[LINK] "Scotland poll shows a nation on the verge of abandoning Labour"

[rfmcdonald]

At The Guardian's datablog, Alberto Nardelli suggests that, come the next British general election, the SNP will sweep Scotland and practically destroy Labour. This has implications for the future of Britain's Labour Party, but even more so for the future of Scotland within the United Kingdom.

Make no mistake, Labour’s crisis in Scotland is profound. That’s the inescapable conclusion of Lord Ashcroft’s 14 constituency polls that show the party losing all but one of the Labour-held seats surveyed.

The swing from Labour to the Scottish National party (SNP) is above 20% in all 14 of those seats – the average is 25% – the kind of shift that is arguably seen only once in a generation.

That is not all. More troubling for Labour is the fact that among all voters under 44, support for the SNP is nearly double that of Labour. The SNP leads across all age groups, except among those aged 65 and above.

To make matters even worse for Ed Miliband’s party, the seats polled by Ashcroft are among the ones Labour won with the highest margins five years ago – and the swing in these is even greater than the one implied in Scotland-wide polls.

On the Guardian’s modelling, based on current polls, the SNP would win 54 out of the 59 seats in Scotland. The Lib Dems would retain one, Orkney and Shetland, and Labour four.

But, curiously, when you look at the impact of these polls on the most recent projection, the most likely next government remains unchanged. Some sort of Labour-SNP alliance is still the most probable starting point of any feasible government because the Conservatives remain far short of an overall majority, where 326 seats are needed. The current arithmetic also means that feasible Tory options fall some way short of the required numbers.