Stonking Survation survey shows the Scottish Parliament on course for another PRO-INDEPENDENCE MAJORITY next year - and the fieldwork took place BEFORE Labour hammered society's most vulnerable

From memory, I'm pretty sure that the previous Survation poll in early January was the only Scottish poll from any firm over the last few months that didn't show pro-independence parties on course to retain their parliamentary majority next year, so it's extremely heartening that has now been rectified and that all pollsters are in agreement.

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot voting intentions (Survation / Quantum Communications, 6th-13th March 2025):

SNP 34% (-1)

Labour 23% (+1)

Reform UK 17% (+4)

Conservatives 12% (-2)

Liberal Democrats 8% (-)

Greens 4% (-2)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot voting intentions:

SNP 29% (-2)

Labour 20% (-1)

Reform UK 16% (+3)

Conservatives 13% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 9% (-1)

Greens 8% (-1)

Alba 3% (+1)

Seats projection: SNP 55, Labour 19, Conservatives 17, Reform UK 14, Liberal Democrats 13, Greens 10, Alba 1

SNP + GREENS: 65 SEATS

ALL OTHER PARTIES: 64 SEATS

SNP + GREEN MAJORITY OF 1 SEAT

PRO-INDEPENDENCE PARTIES: 66 SEATS

ANTI-INDEPENDENCE PARTIES: 63 SEATS

PRO-INDEPENDENCE MAJORITY OF 3 SEATS

You can guarantee that Alba HQ's resident young whippersnapper Robert Reid (who interestingly is never allowed to put his own name to any of his 'official' pronouncements) will be wound up like a clock to proclaim this poll as some sort of breakthrough.  As ever, don't shoot the messenger here, but there's no breakthrough at all, and 3% on the list is actually a poor showing for Alba that would be extremely unlikely to win them any seats.  The Diffley Partnership were commissioned to do the seats projection, and they must have some quirk in their model that awards one seat to Alba even on 3%, something that I'm almost certain wouldn't be the case if John Curtice was doing the projection.  

It's not totally inconceivable that could happen in the real world election, but it's very, very unlikely.  Small parties have picked up one seat on a low national vote share in the past, but that was because their vote was disproportionately concentrated in particular geographical areas - for example, Tommy Sheridan outperforming the SSP's national vote in Glasgow in 1999.  One of the reasons that Alba weren't even close to a list seat in 2021 is that their vote was pretty evenly spread across the country, and until that changes they'd need to be on 5% or 6% of the national vote to expect to make a seats breakthrough.  I'm wondering if the Diffley Partnership may have relied on Survation's regional breakdown to produce the Alba projection, and if so I think that's a questionable way of going about it, because the margin of error in any regional subsample is bound to be enormous.

A lot of the hype surrounding this poll is about Reform UK's showing, and actually that's fully justified, because no poll from any polling firm has produced numbers anything like this before.  Reform's 17% on the constituency vote is a full three points higher than their previous best of 14% (recorded by Norstat), while their 16% on the list vote also beats their former high watermark of 13% (recorded by both Norstat and Survation) by three points.  However, for as long as the SNP and Green vote holds up, Reform will look less like kingmakers and more like spoilers for the unionist side.