[SCOT goes POP!] Well, THAT was a short honeymoon, Sir Keir! Less than one month after taking office, Starmer has negative approval ratings - including in Scotland

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Well, THAT was a short honeymoon, Sir Keir!  Less than one month after taking office, Starmer has negative approval ratings - including in Scotland

As far as I can see, we've still only had one proper voting intentions poll since the general election - which must mean that polling companies and their clients are deliberately avoiding them, because several other political polls have been conducted.  The latest one is from YouGov and has personal ratings for a number of leading politicians. They make startlingly poor reading for the new Prime Minister.

Keir Starmer:

Favourable 40% (-4)

Unfavourable 49% (+5)

With the usual caveats about the limitations of small subsamples, the Scottish figures for Starmer are Favourable 46%, Unfavourable 48%, so he's in net negative territory here too.  I suspect the SNP will be mildly encouraged by this, because by far the biggest danger for them in the run-up to the 2026 Holyrood election would be an extended honeymoon for Labour.  It looks tentatively as if that risk has been lessened by Starmer's key mis-steps in his first month in power - particularly the retention of the two-child cap, the heavy-handed treatment of Labour rebels on the cap, and the scrapping of winter fuel payments for pensioners.  Notably, the front-woman for the new austerity, Rachel Reeves, has seen a similar much-deserved knock in her popularity and now has a net rating of minus 11.  Angela Rayner, Yvette Cooper and David Lammy have also dropped back but by a lesser amount.

An anonymous SNP "official" was quoted a few days ago in a Politico article saying: "The SNP want to send a message to Westminster, we want to send a government' is one of the best [Scottish Labour] attack lines I've ever heard."  You'd kind of have to wonder if this person is in their early 20s, because that attack line is far from new - the exact words may be, but Labour have been using variants of that line against the SNP in general elections for as long as I can remember. It was highly effective in both 1992 and 1997, for example.  It should always have been obvious - and many of us pointed this out well before the election - that the SNP cannot compete with Labour in a UK-wide election by talking solely about bread and butter issues, because Labour can form a government and the SNP can't.  They can only trump Labour by pointing out that independence is a much bigger and better change than a transient Labour government, and that while Labour can only offer five years of the Tories out of office, independence can keep the Tories out for good.

To be fair, Nicola Sturgeon got that, and the real authors of the election setback were the "ditch the de facto" plotters like Stewart McDonald and Humza Yousaf himself.  Hopefully they've learned the lesson the hard way, and the SNP will never again go into a UK general election without foregrounding their unique selling point of independence.

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Source: Well, THAT was a short honeymoon, Sir Keir!  Less than one month after taking office, Starmer has negative approval ratings - including in Scotland