Starmer’s Scottish chickens are coming home to roost

A Scottish opinion poll published following the announcement of the Scottish budget appears to show that in a sharp rebuke to Keir Starmer and the neo-Blairites who have captured the Labour party, Holyrood is set to have a pro-independence majority following the next Scottish elections, and support for independence is at 54%, its highest level for four years. This finding is particularly significant as What Scotland thinks/Norstat is not typically a ‘yes-friendly’ polling company and this result may herald a real breakthrough for Yes after a long period of stasis, doubtless because Scotland is not at all enamoured with Keir Starmer and his false promise of change. The only alternative to Starmer in a UK context is the deeply unappealing prospect of a Tory party that moves ever further to the right or the hideous prospect of Farage and Reform. The 54% finding for yes could have been even higher if the polling company had not continued the absurd practice of weighting its sample according to the outcome of 2014’s independence referendum. While this made sense in the months after that historic vote, a decade out it has the effect of artificially boosting No respondents. No voters in 2014 – as now – were disproportionately older. Over ten years on, half a million predominantly No voters have passed away leaving the electoral roll and a similar amount of predominantly Yes have joined it. Almost 13% of the total electorate has changed. Polling companies which weight according to the results of the 2014 referendum ignore that change.

The news comes the day after the SNP announced the launch of a new Scottish independence grassroots campaign in a bid to unite a movement which has grown increasingly fractured and obsessed with in-fighting in recent years.

The poll, carried out by Norstat on behalf of the Sunday Times showed that support for the SNP has increased by four points to 37 per cent for constituency votes and is up by three points to 32 per cent on the regional list since the last poll in August. Also in the constituency vote, Labour is down 2% on 21%, the Conservatives are down 1% on 14%, while Reform UK is up 1% on 14%. The Lib Dems and the Greens are unchanged on 10% and 5% respectively.

In the regional list ballot, the polling is dire for Labour, with a drop of 4% to 18%, the Tories are up 2% on 16% while the far right in the shape of the Nigel Farage fan club is on 12%, The Lib Dems are on 10%, the Greens on 8% and Alba is up 2% on 5%.

If the results of this poll were replicated at the election it would produce a Scottish Parliament with 59 SNP MSPs, 7 Green, 20 Labour, 19 Tories, 13 Reform and 11 Lib Dem. That means a pro independence SNP and Green majority of 3 seats, 66 as opposed to the combined anti-independence total of 63.

Of course the usual caveats apply, this is only one poll, and we are still 18 months away from the next scheduled Scottish elections, a lot could change in the intervening months.

But for once we have some good news to celebrate. Reports of the demise of the SNP have been exaggerated. Before the Westminster general election I said that Keir Starmer would become unpopular very quickly but no one could have realised just how quickly and how unpopular he and his government would become. Like most people I had expected he’d enjoy a honeymoon period of at least a few months, but Starmer squandered that political capital within weeks of taking office, first with the appalling decision to keep the Tories’ hideous two child cap on benefits, which was quickly followed by axing the universal winter fuel payment for pensioners and the freebies scandal which revealed Starmer to be as shamelessly grasping and avaricious as the Tories he had ousted. Starmer lied his way into the leadership of the Labour party, and he lied his way into Downing Street. But Starmer’s shtick was only ever going to be successful in opposition, in power there is nowhere to hide and his lies are quickly being found out, this time there are political consequences.

One reason that the decision to axe the universal winter fuel payment for pensioners has been so politically damaging for Labour is that the party had made a big and bold claim during the election campaign just a few weeks previously that it would reduce energy bills, The claim that Labour would reduce fuel bills by £300 featured in every Labour party election broadcast and leaflet, yet upon winning office one of the party’s very first actions was to increase energy bills for a vulnerable demographic, over and above the other increases in energy bills being felt by the rest of the population, and moreover at a time when there is most need for heating. It was a decision born out of hubris and arrogance, an attempt to pander to Labour’s corporate donors and to pose as being ‘tough’. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and Starmer and his government are predictably plummeting in popularity.

In England the beneficiaries are the Conservatives and the even more shamelessly lying English nationalist populists of Reform UK, who blame all the problems of the UK, not on the wealthy who don’t want to pay tax or on decades of Conservative austerity, not on the economic and political vandalism of Brexit, but on that brown guy working as a street sweeper and on immigrants having the audacity to speak their own language on the bus.

A UK wide opinion poll published earlier in the week put Labour in third place behind the Tories and Nigel Farage’s English populist fascists. Between now and the next Westminster general election the rise of the far right, enabled and normalised by the British media, will drag the Tories even further to the right than they already are. This rightwards shift in politics is driven by a very well funded ecosystem of far right media funded by the likes of Elon Musk and other billionaire oligarchs who seek to make bogeyman out of the so called ‘liberal elite’ in order to distract attention from the really damaging and dangerous elite – the broligarchy of which they form the backbone. There is a very real prospect that the next general election will result in the nightmare of Nigel Farage gurning and grifting his way into number 10, supported by a Tory party which has been thoroughly parasitised by the populist English nationalist far right.

The choice for Scotland is increasingly clear and stark. Independence or being trapped in an overtly English nationalist state under a far right government with decidedly authoritarian instincts. The way to see off the threat of the far right is to tax the billionaires and the big corporations whose wealth – and greed – has increased massively in the era of austerity, and then to spend the billions raised in taxes on improving public services and lifting households out of poverty. Scotland can only do that if it has a government which has the tax raising powers to do so, and for that we need independence. Starmer’s willingness to throw pensioners and children in poor families under the bus in order to protect corporate greed shows that Labour isn’t going to do it.

This weekend’s opinion poll suggests that more people in Scotland are coming to that realisation too, despite all the efforts of BBC Scotland to protect the Labour party.

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