The Invisible Election

Next Thursday is the General Election in Britain but you would hardly know it to look around locally. In the past, elections in Falkirk have tended to be rather colourful affairs with party banners up on the lampposts and a variety of prospective candidates campaigning on the streets. However, aside from a couple of small SNP and Labour posters up in people’s windows and a couple of advertising hoardings I’ve seen very little. Yesterday, I had to go to Falkirk to visit a mobile phone shop and expected the High Street to be mobbed. Initially I thought there was a major (and belated) showing from the Green Party as there were swathes of cheery looking individuals dressed in green and white but it turned out to be Hibernian fans making their way back to the train station after an early kick off. The High Street was bereft of campaigners and actually rather quiet in general.

Aside from a single mailing from each of the candidates and an SNP marquee in Stenhousemuir shopping centre on a Saturday morning there has been little interest. I suspect that many people have election fatigue with last year’s independence referendum having seemingly dragged on for decades and there is a certain backlash against the Westminster parties treating the Scottish electorate as some sort of leper colony. This appears to have been reflected in the opinion polls with the SNP having benefitted from an upturn in grass-roots interest in politics along with a significant number of former supporters of the other parties having switched allegiance – or at least those SNP supporters that normally support the Labour or Liberal parties in UK elections are not voting tactically this time.

One thing that does interest me with the elections are the opinion polls; not so much for any political content but in that it appeals to my nerdish tendencies and allows one to play around with the statistics. As far as I can see with the UK figures there has been little change in the parties support since the beginning of the year and it looks like being almost a dead heat between Labour and Conservative. The Conservatives will do well in South East England and Labour well in the North, as ever. Where there could be a change is that Labour look set to do very well in Greater London whereas they are doing appallingly in Scotland.

I had expected Labour to recover some of their Scottish vote; it has crept up slowly over the last few months but nothing like as fast as it should have done. I calculated a poll-of-polls for Scotland out of all the opinion polls published in the last week (based on 3668 respondents) and the figures come out as:

SNP 47.8%
Labour 25.4%
Conservative 15.8%
Lib Dem 7.2%
Green 1.6%
UKIP 2.0%

That could be a massive landslide for the SNP with possibly a couple of exceptions where there are popular local MPs (in the Northern Isles, for example). I’m interested to see how that pans out in the real poll next Thursday. Whether we know who the new prime minister is this time next week is another matter. I suspect the next government will be a minority one which means that the next PM will have to stop trying to piss off Scottish people.