The King in the North and tracking Holyrood and Senedd Polls

“If you consider yourself a unionist, you should be very concerned that we are getting to a point where 3 out of the 4 of the countries within it have large numbers of voters that don’t want the UK to exist.”
Will Hayward

As the Andy Burnham debacle unfolds this weekend (Burnham was blocked from standing in the Gorton and Denton byelection, the NEC group voting 8-1 against him) we kick off our coverage of the Holyrood elections.

The internal feuding within Labour provides a turbulent backdrop to the elections. As Brian Leishman, MP for Alloa & Grangemouth has put it:

“The party have decided that they are willing to lose the Gorton and Denton by-election because of their own weakness and insecurity. To block Andy Burnham is a disgraceful decision that is as undemocratic as it is cowardly.”

The sad tale reveals a lot about Labour’s problems, north and south of the border. The Burnham leadership feud shows the extent of democracy within a broken Labour party, but it also shows two other things. First, it reveals the shallowness of Labour’s political thinking, which assumes that their problems are essentially about individuals and personalities, rather than politics. But second, it shows complete disregard for their Scottish colleagues who are now in the middle of an election. This disregard is odd because a terrible defeat for Labour at Holyrood (and at the Welsh Senedd) will be a major blow for Starmer’s beleaguered government.

This is the first Scotland poll tracker of the year. The SNP are just one short of a majority. As Mark McGeoghegan states, this gives a “Pro-independence majority of 21. Worst ever Labour & Con results. Best ever Green result.” The projected seats (compared to 2021) are as follows:

Seats (+/- 2021): SNP: 64 (-) Ref: 16 (+16) Lab: 18 (-4) Grn: 11 (+3) Con: 10 (-21) LD: 10 (+6) Alba: 0 (-)

The polling is consistent with recent trends.

A result like this would mean an extinction event for the Scottish Tories, and a huge boost for the Scottish Greens, possibly benefiting from the high-profile insurgency of the party in England and Wales under Zack Polanski. Whether that is deserved or not is a different matter, but it’s likely nevertheless. This pattern of UK politics influencing Scottish politics is seen across the parties, with the rise of Reform UK being the most obvious, despite Scotland having fundamentally different ‘needs’ on immigration, and despite the party having no Scottish policies whatsoever. But if Reform have emerged on the back of Farage’s wrap-around UK media coverage, Scottish Labour have the negative effect of this phenomenon. Anas Sarwar can’t and won’t distance himself from his London leader, and while Starmer is dragging Sarwar down with him, a big defeat in May will also be disastrous for Starmer.

Defeat in May will be a bitter blow for Scottish Labour, particularly after the party having spent a huge warchest on the campaign, flooding social media and You Tube with party broadcasts.

Some have noticed how desperate the Scottish Labour campaign has become with Sarwar attempting to mimic the success of Zohran Mamdani in New York. This, as Coll McCail has pointed out (Scottish Labour is a party stuck in long-term decline ), has only gone to show the paucity of the SLAB offering. With neither the charisma, policies or groundforce of supporters, Sarwar’s attempt to copy Mamdani has just made him look ridiculous and desperate.

What about Wales?

The pattern of Labour crisis and resurgent nationalist parties and Greens, is mirrored in Wales.  Recent polling puts Plaid well ahead of Reform and, if correct, would allow Plaid Cymru to form a majority coalition without Labour.

As Will Hayward has written (Wake up, Westminster: after May, the Scottish and Welsh parliaments will likely be for independence):

“If you were the leader of a democracy, you would hope that the people you govern would, at the very least, want the state itself to exist. It shouldn’t be too much to ask. And yet, if the polls are to be believed, the United Kingdom is in a very interesting position. By the end of May, it is likely that the largest party in three of the four constituent countries of the UK will want the larger polity in which they operate to break apart.”

“The SNP is currently the overwhelming favourite to have the most seats in the Scottish parliament in the upcoming elections. In Wales, there was polling last week suggesting that the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru was on course to be the largest party inside the Welsh Senedd, just four seats short of a majority. Even more astonishing is that the Welsh Green party was also predicted to get 11 of the 96 seats. This would mean that there would be a majority of parties inside the Welsh parliament whose official policy was for Welsh independence. In Northern Ireland, the party with the most seats at present is Sinn Féin.”

That much of this is going on below radar from the UK Labour party which is more obsessed with internal feuding than supporting their faltering colleagues in Scotland and Wales, tells you all you need to know about the blinkered political culture of Unionist parties.

If Plaid and the SNP are seen to be a bulwark against the rise of Reform they will continue to attract support from voters desperate to stop Farage’s party getting a foothold in either parliament. The rise and rise of the Green Party under Polanski offers an obvious option for left-voters turned off the failed Starmer project. None of this detracts from the fact that the SNP and Scottish Green Party, and Plaid and the Greens have huge questions to answer and difficulties to navigate in the coming months.