54% for Yes on the standard independence question is more than enough - it's plenty enough

It's not the normal practice of our resident Brit Nat troll KC (who I recently found was self-identifying as a youthful Italian stallion on Twitter) to tell direct lies - he normally takes something with a very small grain of truth in it and spins it for all he's worth.  But he broke that habit today by lying through his teeth.  In two comments that I've since deleted, he falsely claimed that the recent 54% for independence in the Norstat poll was merely from another hypothetical, conditional question and was based on the idea that independence would lead to everyone in Scotland being given a large lump sum payment.  That's complete rubbish - it was the standard independence question 'Should Scotland be an independent country?' and there was no jiggery-pokery at all.  It will have been asked by Norstat at the start of the question sequence and so repondents will not have been affected in any way by the leading wording of the supplementary questions that were posed later in the sequence on behalf of Believe in Scotland.

However, I think this highlights one of the dangers of the hypothetical "would you vote for independence if condition X applied?" questions, because they've led people to start talking as if the 54% on the standard question somehow isn't good enough and that we instead need a "Yes supermajority".  In fact, Yes 54%, No 46% is an almost exact reversal of the 2014 referendum result - the winning margin of which BBC journalists repeatedly referred to at the time as "decisive" (almost as if they'd received an order from on high to call it that).

And yet we know John Swinney isn't remotely interested in pressing home for independence with anything that might look like a slender Yes majority - his plan seems to be to do nothing until there is overwhelming public backing for independence.  There are two ways of interpreting that stance - either a) he's the de facto devolutionist that his critics portray him as, or b) he's genuinely trying to achieve independence by the slow road, and has in mind the precedent of devolution finally being achieved when the majority in favour of it was so huge that it could be safely described as a "settled will".

But there's one huge problem with the devolution precedent.  It took a genuinely pro-devolution Labour government in London to actually give effect to Scotland's settled will in the late 1990s.  No matter how high the Yes vote goes, there is never going to be a pro-independence government in London, so sooner or later the SNP themselves will have to force the issue.  If Mr Swinney is serious about independence, he will eventually have to confront the "process" problem, whether he likes it or not.  Supermajorities in opinion polls are not somehow self-enacting, although you'd occasionally be forgiven for thinking some in the SNP's "slow boat" faction believe they are.  "The barriers will just melt away", etc, etc.

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