Anti-Brexit feeling expected to help SNP in European elections

The element of “scunner” – Scottish slang for disgust or dislike – will be powerful among Scottish voters in next week’s EU elections, according to the MEP Alyn Smith, who has represented the Scottish National party in Brussels for the last 15 years.

“There are people who are tired of the whole Westminster mess and just won’t vote, but there’s also evidence on the doorstep that especially former Labour voters who have yet to be convinced about independence are lending the SNP their support because we have a clear message on Europe.”

Latest polls show the SNP is the only one of the three major parties in Scotland which is not losing votes over Brexit, explained Prof Sir John Curtice, the elections expert at the University of Strathclyde.

Its support is holding firm at 40%, in line with its popularity in Westminster and Holyrood polling, boosted by substantial numbers of remain voters whose allegiances have shifted from Labour or the Tories since the 2016 Holyrood election. The party is now poised to win three and potentially four of Scotland’s six EU seats.

With the SNP presenting itself as the logical pro-EU option north of the border – where 62% voted to remain in the 2016 referendum – the party leader, Nicola Sturgeon, urged voters to treat both Labour and the Conservatives as pro-Brexit parties when she launched her European election campaign last week.

Curtice said the polling evidence suggested Labour’s vote in Scotland was more pro-leave than the rest of the UK yet, like the Tories, its support at this election had been eroding, leaving it likely to lose one of its two European seats.

Many of those voters who have switched to the SNP replaced leave supporters who ditched the party after Sturgeon explicitly linked her renewed quest for a second independence referendum to opposing Brexit, in 2016.

Kirsty Hughes, director of the Scottish Centre on European Relations and campaigner for a second EU referendum, noted that, since 2016, polls had shown that SNP voters had become more strongly remain. “There is still a chunk of pro-independence, pro-leave support,” she said, “but it’s a bit of a stretch for them to vote for Nigel Farage.”

Despite Farage being famously hounded out of Edinburgh by protesters in 2013, a year later at the last EU elections Ukip unexpectedly won a Scottish seat, nearly doubling its support.

Curtice cautioned that the final results – including a potential seat for the Brexit party – were difficult to predict since there were significant differences between the two most recent polls.

A YouGov survey for the Times put Tory support at 10%, on the edge of defeat, compared with Farage’s Brexit party on 13%, just behind Labour on 14%. A Panelbase poll, however, reversed those findings. It put the Tories on 16% (excluding don’t knows) – enough to save its seat, and the Brexit party down at 10%, while Labour was on 20%, comfortably able to hold at least one seat.

Angus Robertson, the SNP’s former Westminster leader who recently launched a polling organisation gathering data on Scotland’s views on independence, said he expected the result to reflect “the extent to which Scottish politics and developments across the rest of the UK have diverged”.

“I expect the results will confirm strong anti-Brexit feeling in Scotland and be a good result for the SNP, which will underline calls for a second independence referendum and cement the constitutional question at the heart of Scottish politics.”