Oh dear. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar will have been hoping for some positive headlines this weekend, as his party’s 2025 conference looms next week – but it wasn’t to be. New Norstat polling for the Sunday Times, interviewing 1,026 people between 11-14 February, suggests Sarwar’s group is heading for its worst Holyrood election result since devolution. When it rains for the Labour lot, it pours…
After Sir Keir Starmer’s army won a landslide victory at the general election, some in the Scottish Labour group harboured high hopes for their chances in the 2026 Holyrood election. Yet the Norstat survey reveals less than a fifth of Scots intend to back the party next year – which would leave them with the same number of seats as the Scottish Tories are predicted to cling onto: just 18. Meanwhile the SNP would pick up 35 per cent of the constituency vote with Reform UK coming up the sidelines to scoop 14 per cent – splitting the unionist vote north of the border. The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, are set to pick up another nine seats to leave them with 13 MSPs. ‘Anas Sarwar’s hopes of becoming Scotland’s next first minister are, it seems, fading fast,’ proclaimed polling guru Professor John Curtice. You can say that again!
Support for independence sits at 50 per cent, and today’s poll predicts a pro-indy majority in the Scottish parliament in 2026. The Nats, it suggests, would take 55 seats while the Scottish Greens would take 10 – and a coalition between the pair would see a secessionist majority of one and the return of an SNP First Minister. Not that the last Bute House Agreement between the two separatist groups ended particularly well – its result being hapless Humza Yousaf forced out of the top job after just 13 months in power. Ouch.
Sarwar has taken a leaf out of Sir Keir’s book and promised Scots ‘change’ in the hope his party will oust the SNP from government next year. If the polls continue to worsen for Scottish Labour, however, the 2026 result may deliver a quite different change from that which Sarwar wants to see…
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