and also studying Lord Ashcroft’s polls of individual constituencies, he sees increasing evidence that the uniform swing assumption could be “conservative”.

He said: “There is nothing in these patterns to suggest that the rise of the SNP is not extending to supposedly safe Labour heartlands – if anything, the opposite is the case”.

Many of the old socialist bastions are in and around Glasgow, a city that voted for independence last year, buoying the Nationalists there.

Monday’s poll suggests that the SNP have advanced 31 percentage points in heartland Labour seats, compared with 16 points in more marginal areas. This arithmetic is devastating, because it implies that the SNP will have smaller swings where these are sufficient to win, but could also secure much more dramatic shifts where required, leaving Labour without any safe refuge.

On the Curtice projections, Labour would in fact lose all but one – Glasgow North East – of its existing seats. The other seat it would win, East Dumbartonshire, would be picked up from the Liberal Democrat Jo Swinson as a result of her party’s collapse.

Local factors and personal votes could ride to the rescue of some Labour MPs, and the SNP could still undershoot much more widely if many of those Scots – 66% in Monday’s poll – who now insist that they are certain to turn out fail to do so on the day.

But when it comes to resetting the post-referendum debate, time is running out for Labour. After the tumultuous movement in Scotland’s politics last year, Curtice’s rolling poll of polls has since been displaying what he describes as “a series of horizontal lines”.

The politics of personality are also holding back Labour. While Sturgeon retains a net positive rating – that’s the difference between the proportion who say she will be good for Scotland, and bad for Scotland – of +21. Murphy, who had also enjoyed a positive personal score just after his election in December, has now slid back to a modestly negative -2. By contrast, former first minister Alex Salmond, the SNP’s high-profile candidate for Gordon in May, is on +12.

ICM Unlimited interviewed an online sample of 1,002 Scottish adults aged 18 and over between 13 and 19 March. Interviews were conducted across Scotland and the results have been weighted to all Scottish adults. They have also been weighted to respondents’ recall of the 2011 Holyrood election and to the independence referendum results. ICM is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.