Find Out Now! Find Out How? Find Out BLESS MY SACRED SOW! Farage on course for 10 Downing Street as apocalyptic poll gives Reform a huge double-digit lead

By any standards, this poll is a major landmark - Reform hadn't previously broken through the 30% threshold, but now they've absolutely smashed through it and reached 33%.

GB-wide voting intentions (Find Out Now, 7th May 2025):

Reform UK 33% (+4)

Labour 20% (-1)

Conservatives 16% (-3)

Liberal Democrats 15% (+2)

Greens 11% (-)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

20% returns Labour to their post-election low across all polling firms, but perhaps of greater significance this time is that 16% is a new post-election low for the Tories across all firms - and without trawling through the archives for the last century, I would guess it must be very close to their all-time low too.  The 3-point drop for the Tories is similar to the 4-point increase for Reform, so one possible interpretation is that the main impact of the local election results was to persuade a substantial chunk of the remaining Tory support to throw in their lot with Reform, who now have more than double the vote of the Tories.

There is of course a house effect at play here - Find Out Now have consistently been better for Reform and worse for Labour than most other pollsters.  So this poll shouldn't be taken to mean that other firms are likely to show Reform in the 30s or with double-digit leads.  But the broad direction of travel is consistent across all pollsters, and as in the recent YouGov poll, it looks like the Tories are now in severe danger of slipping into fourth place behind the Liberal Democrats.

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I'm aware that my devoted Somerset stalker had something of a prolonged 'emotional moment' about me last night (I'm touched, Stew!) and I'll hopefully find the time to respond in some detail later today.  But for now I just want to respond to one of my 'other' stalkers from the Stew Fan Club, the one and only Cath "Two Accounts" Ferguson, who seems more and more to be taking refuge in a world of sheer fantasy.

What on earth does this even mean?  Reform surging into second place in Holyrood polling, even if it turns out to be only temporary, is plainly a major story and I wouldn't be much of a polling blogger if I completely ignored it.  But I certainly haven't given any indication that it's a welcome development, because that's not what I believe.  What I do think, and I said this very recently, is that if the SNP leadership are determined to argue that a simple 50% + 1 majority is no longer enough to bring about independence and that we instead need some sort of overwhelming majority, then there's no point being squeamish about it - the only chance of that happening, in my view, is if some kind of major disruptive event occurs, and the only such event that realistically seems to be on the horizon is a Reform government that would pull Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights.

But Reform moving into second place in Holyrood doesn't particularly assist that process.  At best there are pros and cons, and one of the major cons is that Reform are gobbling up a small but non-trivial percentage of the pro-indy vote, which will make it harder to produce a 50%+ combined vote for pro-indy parties in any plebiscite-type election.  So on balance it would be more optimal from a strategic point of view if no Reform surge was occurring in Scotland.

Where Cath seems to have totally lost touch with reality is in this nutty idea she's punting that the choice before independence supporters on the Holyrood list ballot is between Reform and Alba (!) and that people like me are part of some sort of pro-Reform conspiracy that will prevent Alba becoming the main opposition party.  Newsflash, Cath: barring miracles, Alba are not going to win any list seats at all, let alone get within light-years of becoming the main opposition party.  The last two polls have had them on 2% or 3% of the list vote, which is well below what they would need to win even one seat.

And second newsflash: I'm now an SNP member once again, and like the vast majority of SNP members I intend to vote SNP on both the list and constituency ballots.  Why on earth would we vote Reform, a party opposed to pretty much everything we believe in (with the possible exception of proportional representation)?  Under the AMS voting system the list vote is the more important vote, so SNP members will vote SNP on the list, Green members will vote Green on the list, and those who are content to pointlessly throw their votes away will, I suppose, vote Alba on the list.  This isn't rocket science.

Oh, and as I've gently pointed out many, many times - if Alba actually wanted my support on the list, it might have been an idea not to expel me.  You know, just sayin'.