SNP and Plaid Cymru overtake the Liberal Democrats across Britain in dizzying new Ipsos-Mori poll

The Evening Standard have revealed that their new Britain-wide Ipsos-Mori poll puts the SNP and Plaid Cymru ahead of the Liberal Democrats for the first time ever.  I haven't been able to track down the full set of figures yet, but the Lib Dems are on 6%, and the SNP/Plaid are said to be just slightly ahead - so that implies 7%, or perhaps 6% with the Lib Dems behind on the unrounded numbers.

UPDATE : And it's the better of those two possibilities - the combined vote share for the SNP and Plaid is 6.7%, which is rounded up to 7%.  Even the SNP on their own are on 5.8%, which is rounded up to 6%.  Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats have slumped to just 6.3% (rounded down to 6%), in spite of their GB-wide status.

Here are the full figures...

Britain-wide voting intentions (Ipsos-Mori, 8th-10th February) :

Labour 36% (+2)
Conservatives 34% (+1)
UKIP 9% (-2)
SNP/Plaid Cymru 7% (+3)
Greens 7% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 6% (-2)

You might be wondering if the SNP must have roughly two-thirds of the vote in the Scottish subsample, given that Scotland makes up less than 9% of the GB population.  Not quite - they're actually on 56% in the subsample.  The reason for the apparent contradiction is that Ipsos-Mori's headline figures are filtered by certainty to vote, meaning that it's possible for respondents in Scotland to make up a disproportionate share of the overall sample.  Having said that, even among all respondents who named a party, the SNP are on 5.2% of the Britain-wide vote, and the SNP and Plaid in combination are on 6.0%.

It wasn't all that long ago that the conventional wisdom about UKIP was that their support came primarily from "Tories on holiday" who would melt away and return to the Cammo fold when the general election came into view.  At some point our perception flipped and we started thinking of UKIP as an entrenched electoral force that seemed to be heading for third place in the general election popular vote.  This poll calls that revised view into question.  OK, it's probably a bit freakish that UKIP have fallen to single figures, and Ipsos-Mori's methodology is likely to have had a hand in that.  But the general trajectory for the party has not been upwards of late.  Given that the Liberal Democrats are likely to make a modest recovery from their present dire state, it's starting to look perfectly possible that UKIP will not be able to hold on for third place in the popular vote.  It's also getting harder to see how they can hope to win more than a tiny handful of seats, which would leave them well behind both the SNP and the Lib Dems.  The only factor that might yet change things is Farage's participation in the TV debates (if they go ahead), but he would have to play an absolute blinder.

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SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Today's update of the Poll of Polls is based on seven Scottish subsamples from GB-wide polls - four from YouGov, one from Populus, one from Ashcroft and one from Ipsos-Mori.

Scottish voting intentions for the May 2015 UK general election :

SNP 44.6% (+2.4)
Labour 27.0% (+1.0)
Conservatives 17.7% (-1.5)
Greens 3.4% (+0.4)
Liberal Democrats 3.4% (-2.1)
UKIP 3.0% (n/c)

(The Poll of Polls uses the Scottish subsamples from all GB-wide polls that have been conducted entirely within the last seven days and for which datasets have been provided, and also all full-scale Scottish polls that have been conducted at least partly within the last seven days. Full-scale polls are given ten times the weighting of subsamples.)