Bombshell GB-wide Ashcroft poll is the first not to show Reform in an outright lead for the first time in almost a year - Greens are in joint lead for the first time ever - Labour are in FOURTH - and the SNP have overtaken Labour UK-wide in the seats projection

So this is a genuine landmark for the reasons given in the title, and it's also worth making the point that the data tables (unless I'm misinterpreting them, but I don't see how I can be) show that the Greens are actually in a slight overall lead over Reform and the Tories - but that seems to have been disguised by the rounding to the nearest whole number.

GB-wide voting intentions for next general election (Lord Ashcroft, 26th-30th March 2026)

Greens 21%

Reform UK 21%

Conservatives 21%

Labour 17%

Liberal Democrats 9%

SNP 3%

Plaid Cymru 1%

I know somebody listed Scottish subsample numbers on the previous thread, but I can't see any in the data tables with the "don't knows/will not votes" removed.  However, I've used what I presume was a rough recalculation to fine-tune a UK-wide seats projection, which shows: Reform UK 204, Conservatives 175, Greens 116, SNP 48, Liberal Democrats 47, Labour 33, Plaid Cymru 8, Others 19.

The target for an overall majority is 326, so it's not hard to see why a hung parliament is currently the strongly favoured outcome on the exchanges.  Nevertheless, under first-past-the-post not all that much movement is required to transform an absolute guddle into a clear majority, and by the same token not much movement would be required to turn a projection showing a right-wing parliament, as this one does, into one showing a centre-left parliament in which the SNP might just hold the balance of power.  Even if they don't hold the balance of power on their own, the huge strength of the Greens is a potential game-changer, because at the very least the English Greens are not opposed to independence.

On the exchanges, the Greens are currently estimated to have a 1 in 8 chance of winning most seats in the general election, but as the above numbers demonstrate, they might not actually need to win most seats to end up with influence.

An intriguing quirk is that the SNP are currently the fourth-largest party in the Commons (albeit only just, and they may soon be overtaken by Reform).  The projection from this poll shows they would still be in fourth place, but in a radically different way - they would have five times as many seats as now, they would re-overtake the Liberal Democrats, and they would overtake Labour for the first time.  Let's just reiterate that: the SNP would have more seats than Labour, UK-wide.

Ashcroft himself concedes that the reason his results might be different from other pollsters is that he has a completely different approach to the voting intention question - instead of directly asking people how they will vote, he asks them to rate their chances of voting for each party in turn.  As I understand it, any respondent who does not estimate a 50%+ probability of voting for at least one party is assumed to be an abstainer and excluded, and everyone else is assigned to the party they gave the highest probability to.  That method seems intuitively reasonable to me, but whether the results it produces will be more accurate, or less so, is anyone's guess at this stage.

For weeks after the Gorton & Denton by-election, YouGov were putting "footnotes" of sorts on their polls to give the impression that the Green advantage over Labour must just be a temporary effect caused by the by-election and would fade.  There is now some doubt over that, not just because of this Ashcroft poll, but also because last week's YouGov poll showed the Greens moving back ahead of Labour, after having slipped behind for one week.

In case you're wondering, the last GB-wide poll not to show an outright Reform lead was a Survation poll in late April/early May of last year.  That showed Labour and Reform tied on 26% apiece.

There is actually some relief for Starmer in the supplementary questions in the Ashcroft poll.  It's generally believed that head-to-head leadership polls are more predictive of election results several years in advance than headline voting intentions, and Starmer does have a clear 15-point lead over Farage.  However his lead over Badenoch is just three points, which amounts to a statistical tie - and Ashcroft doesn't even bother to ask whether respondents prefer Polanski to Starmer, which many will suspect is because he feared what the answer might be.  

There are a couple of results that I actually found quite surprising.  When asked whether nuclear power should be phased out, with wind power expanded and the net zero target brought forward a decade, respondents are almost split down the middle - 40% in favour, 45% against.  My guess is that Ashcroft asked it as a "shopping list" question in the hope that most respondents would find something on the list to object to, thus producing a result he'd be able to spin as clear and decisive support for nuclear power, but that didn't happen.

And on Europe, there are any number of people who will tell you that if you spell out in a poll question what returning to the EU would actually mean in practice, the pro-EU majority evaporates.  It looks to me like Ashcroft set out to prove that theory and spectacularly failed.  When asked whether they want to rejoin the customs union, restore freedom of movement and then rejoin the EU itself as soon as possible, 55% supported the idea and only 34% were opposed.  That's absolutely remarkable.

Ashcroft did manage to get a result which he can spin as showing massive opposition to scrapping the "nuclear deterrent", but as he lumped "and cut defence spending" into the question, the result is pretty meaningless.

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Loopy billionaire lord tries to convince us that funding the NHS with fair taxation is as impossible as enhancing the size of women's breasts with hypnotherapy

I cannot in all good conscience conclude my discussion of this poll without drawing your attention to the fact that Ashcroft has made a complete blithering idiot of himself with one particular part of his write-up - 

"Perhaps more controversially, nearly a third of voters said they felt less favourable towards Polanski when they heard that in his days as a hypnotherapist he once claimed he could increase the size of women’s breasts by hypnosis. Polanski claims to have apologised and put all this behind him, but in a different way he is arguably still at it. Just as there are those who want to change their body shape through the power of mind over matter, there will always be people eager to believe we can fund the NHS by taxing the rich"

Nice try, Mike, but you are believed to be worth £2 billion.  That alone would be enough to fund 1% of the entire annual budget of NHS England.  Quite plainly, taxing the rich could very easily fund the NHS - and the only use hypnotherapy would be on that front would be for those like you who don't want us to notice or believe a simple arithmetical fact.

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