Lord Ashcroft survey shows that swing against Labour in Scotland is as high as 25% and the party has minority support across almost all age groups

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Make no mistake, Labour’s crisis in Scotland is profound. That’s the inescapable conclusion of Lord Ashcroft’s 14 constituency polls that show the party losing all but one of the Labour-held seats surveyed.

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The swing from Labour to the Scottish National party (SNP) is above 20% in all 14 of those seats – the average is 25% – the kind of shift that is arguably seen only once in a generation.

That is not all. More troubling for Labour is the fact that among all voters under 44, support for the SNP is nearly double that of Labour. The SNP leads across all age groups, except among those aged 65 and above.

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To make matters even worse for Ed Miliband’s party, the seats polled by Ashcroft are among the ones Labour won with the highest margins five years ago – and the swing in these is even greater than the one implied in Scotland-wide polls.

On the Guardian’s modelling, based on current polls, the SNP would win 54 out of the 59 seats in Scotland. The Lib Dems would retain one, Orkney and Shetland, and Labour four.



But, curiously, when you look at the impact of these polls on the most recent projection, the most likely next government remains unchanged. Some sort of Labour-SNP alliance is still the most probable starting point of any feasible government because the Conservatives remain far short of an overall majority, where 326 seats are needed. The current arithmetic also means that feasible Tory options fall some way short of the required numbers.

Coincidentally, the single most popular general election outcome in the seats polled by Ashcroft was a coalition involving Labour and the SNP – a result favoured by 39% of all voters, including 62% of SNP supporters and 79% of Labour-SNP switchers.

There are also two important factors here that make the Scotland contest so different from the rest of the country.



Firstly, Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, is the only genuinely popular party leader in the UK. Other polls show 69% of Scottish voters are satisfied with the first minister. Even 39% of Labour voters in Scotland think she is doing a good job at Bute House.

These levels of cross-party support are reminiscent of Angela Merkel’s popularity during the 2013 election campaign where polls showed one in four Social Democratic party (SPD) supporters preferred the CDU leader as chancellor to their own candidate, Peer Steinbrück.

There are other European parallels worth noting. Several centre-left parties in Europe have seen their support fall in their traditional heartlands. No other party better reflects this trend than Greece’s Pasok. In elections held since the 1980s, the Greek socialist party consistently won between 40% and 45% of the vote. This dropped to 13% in 2012’s two votes. Then in the election just won by Syriza, Pasok fell to just short of 5%.

The second key factor that makes the election in Scotland unique is Labour’s unpopularity north of the border. Consider this: in the 14 Labour-held seats surveyed by Ashcroft, fewer people would like to see Miliband become PM than David Cameron. An Ipsos Mori poll released earlier this year also found the Labour leader was less popular in Scotland than Cameron: just 27% said they were satisfied with the prime minister, but even less (21%) were happy with Miliband.

The similarities between Pasok and Scottish Labour are less about the direct implications of any specific policy decision than the story of what happens when the traditional base of a party – often after decades of no-questions-asked loyalty – feels left behind. Once the trust that binds electorate and representatives is lost, it is not easy to recoup.

Like in Greece, it is very difficult to understand where the SNP’s and Syriza’s popularity begins, and where the unpopularity of PASOK and Labour end.

But what is clear in Scotland is that on the nationalist side the vote appears more united, while on the pro-union side it is both divided and fragmented. In the YouGov poll released earlier this week, just 15% of all Scots, and only one in two among Labour voters, said Miliband’s party could best use its influence to secure more powers for Scotland.

What Ashcroft’s poll has confirmed is that there is a wave sweeping Scottish Labour. The challenge for the party is that because the damage is not restricted to a limited number of constituencies, but is evenly and widely distributed across Scotland, Labour needs to reverse this tide. Given the party’s current unpopularity in Scotland, and the clear alternative articulated by the SNP, this seems like an improbable and gargantuan task with just three months to polling day.





