This week, we saw UKIP poll highly enough to suggest that they might win 7 seats at this May’s election. Luke Skipper looks at why we shouldn’t be surprised by this recent surge.
As we all wait to see what kind of deal David Cameron secures in Europe it is easy to forget that there will be major electoral contests in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and London before the EU referendum. The complex interplay between the overlapping campaigns will have an effect on how people cast their votes at the election in May and it is an issue worth exploring more.
There have been three polls in Scotland recently by three different pollsters that have all asked the EU referendum question. They all break down the ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ voters according to what party they voted for in a recent election. The polls were conducted by Ipsos MORI Scotland (1-7 Feb), YouGov (1-4 Feb), and TNS (6-25 Jan).
Starting with the headline figures the regular refrain about Scotland being more ‘pro-EU’ than other parts of the UK remains true. Excluding ‘don’t knows’ (DKs) there is between 66-70% support for ‘remain’. However the polls by Ipsos and TNS recorded a narrowing of the gap from their previous polls in November and September respectively.
Looking towards the election it is more interesting to see how those people will vote in the referendum with who they voted for at a recent election. For the SNP between 25-38% of those, (excluding DKs) would vote to leave. For Labour it is 22-29%, suggesting that SNP voters are slightly more Eurosceptic than Labour. For the Tories two of the three polls shows a dead heat between leave and remain and one with a majority for remain.
Put another way 1 in 4 voters for the SNP and Labour support leaving with half of Tories doing the same – yet none of those parties will campaign to leave. Which raises the question: what will those voters do in May? Of course they may do nothing and simply vote the way the way they did last time, or not cast their vote based on that issue at all and make a decision on other policies. The only party in Scotland that supports a vote to leave UKIP. Much was made of a recent poll by Survation for the Daily Record (11-16 Feb) which gave that party, excluding DKs 6% of the vote, tied with the Liberal Democrats. Using our handy seat predictor on this website it would give them 7 list seats. Of course one poll does not a trend make and Survation historically has shown higher levels of support for UKIP than other pollsters.
However as I pointed out recently there is precedent for an election happening close to a major referendum, and that was the European Parliament elections in May of 2014 ahead of the independence referendum. In that election UKIP surprised many and doubled their vote percentage from the previous European Parliament election to 10% securing their first ever MEP in Scotland. Is it that inconceivable that given the huge focus on the EU question and the coverage they will get as a result, that they will as the only party holding that view, take some votes from others? In some commentating and political elite circles the casual dismissal of the Eurosceptic case in Scotland might seem familiar to those who hold what was once a fringe view on the constitutional question.
In the next few months the political space will be extremely crowded for all parties and it is difficult to say what defining narrative will emerge. To quote Donald Rumsfeld there are lots of “unknown unknowns”. Of course we need reams more polling to draw any meaningful conclusions and we will get it soon enough. We will do our best to analyse it for you so please do watch this space.
