Lord Ashcroft's dodgiest poll question is one the health inspectors should be all over

I've been having a more leisurely look through the results of the supplementary questions in the Ashcroft poll, and I think there are three worth drawing to your attention.  First of all, Ashcroft has really pulled a fast one in order to produce an unhelpful result for the independence movement on one of his questions.  In the write-up of the poll, he claimed that only one-quarter of respondents thought that a majority of seats for pro-independence parties would constitute a mandate for an independence referendum, or to put it another way, he was implying that three-quarters either don't understand or don't accept the most fundamental principle of parliamentary democracy.  I thought that was a surprising result, because other pollsters have asked that question and found that a slim majority think there would be a mandate.  

But the data tables demonstrate in embarrassingly vivid detail how Ashcroft pulled his stunt off.  One of the basic rules of polling balance and impartiality is that if you are trying to measure whether respondents agree or disagree with a proposition, the negative option should be worded so that it's as close as possible to the natural opposite of the positive option.  In other words, if the positive option is "a majority of seats should be taken as a mandate for an independence referendum", the negative option should be "a majority of seats should NOT be taken as a mandate for an independence referendum".  But Ashcroft doesn't do that, and instead takes a walk on the wild side by offering as the negative option "People vote at elections for lots of different reasons - we cannot assume someone supports Scottish independence just because they vote for a particular party".  Not only is that self-evidently not the natural opposite of the positive option, it's not even about the same subject.  The positive option is about a mandate for an independence referendum, the negative option is about a mandate for independence itself.  Moreover, the negative option is a statement of the obvious that nobody would actually dispute regardless of their views on independence or a referendum. 

What Ashcroft is doing is forcing people to reject the positive option because they know that if they don't, it would look like they were denying a statement that everyone knows to be true.  If he had wanted to achieve the opposite effect, he could have done it by making the negative option something like "Many voters are not intelligent enough to check what they are voting for or to understand the issues, so of course they are not giving a mandate for any particular policy", and then respondents would have flocked to the positive option in a state of indignation.

In a nutshell, the results of the mandate question have no credibility, and the polling health inspectors should be all over that question like a rash.

The poll also has approval ratings for the various political parties, including for Alba.  The Alba rating is so utterly diabolical that if anyone has any lingering regret about the party's demise, they should consider themselves liberated to no longer entertain that feeling for even a moment.  Only 5% of respondents approve of Alba, and 55% disapprove, giving a net approval rating of -50, which is marginally worse than Reform UK and only slightly better than the Tories.  Alba is almost equally hated on both sides of the constitutional divide, with SNP voters giving it a rating of -37, and Green voters going even lower at -54.  By the end, Alba simply had nothing to offer because independence supporters themselves didn't even want the party to exist, and there's not really much point arguing the toss when people have so definitively made their minds up.

Lastly, there's a question revealing that a grand total of 46% of respondents say that one of the top three things in their minds when they cast their vote will be either "keeping Scotland part of the UK" or "getting an independent Scotland".  That rather gives the lie to the oft-heard claim that the independence question is a low priority for the electorate these days.

If you haven't watched my video about the poll yet, you can see it below.