The Scottish National Party, which won power four years ago for the first time, may still emerge as the largest group in the Edinburgh parliament after May 5 elections, according to a poll of voting intentions.
The pro-independence SNP, led by First Minister Alex Salmond, led the Labour Party by 37 percent to 36 percent in the constituency vote and by 35 percent to 33 percent in the regional vote, an Ipsos MORI survey for the Times newspaper found. Voters cast two ballots in Scottish elections, one for a specific lawmaker and one for a party in the region.
The poll indicates a change in fortunes for the SNP, which has been trailing Labour in recent surveys by as much as 16 percentage points. Labour, led in Scotland by Iain Gray, had been picking up support from defecting Liberal Democrats, which formed a coalition in the U.K. government with Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives in May last year.
Labour led the SNP by 49 percent to 33 percent in the constituency vote and by 47 percent to 33 percent in the regional vote, according to a survey of voting intentions by TNS-BRMB published on Jan. 17.
The Scottish government has powers over justice, health, education, the environment and some financial affairs under the devolution agreement that re-established the Scottish Parliament in 1999. Broader economic policies such as taxes and regulation, as well as foreign affairs, defense and energy, are reserved for the U.K. Parliament at Westminster in London.
The Ipsos MORI poll for the Times asked 1,019 adults in Scotland between Feb. 10 and Feb. 14. The support for the parties was based on 627 people who said they were certain to vote. No margin of error was given.
To contact the reporter on this story: Rodney Jefferson in Edinburgh at r.jefferson@bloomberg.net
4 comments:
You've changed your blog design. Clever. Also you're advertising. Is it worth it?
Rosie, Can't say it is worth it yet, but then I am a bit lazy in the promotion stakes.
It seems to me to be high time that we were not leaving important things like defence, foreign affairs, finance and social security to the idiots in London who don't seem to be able to organise a booze-up in a brewery.
Billions of pounds wasted by the MoD on badly negotiated contracts, a FCO which seems to know a great deal about driving in Rolls, wearing stupid hats and drinking very good wine, at our expense, but is moribund when it comes to rescuing UK subjects from Libyan dictators. (Whereas the Turks and the Americans are getting their nationals out, the FCO is "trying to charter a plane" for god’s sake.)
The revenue is all over the place, no one knows whether they have paid the right tax or not. (I’m convinced that they have been overcharging me for years, but no one ever does anything about it.) And despite high taxes on cars, petrol and roads, not to mention the boost that the Libyan crisis ig giving to the value of Brent Crude, the Dept of Transport in England seems to be unable to find more than about 1/100th of the money required for filling in the pot holes which are causing hundreds of millions of pounds worth of damage to cars (thereby giving us a consequential to try to fix out tracks).
If it were not for the financial genius of John Swinney we would be in the same mess as England.
GET US OUT OF HERE
Agreed tris thanks for now big story breaking on the Labour Mafia.
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