Scottish politics: Scotland’s hidden anti-Tory block vote

More precisely, back in June the gold-standard Scottish Election Survey asked 1200 or so voters to rate their likelihood of backing the Tories from zero to 10. Fully 60.2% - not including don’t knows - put zero. Only 7.1% said 10. 

We are used to opinion polls taking a snapshot of who respondents will support at the next election. But the team at the Scottish Election Survey - including Professor Ailsa Henderson, a political scientist at Edinburgh University - gets behind those headline numbers.

Their questions - such as the propensity to vote scale - are starting to uncover what might be the biggest bloc of voters in Scotland, what some calls the “never Tories”.

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There is nothing new about Scotland having a sizeable cohort of residents who are strongly opposed to the Conservatives. But the Scottish Election Survey also picks up a substantial anti-SNP group.

In the survey 39.3% - nearly two out of five voters, excluding Don’t Knows - gave the nationalists a score of zero out of ten on a propensity to vote scale. Some 21% said put 10, meaning they were very likely to vote for the party.

“In a way, this is fairly standard for the Scottish electorate, explained Prof Henderson. “As the salience of the constitutional issue has increased, it has polarised voting. 

“So while it has rewarded parties at the poles of that debate, those parties have also acquired a pool of voters who wouldn’t consider voting for them.”

She added:  “For the Conservatives, they already had a pool of voters unwilling to vote for them (or depending on how you phrase the question, a pool who ‘strongly disliked’ them). 

“But an unwillingness to vote for rivals is nothing new.  In England this is an issue that primarily concerns Labour and the Conservative voters – and this used to be the case in Scotland. It’s just that the poles of debate here are different.”

The SNP is much less unpopular and more popular than the Conservatives - but its propensity to vote numbers are nevertheless very polarised. That is not true to the same extent for Scottish Labour.

Michael Shanks being congratulated by Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner (Image: PA)

June figures from the Scottish Election Survey show that nearly a quarter of voters are very unlikely to back Sir Keir Starmer’s party. Or rather, 24.5% of people marked Labour at zero on a zero-10 scale for propensity to vote. Only 8.7% of Scots gave the party a 10.

The Greens and Liberal Democrats also have their most vociferous opponents. Respectively 43.2% and 37.3% of June respondents, excluding Don’t Knows, said they were very unlikely to vote for the parties.

But the latest numbers show Labour got the lowest number of “zeroes” in propensity to vote polling.

Last week the party won Rutherglen and Hamilton West - one of its top target Westminster seats north of the border - with a substantial swing away from the SNP on a small turnout. The Tories lost their deposit. 

Did Conservatives stay at home? Did some vote tactically for Labour? There has been a lot of expert commentary and speculation about the by-election. 

But the propensity to vote polling sets the parameters for tactically voting - and suggests Labour (as the least unpopular of the three major parties) is more room  for such gains than Conservatives and nationalists.

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Not that long ago many in the SNP were pitching the 2024-5 Westminster election as a de-facto referendum on independence. That might also have suited the Conservatives, some analysts suggest. Scottish Labour is hoping the vote will instead be settled on whether the Tories should run Britain or not.

Blair McDougall, the former head of the pro-UK Better Together campaign, yesterday published a poll he commissioned for his Notes on Nationalism blog. 

He asked 2019 SNP voters whether they would prefer a Labour or Tory government after the next election. The result was respectively 67% to 10%.

Earlier this month Prof Henderson made sense of some Scottish Election Study findings on this very topic. In a blog, she teased out what voters wanted out of the next Westminster vote. And she found a big block of people - more than a third - who above all want Rishi Sunak and the Tories out of office. And she identified smaller groups who prioritised electing pro-independence and pro-union MPs. 

Prof Henderson drilled right down in to SNP and/or Yes-voting part of the electorate. She found split priorities: 47% focused on electing pro-independence MPS and 44% wanted to get the Conservatives out.  She revealed that “very strongly Yes” were mostly likely to priorities maximising the independence supporting MPs while “fairly strongly Yes” Scots favoured getting the Tories out.

Prof Henderson concluded: “While we, rightly, have spent a lot of time discussing the impact of constitutional preferences on vote choice since the 2014 referendum, we should never underestimate the anti-Conservative negative partisanship of the Scottish electorate. There is some sign that constitutional politics introduce a level of noise here – one third of loyal Labour voters would prioritise electing a pro-union MP than unseating their main rivals for UK office – but it is also clear that a similar proportion of very strong Yes supporters would prioritise unseating the Conservatives over a de facto strategy.”

Has hostility to the Conservatives grown in recent years or months? This is a hard question to answer. That is because the Scottish Election Survey some years ago changed its questions. It used to ask respondents how much they liked or disliked a party. 

In 2007 it did so on a scale from zero to 10, where zero was “strongly dislike”.  With Don’t Knows removed, 32.5% of Scottish residents surveyed put the Tories at zero. This is not directly comparable with the number of Scots who say they are very unlikely to vote Conservative. But it does suggest changing attitudes since the Tories took power at Westminster, first with the Liberal Democrats, in 2010 and then under increasingly controversial premiers after the Brexit vote.