28 June 2024

With the top jobs now agreed in Council, Helena and Alexandros from our EU team sit down to discuss what are some of the opportunities and risks coming out of this year’s election results.

To get involved in the discussion or find out more, get in touch with our team: ukpublicaffairs@h-advisors.global

And you can subscribe to our monthly UK Public Affairs newsletter to get all the latest updates.

14 May 2024

We welcome back Lizzy Tomlin and Claudia Mulholland into the Unplugged studio to talk about their favourite topic: the Lib Dems! Just a week before the UK General Election, they discuss the number of seats Ed Davey’s party can hope to win, the sorts of seats they’re fighting, and what their results might mean for their power and influence if they become the third biggest in the next Parliament.

To get involved in the discussion or find out more, get in touch with our team: ukpublicaffairs@h-advisors.global

And you can subscribe to our monthly UK Public Affairs newsletter to get all the latest updates.

24 June 2024

Last week, H/Advisors Cicero hosted legendary polling expert, Sir John Curtice, at our offices in London. Sir John provided an hour of insights into the current campaign polling figures, followed by a Q&A with an audience of representatives from a variety of industry backgrounds.

Read more analysis on our Elections ’24 microsite here

Topline summary of General Election polling assessments

Sir John began with a presentation on what the polls are currently reporting, focusing on Labour’s consistent lead over the Conservatives, and the increase in figures seen by Reform UK since 2019. The sentiment in the room, as well as in the polling explained by Sir John, is that this election is one driven by how badly the Conservatives are losing, rather than how much the Labour Party is winning.

Sir John detailed the ways in which polling can be a useful tool, MRP polls in particular, when looking at geographical shifts in voting, especially relevant for the Conservatives in this scenario. However, he was clear that polling reliability should not be overstated as there are some factors that can impact the outcome, such as the data exclusion of those who do not know how they will vote, or the assumptions made about their voting intentions based on historic polling.

Here is a summary of the key points from Professor Curtice’s talk:

Key points

• Polling is useful in an election campaign for a variety of reasons, notably to analyse change, separate the “knows” from the “don’t knows”, and to measure sentiment across the country. However, their reliability should not be overstated – polls should be “taken and not inhaled”.
• The “don’t knows” provide a certain level of uncertainty in the campaign polling, which is likely to last through to 4 July.
• Two key reasons driving the demise in polling figures for the Conservatives are Boris Johnson’s untenable relationship with the truth following the Covid inquiry and Liz Truss’s short-lived economic policy.
• While initially polls showed ex-Conservative voters tended to sway to Labour, recent trends indicate that these figures have gone down, as more instead are now shifting to Reform.
• Age is the biggest differentiator in terms of voting demographic in our society.
• Geography will play an important part in shifting votes away from the Conservatives in this general election:
  • You Gov’s MRP poll showed a predicted 140 seats for the Conservatives and 422 for Labour, whereas the Survation MRP poll showed a tougher election day for the Conservatives, putting them at 80 seats, and Labour at 443.
  • The conclusion one can draw from the Survation poll as opposed to YouGov’s poll is that the Conservative vote loss could be much higher in seats that are deemed “safe”, rather than marginal.
• MRP polls can of course still shift, but they are reliable insofar as we have MRP data from other elections to direct them.
• This aligns with polling in the local elections, where the Conservatives fell in many historically safe seats.
• One key issue for the Conservatives is that Reform has increased their polling position by approximately 10% and the Conservatives have done little in terms of producing a strategy to combat this threat from the right.
• Are we really facing an unprecedented election in terms of result and campaign?
  • The campaign trail itself is not unprecedented.
  • The level of Tory support we come to see on polling day could be unprecedented.
  • The share of votes won by the two largest parties may set a new record low.
  • We may end up with five UK-wide parties in Parliament, each with at least five seats. 

For more analysis of the polls and to understand what the General Election results will mean for you, get in touch.

14 May 2024

Rhoda and Simon dive into the latest news and updates from Scotland in our next instalment of our UK public affairs video series. They cover the SNP’s leadership developments, what Scottish Labour’s prospects look like, and other updates from north of the border.

