Darkness descends upon dejected Labour as new YouGov data shows 13% of their Scottish voters from the 2019 general election have defected to the SNP

There's been intense excitement among Scotland's neutral, objective, Labour-supporting mainstream media over the last few days as they've pushed the wholly bogus narrative that the boost in Labour support in Scottish polls means there must somehow have been a bandwagon of SNP voters moving across to Labour.  That bubble has been burst by the more sensible (and honest) commentators who have suggested that Labour are in fact only benefiting from an intra-unionist swing from the Tories, with the SNP remaining untouched.  The latter explanation is certainly a lot closer to the truth, although of course it's a slight over-simplification, because there has in fact been some movement between SNP and Labour - it's just that the movement has been in both directions, and is in any case dwarfed by the big swing from Tory to Labour.

The data tables from YouGov's recent full-scale Scottish poll are now out, and show that the Tories have retained an extraordinarily low 52% of their voters from the election in 2019 (when they lost half their Scottish seats, let's not forget).  A whopping 30% have gone direct to Labour, and only 3% to the SNP.  So that more or less explains why Labour's support has gone up significantly while the SNP's support has not come down.  The pattern shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, because SNP and Tory support is now very polarised along constitutional lines, which makes large amounts of direct switching between the two parties very unlikely.  Before the indyref in 2014, there used to be quite a bit of movement between SNP and Tory in places like the north-east, because people didn't necessarily feel they were voting for independence by voting SNP and didn't necessarily feel they were voting against independence by voting Tory.  But those days are long gone - present-day Tory voters are usually committed unionists who loathe the SNP, and if there's a sudden loss of confidence in a Tory government, those voters will be looking for a strictly unionist alternative.  For now (ie. in the absence of a Lib Dem recovery), that can only mean Labour.

That said, Labour have also succeeded in picking up 13% of people who voted SNP in 2019 - but that's been partly offset by the SNP picking up exactly the same percentage of people who voted Labour in 2019.  Furthermore, the SNP have retained a bigger percentage of their 2019 support (84%) than Labour have (79%).  It may be that ex-Tory voters are actually more enthusiastic about Keir Starmer than people who voted for Corbyn in 2019. I would guess quite a few of those Labour-to-SNP switchers are people who felt three years ago that a vote for Corbyn was actually a more radical option than a vote for the SNP or independence - but who now aren't remotely interested in voting for "centrist dad" Sir Keir or immigrant-bashing Rachel Reeves.

It shouldn't go unremarked, incidentally, that Nicola Sturgeon has better approval ratings in this poll than the three unionist opposition leaders at Holyrood.  She has a net positive rating of +11, which compares favourably to the much vaunted (by that neutral media of ours) Anas Sarwar who is only on +6.  The preposterous Alex Cole-Hamilton is in negative territory on -8, which would almost certainly be even worse if it wasn't for the fact that an embarrassing 62% of voters either don't have a scooby who he is or don't know enough about him to venture an opinion.  "Fast bowling" has failed, bring back Willie Rennie's "Calypso Cricket".  Douglas Ross, meanwhile, is languishing on an abysmal -39, with his only consolation being that he's outpolling his London overlord Liz Truss, who is on (wait for it) -70.

The vote to elect members of the National Executive Committee will take place during Alba's annual conference, to be held in Stirling on 15th-16th October.  If you're an Alba member, I believe it's still possible to purchase a conference pass HERE, and if you're not yet an Alba member, you can join the party HERE.