One subsample to rule them all, and in the brightness grind them

As you probably saw in the comments section of the previous post, yesterday was a red-letter day for the SNP in the latest GB-wide YouGov poll.  They hit 4% of the GB vote, which hardly ever happens, and were above 40% in the Scottish subsample.

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 15th-16th June 2025):

Reform UK 27% (-2)

Labour 24% (+1)

Conservatives 17% (-)

Liberal Democrats 15% (-)

Greens 10% (-)

SNP 4% (+1)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 41%, Labour 23%, Reform UK 13%, Liberal Democrats 10%, Conservatives 7%, Greens 5%

Although YouGov are unusual in structuring and weighting their Scottish subsamples correctly, the margin of error in any subsample results is still enormous due to the small sample size.  So the SNP are unlikely to really be in the 40s, but this is the second post-Hamilton YouGov subsample in a row to have them with a big lead over Labour, which makes it more likely that they've effectively got away with their defeat in the by-election.  The only real danger of that setback was that it might produce a snowball effect threatening the SNP's national lead, and if that hasn't happened, we may end up looking back on the by-election as a noisy irrelevance.

The Britain-wide figures are consistent with the recent pattern of the gap between Reform and Labour narrowing.  I'd put that down to a combination of Reform's breakthrough in the local elections gradually fading from memory, and Labour winning back a small percentage of lost voters with the U-turn on winter fuel allowance.  Morgan McSweeney may even think this means his masterplan for winning the next general election for Labour is gradually coming together, but I am very sceptical that Labour will be able to win the election if they merely recover to the high 20s or low 30s.  There's always the potential for the right-wing vote to coalesce behind (probably) Reform to defeat Starmer.

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It's trite to point out that Somerset's controversial "Stew" blogger often directly contradicts himself, but nevertheless it's startling to see him being brazen enough to do it in back-to-back blogposts.  In his last-but-one post, he blasted John Swinney and Kate Forbes for taking part in the "Scotland 2050" conference because this supposedly implied Scotland would still be part of the UK in 2050.  But when it became clear that Swinney would in fact be using his speech at the conference to say that he envisaged Scotland being independent well before 2050, Stew wrote another post expressing his outrage about that, because it's supposedly 'carrots'.

Whatever anyone may think of John Swinney and his excessive caution, it's fair to say that, as far as his participation in the conference was concerned, he simply couldn't win with Oor Stew.  Anticipating that Scotland will be independent is bad, anticipating that Scotland will not be independent is bad.  Maybe Swinney was supposed to channel his inner Peter A Bell and declare UDI on the podium.  

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