Yes secure second-highest ever showing in a telephone poll - and it was commissioned by the No campaign

New Survation telephone poll commissioned by the No campaign -

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 46.5%
No 53.5%

That's by quite some distance the second-highest ever Yes vote in a telephone poll, only beaten by yesterday's ICM poll.

This is the first time "Better Together" have ever released straightforward voting intention figures from one of their private polls, and it's fascinating that they've chosen to do it with a result that even a couple of weeks ago would have been regarded as extremely bad and worrying for them.  It's probably an indication that they were concerned that the polling narrative was completely running away from them yesterday.

Fascinating too that they chose Survation - have they detected something in that firm's methodology that will work in their favour?  We know that Survation still don't weight by country of birth - the evidence is mixed as to whether that's quite such an issue in phone polls, but even the sample for yesterday's ICM poll over-represented English-born people slightly.

One obvious possibility we shouldn't discount is that BT have used their vast resources to commission several private polls from different companies, and have simply published the worst one for Yes (ie. 'publication bias').  Today's figures are, of course, well within the margin of error of a 49% Yes vote - exactly the same as yesterday's poll.

Further analysis of all of today's four polls, plus a Poll of Polls update, will appear HERE.