We try to publish a new Cicero UNPLUGGED video on our LinkedIn page and YouTube channel each week. To get involved in the discussion or find out more, get in touch with our team: ukpublicaffairs@h-advisors.global

And you can subscribe to our monthly UK Public Affairs newsletter to get all the latest updates.

13 October 2023

The party conference carnival has departed Liverpool and will make its next and final stop in Aberdeen, as the baton passes from Labour to SNP.

The Labour gathering was comfortably the most upbeat and energetic I have been to in my dozen years of conference attendance, and nowhere was this more evident than at the Scottish Labour events. Michael Shanks, Labour’s newest MP, received rapturous applause each time he walked into a room and his commanding win in Rutherglen & Hamilton West has clearly given Scottish Labour a major shot in the arm. After so many setbacks, this is a party that has its confidence back.

Labour’s path to election victory could be through Scotland

Dame Jackie Baillie, Scottish Labour’s deputy leader who ran the Rutherglen operation, informed audiences that having started the year with a list of six Scottish Westminster target seats, this has now grown to 28 credible targets, with more still on her “watchlist”. Speaking to Scottish PPCs, those in seats with similar demographics to Rutherglen can now clearly see a path to victory, but even those in notionally less promising areas for Labour feel that the growing sense of momentum could give them a chance to compete.

Everyone who had been active on the ground in Rutherglen spoke of the particular impact of Anas Sarwar on the doorstep. Like his party he has grown in confidence and seems to enjoy an easy rapport with the voters he meets. The other common theme emerging from campaigners in the seat was that independence did not register highly as an issue amongst voters. Instead, the cost of living and concern at NHS waiting lists were the most salient issues. Baillie also believes that Labour’s ‘new deal for working people’ – including a ban on zero hours contracts, an increased living wage and improved access to rights and protections at work – was a major selling point for her party. Expect it to be a significant focal point of the party’s campaign in Scotland.

Keir Starmer knows how important the Scottish fightback is to his chances of securing a majority. It was striking how long the section on Scotland was in his keynote speech and how frequently GB Energy – the new publicly owned energy company he plans to establish in Scotland – was mentioned. Starmer will regard the whole conference as a real success, but without doubt the Scottish dimension will have been one of the most pleasing aspects of all.

And the good news didn’t stop there. On Thursday morning news broke that East Kilbride’s SNP MP, Dr Lisa Cameron, had defected to the Conservative Party. Cameron cited the “toxic” culture in the SNP Westminster group, with whom her relations soured in the wake of the sexual harassment allegations against former Chief Whip Patrick Grady. This is just the latest in a series of internal rows in the SNP, from the suspension of Fergus Ewing MSP to the resignation of the SNP whip by Angus MacNeil MP. While the Tories are the immediate beneficiary of a new MP in this instance, it will be Labour who will have their eyes on the seat next year.

SNP friction going into their conference

This is the backdrop against which Humza Yousaf will oversee his first party conference as leader. His party is fractious, with some believing a stronger push towards independence is required, while others believe constitutional debate should take a backseat in favour of the day-to-day issues voters in Rutherglen highlighted.

Which way will Yousaf go? He gave some indication in a pre-conference interview with the New Statesman in which he said his party has spent too long “navel-gazing” about the process around independence. Voters “do not view it as being meaningful to their lives when they can’t pay their mortgage or their heating bill”, he added. Yousaf also acknowledged a perceived “credibility gap” between the SNP’s rhetoric and their record of delivery: “People have to believe we can deliver with the powers of devolution and then imagine what we can do with the powers of independence.”

This sounds very much like the language of someone who believes the central mission of the SNP to achieve independence will have to take a temporary back seat, in favour of a greater focus on bread-and-butter issues.

And yet, a conference motion in Yousaf’s name would commit the party to opening negotiations to “give democratic effect” to Scotland becoming an independent country in the event that the SNP wins the most Scottish seats in Westminster next year.

It is not immediately obvious how Yousaf will reconcile these two seemingly contrasting positions. If he cannot chart a way through them in Aberdeen he may find his party losing yet more ground.

This article was written by Simon Fitzpatrick, our Glasgow-based Director in the UK Public Affairs team. If you would like to speak with Simon about Scottish politics or policy, please do get in touch.