Support for independence increases by two percentage points in heartening new YouGov poll

First of all, what a terrible shock about Christina McKelvie.  I know all our thoughts will be with her family and friends over the coming days and weeks.

There's a full-scale Scottish poll out from YouGov today - it doesn't have any Holyrood or Westminster voting intention numbers, but it does have independence numbers and a bonanza of interesting supplementary questions.  

Should Scotland be an independent country?  (YouGov, 17th-21st March 2025)

Yes 46% (+2)

No 54% (-2)

Normally we'd be a bit disappointed by a 46-54 split, but a recovery is a recovery and this is quite a heartening one.  Remember that YouGov are consistently one of the most No-friendly pollsters, and we've seen many times before that a YouGov poll showing a moderate No lead can easily be conducted at roughly the same time as an Ipsos telephone poll showing a decent Yes lead.  So whether Yes or No is in the lead may well just boil down to the question of which polling firm has the most credible methodology.

Net ratings for politicians:

John Swinney (SNP): -14

Nicola Sturgeon (SNP): -16

Alex Cole-Hamilton (Liberal Democrats): -20

Russell Findlay (Conservatives): -21

Kate Forbes (SNP): -22

Patrick Harvie (Greens): -24

Lorna Slater (Greens): -27

Anas Sarwar (Labour): -29

Keir Starmer (Labour): -36

Humza Yousaf (SNP): -37

Douglas Ross (Conservatives): -41

Kemi Badenoch (Conservatives): -44

Nigel Farage (Reform UK): -54

This is an unusually inclusive and helpful list, because it allows us to make some kind of assessment of whether the SNP is better off with John Swinney than with his predecessors.  It's no surprise to learn that the party is in a far better place due to having replaced Humza Yousaf with Mr Swinney, but the comparison with Nicola Sturgeon is a more complex one.  Mr Swinney does have a better net rating than her, but only just, and her reputation seems to have recovered markedly due to the police clearing her of wrongdoing.  And few would doubt that she always has been, and always will be, a more fluent and charismatic speaker than Mr Swinney.  But there's also always going to be a lot of baggage with her (not least the toxic war with Alex Salmond's supporters), so on balance it may be for the best that we're definitively turning the page on the Sturgeon era.

Every political party has a net negative rating, and the SNP's rating is a tad worse than the Lib Dems' and the Greens' - but the crucial point is that it's significantly better than Labour's.  With the SNP having a more popular leadership than Labour, and with the SNP collectively being a more popular party than Labour, it's not hard to see why next year's election is now the SNP's to lose.

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I gather Ash Regan declined to speak yesterday after her narrow defeat in the Alba leadership election was announced, and the last time I checked she hadn't tweeted either.  McEleny, meanwhile, has been laying out an alternative blueprint for how a small party like Alba should conduct itself, rather than doing the normal thing in this situation of falling in behind the leadership team that has only just been elected.  

When I suggested a few weeks ago that Ms Regan might follow McEleny out of the Alba Party altogether, most people reacted with scepticism.  Time will tell, but I'd just note that if you were preparing the ground for a formal split, you'd probably behave in exactly the way that McEleny and Ms Regan have been doing over the last 30 hours or so.