Holyrood election is ‘loveless’, says pollster

The Holyrood election in May has been described as “loveless” by a leading pollster.  

Speaking during a pundits' panel at the Holyrood Connections event in Edinburgh on Tuesday, Mark Diffley told the audience the SNP was on track to return a similar number of MSPs as it did five years ago despite losing one in four of its voters. 

With Anas Sarwar urging voters to “hold your nose” and vote for Scottish Labour, the SNP running on an anti-Keir Starmer message, and Scottish Conservative message to stop an SNP majority, Diffley said: “It’s an absolutely loveless election.” 

He pointed to recent polling that suggests that all the leaders’ approval ratings are negative, describing the current situation as “a bit of a race to the bottom”.  

Earlier this week, exclusive polling for Holyrood by Lord Ashcroft found all party leaders of major parties have a negative approval rating, including First Minister John Swinney, with a score of -17.   

Political scientist Professor John Curtice said the SNP was “probably going to win the election with a fair degree of comfort”, but said it has nothing to do with improving its popularity.  

He said: “It has nothing to do with an improvement in popularity of the SNP as compared with 2024 [the general election], and everything to do with the fact that Reform has split the Unionist vote.  

“There is a remarkable parallel between what happened to the Labour Party in 2024 and what is likely to happen here.”   

Curtice explained that Labour achieved a landslide victory two years ago in large part because Reform “took a barrel load of votes” from the Conservatives.  

He added: “Support for the SNP is about 12 or 13 points down on what it was in 2021. It’s not that people are voting for the SNP; it's that they are rejecting the SNP, but they are also rejecting the Labour Party and the Conservatives.  

“The fragmentation of politics, which is going on more broadly across the UK, is being writ large in Scotland because the three big parties in Scottish politics are all being rebuffed, it just so happens that the SNP are staring from a much higher baseline, and because of the way Reform has fragmented the vote the SNP look as if it is in a strong position.”  

James Mitchell, a professor of public policy, was asked about the lack of positive messaging from parties ahead of the election. “It’s depressing when you look at the kind of challenges that we’re facing,” he said.   

Mitchell mentioned consistent reports from Audit Scotland suggesting difficult times are ahead for Scotland, telling the audience: “We are going to hit a crisis at some point”.   

He said: “For me it’s tragic that it's not under discussion seriously in this election... we’re running away from it, we’re going to hit a crisis and when we do it’s going to be painful.”   

Curtice added that the same can be said for the 2024 election: “We knew perfectly well the UK Government was going to face a fiscal problem.”