Poll of Polls : the long-term trend towards Yes in graphical form - now updated!

Thanks once again to Sandy Brownlee for providing this graph, updated to include the newest Poll of Polls figures for the independence referendum.

(Click to enlarge.)

The Scotsman have also published the European Parliament voting intention figures from the new ICM poll.  Percentage changes are from the January ICM poll (the question wasn't asked in February).

SNP 41% (-2)

Labour 29% (+5)

Conservatives 13% (-1)

UKIP 6% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 5% (-1)

Greens 4% (n/c)

The seat projections (with changes from the actual result in 2009) are as follows -

SNP 3 (+1)

Labour 2 (n/c)

Conservatives 1 (n/c)

Liberal Democrats 0 (-1)

UKIP, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens would all fail to win a seat by a country mile, so I think we can safely forget all that "Voting Green is the only way to stop UKIP!" nonsense.  It's the biggest con-trick since...oooh, since the Greens tried to hoodwink people into thinking the Holyrood regional list ballot was some kind of second preference vote.

In a perverse way I'm not too disappointed to see the SNP's lead slip in this poll, because the bigger the lead is, the more it puts a question mark in my mind about the Yes-friendly referendum results in the same poll.  There's a local by-election this week in an SNP-held seat (a genuinely SNP-held seat, I mean, rather than a quirk of the STV system), so that'll be an interesting straw in the wind.  It may give us a clue as to whether the strong Labour recovery in the Cowdenbeath by-election occurred in a bubble, or whether the polls (or at least the Yes-friendly ones) are not fully reflecting the true facts on the ground.