Well, THAT was a short honeymoon, Sir Keir! Less than one month after taking office, Starmer has negative approval ratings - including in Scotland

As far as I can see, we've still only had one proper voting intentions poll since the general election - which must mean that polling companies and their clients are deliberately avoiding them, because several other political polls have been conducted.  The latest one is from YouGov and has personal ratings for a number of leading politicians. They make startlingly poor reading for the new Prime Minister.

Keir Starmer:

Favourable 40% (-4)

Unfavourable 49% (+5)

With the usual caveats about the limitations of small subsamples, the Scottish figures for Starmer are Favourable 46%, Unfavourable 48%, so he's in net negative territory here too.  I suspect the SNP will be mildly encouraged by this, because by far the biggest danger for them in the run-up to the 2026 Holyrood election would be an extended honeymoon for Labour.  It looks tentatively as if that risk has been lessened by Starmer's key mis-steps in his first month in power - particularly the retention of the two-child cap, the heavy-handed treatment of Labour rebels on the cap, and the scrapping of winter fuel payments for pensioners.  Notably, the front-woman for the new austerity, Rachel Reeves, has seen a similar much-deserved knock in her popularity and now has a net rating of minus 11.  Angela Rayner, Yvette Cooper and David Lammy have also dropped back but by a lesser amount.

An anonymous SNP "official" was quoted a few days ago in a Politico article saying: "The SNP want to send a message to Westminster, we want to send a government’ is one of the best [Scottish Labour] attack lines I’ve ever heard."  You'd kind of have to wonder if this person is in their early 20s, because that attack line is far from new - the exact words may be, but Labour have been using variants of that line against the SNP in general elections for as long as I can remember. It was highly effective in both 1992 and 1997, for example.  It should always have been obvious - and many of us pointed this out well before the election - that the SNP cannot compete with Labour in a UK-wide election by talking solely about bread and butter issues, because Labour can form a government and the SNP can't.  They can only trump Labour by pointing out that independence is a much bigger and better change than a transient Labour government, and that while Labour can only offer five years of the Tories out of office, independence can keep the Tories out for good.

To be fair, Nicola Sturgeon got that, and the real authors of the election setback were the "ditch the de facto" plotters like Stewart McDonald and Humza Yousaf himself.  Hopefully they've learned the lesson the hard way, and the SNP will never again go into a UK general election without foregrounding their unique selling point of independence.

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Could elections in the UK be RIGGED as they are in VENEZUELA? Here's John Curtice on how it could happen!

Being an unreconstructed leftie, I would have felt a pang of regret if Venezuela had ceased to be a socialist country, but there's no point pretending that the result of the presidential election yesterday was anything other than fraudulent - the evidence is overwhelming.  Of course if anyone suggests that an election in the UK may be rigged, they're always dismissed as a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist, and indeed I had little time for the suggestions that the indyref was stolen, because there was simply no evidence at all to support that. Nevertheless, this might be an appropriate moment to draw your attention to an extraordinary observation made by Professor John Curtice a few weeks ago.  To be clear, he's not suggesting UK elections have been rigged, he's just identifying how the system is theoretically wide open to abuse - 

"In most countries, before anyone would dare let a ballot box leave the polling station, they would want the votes to be counted.  Because the moment it leaves the polling station, who knows what might happen to it on the way to its supposed destination?  Maybe it won't make it, maybe it will get stuffed, etc, etc, right?  So for most countries that is a crucial part.  In our case we go 'Oh it's fine.  We'll put a ballot box in a boat between Eday and the mainland on Orkney in the middle of winter and it's absolutely fine, you know, we'll have a little police car on it to make sure everything is OK', and we expect all these ballot papers to happily arrive unstuffed, safe arrival, right?"

Everyone knows the Tories introduced photo ID in the hope that supporters of other parties would be prevented from voting, but their nominal excuse was that they were trying to stop electoral fraud.  Perhaps it's time to call that bluff and start demanding that votes should be counted in polling stations, which would be a more important safeguard.  However, an even bigger weakness in our system is postal voting on demand, and if fraud does occur on any sort of significant scale, that would almost certainly be the place to look for it.  There's probably a grey area where people are actually filling in their own ballot paper, but without any secrecy and under tremendous pressure to vote in a particular way from someone watching over them as they do it - perhaps a family member or a party activist.

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