First subsample of election year has SNP comfortably back into second place

The detailed figures from YouGov's UK-wide poll in today's Sun have been released, and the Scottish breakdown tends to reinforce the suspicion that the previous subsample from a few days ago is likely to have been somewhat freakish. The SNP leapfrog both the Tories and the Liberal Democrats to return to second place, while Labour slump to a much more plausible 35% share of the vote. Here are the full figures -

Labour 35% (-11)
SNP 26% (+13)
Conservatives 17% (-4)
Liberal Democrats 15% (-2)
Others 7% (+4)

Eagle-eyed readers might have spotted that the figures I quoted last time round were slightly wrong - the Conservatives had been in outright second place on 21%, not joint second with the Liberal Democrats on 17% as I stated!

I'm not quite sure what these figures will do for any lingering fantasies of the SNP being "squashed" at the election, let alone the recurring fiction that it has in some way been demonstrated that Labour's vote is holding up dramatically better in Scotland than elsewhere. In this poll, they are four points down on their 2005 share in Scotland, and five points down in Great Britain as a whole. Such findings have not been untypical over the last few months.