"I'm a gardener" : Eyebrows raised after latest shock claim by spin doctor McTernan

It was a lovely, hot, sunny day yesterday, and naturally I couldn't think of anything I'd rather do than sit in an underground lecture theatre in Edinburgh listening to John McTernan telling me fairy stories.  He was the star turn of 'Nostival', an unexpected and ground-breaking strand of National Collective's Yestival, which is currently being hosted at Summerhall.

The written instructions for how to get to the lecture theatre were a bit daunting, not least because they somehow managed to include the word 'atrium' at least three times.  National Collective's Facebook page also urged people to turn up well in advance, so to be on the safe side I arrived twenty minutes early, and found that I was the first person there.  After five minutes I was still the only one in the "queue", so I started to have awful thoughts about what the consequences might be of playing the role of one-man audience to McTernan.  But to my eternal relief, there was a heavy late rush.  In fact, I think the second person to arrive might well have been Melissa Murray, aka the Daily Mail's least favourite freedom-lovin' American.

After we were all seated, I turned off my mobile phone, and it suddenly occurred to me that this meant I wouldn't be able to take photos.  I thought to myself : "How will I explain on the blog why there are no photos of McTernan?"  And then I realised I could just say I was worried he would taser me.  That was going to be a joke, but as it turned out McTernan stopped midway through his talk to angrily challenge a "comrade at the back" who was filming him on a phone.  He turned to Gerry Hassan (who was chairing the session) and said "I thought we had an agreement about this".  The man in question apologised, and pointed out that he had arrived late and therefore would have missed any warnings about not using photography.  Well, I was there at the start, and there was certainly no such warning - as McTernan knew perfectly well.

For whatever reason, a lot of people were taking notes as McTernan spoke, which is probably what I should have done if I wanted to analyse his anti-independence argument (such as it was) properly.  But here are some scattergun points, based on the bits that stuck in my mind -

* McTernan claimed that "there is no country in the world more like Scotland than England".  I'm not sure where that leaves our Celtic cousins Wales and Ireland.

* He claimed that the reason why an independent Scotland couldn't have a Scandinavian-style social democracy is that this is Scotland and we speak English rather than Swedish or Finnish.  Honestly, I'm not making this up - that's what he said, and he didn't develop the point further.  That was it.  Social democracy is apparently impossible unless you speak a social democratic language.

* Prompting gales of laughter, McTernan claimed that there "is no problem in the UK that cannot be solved by a change of government".  The question is, just how many of the UK's problems are the alternative government actually proposing to tackle?  Would Labour reverse austerity?  No.  Would they end the war on benefit claimants? No.

* Compare and contrast : McTernan savaged the Yes campaign for not acknowledging that there are some risks attached to independence - he said that's "not a proper discussion".  Just minutes later, he made dozens of jaws drop to the floor with his promise that he could "guarantee you a Labour government after the next election".  Well, if he truly believes that there is no risk of Tory rule attached to voting No, he really should get himself down to the bookies, all of whom make a Tory victory next year either an odds-on or even bet.  Does your almost comical denial of a self-evidently huge risk mean that you're not "having a proper discussion", John?  (I was also amused to hear him go on to talk about the Yes campaign's "magical thinking".)

* McTernan claimed that "Alex Salmond's" plan to renationalise the Royal Mail was a colossal waste of money, and was (for reasons that were never specified) literally "impossible" anyway.  Question : how do you actually go about wasting money on something that is literally impossible?

* While talking about another subject entirely, McTernan innocently dropped in the line "and that's why young people are overwhelmingly voting No".  Excellent timing, I must say, coming just hours before the publication of a Survation poll showing an 11% lead for Yes among 16-24 year olds.  And those figures are scarcely untypical.

* He claimed on at least four separate occasions that by becoming independent, Scotland would be leaving the "fifth-largest economy in the world".  In reality, the UK has not been the fifth-largest economy since France overtook it several years ago.  Indeed, for a while it had slipped to seventh place after being overtaken by Brazil, and it's only a matter of time before that happens again.

* To general astonishment, including even from an otherwise sympathetic Gerry Hassan, McTernan indignantly took issue with the irrefutable claim from an audience member that he is a spin doctor.  When he realised that people weren't impressed with his protestations that he is a humble freelance journalist, he started spluttering "I like Aussie Rules football!  I'm...I'm...a gardener!"  He also seemed to think that "spin doctor" was a term of abuse, of the sort that only the Yes campaign would bandy about.  It was then pointed out that he used the term "cybernat", at which point he insisted that the cybernat phenomenon was real, and had no equivalent on the No side.  Hilarity ensued (perhaps because most of the audience had been abused on social media at some point by anti-independence trolls).

* He persevered with the risible fantasy that Alex Salmond has direct personal control over each and every online independence supporter - "if I was advising the Yes campaign, I'd have told them to call off the dogs".

* Undecided voters should probably be aware that one of the reasons McTernan wants you to vote No is that he thinks it would abolish for all time one key aspect of democracy, namely the right to national self-determination.  He pondered whether it would be possible to ever hold another independence referendum, even after thirty years had passed, and he flatly declared that it wouldn't, because that's "against the British constitution".  Frankly, I'm not sure that's true (he appears to be making up the unwritten British constitution as he goes on), but if it is, do we really want to vote to abolish the democratic rights of the unborn for the remainder of time?  That's what McTernan and his ultra-authoritarian chums are proposing.

* He trotted out the "one million skilled immigrants" thing again, and swatted away clarifications from the audience that this would be over a long period of time, and would thus only entail a small increase on recent levels of annual immigration.  He said that anyone from the EU could already come here if they wanted, and therefore "Alex Salmond" must be looking at Africa and Asia to make up the shortfall.  "Remember, these would be skilled immigrants," he added with a sneer.  Yeah, of course, because everyone knows there are no skilled workers at all in China - the biggest nation on Earth, and the world's second-largest economy.

* When it was suggested that an independent Scotland would be more democratic as it would always get the government it voted for, McTernan claimed that democracy primarily consists of UK Labour "learning the lessons" when it suffers a defeat.  This of course always entails modifying Labour's programme for government to appeal more to centre-right voters in Middle England.  It's essentially the Tom Harris position - "maturity" demands that everyone accepts his preferred New Labour policies, and because independence would strip away the requirement for "maturity", independence is by definition a bad (and rather incomprehensible) thing.

* He angrily challenged someone who talked about "your Westminster system", and insisted they should have said "our Westminster system".  After all, who would realistically think that a New Labour spin doctor could possibly claim more ownership of the Westminster system than a pro-independence activist?

Overall, it was an enjoyable session in a "let's boo at the pantomime villain" sort of way, although I was slightly disturbed that almost everyone there seemed to be pro-independence - obviously if Yestival is to have the desired effect, it will have to reach out to undecided voters to some extent.  There were a couple of people who asked McTernan quite nuanced questions, but I got the strong impression that even they would probably be voting Yes.  Oh, and there was a very nice chap from Barcelona who was researching the referendum, and who asked me a few questions before we went in.  But other than him, no obvious neutrals.  Perhaps Yestival will have more luck bringing in casual visitors when it visits smaller communities.

Unrounded Survation figures confirm the No lead has fallen to its lowest level so far

As I suspected they would, the newly-released Survation datasets confirm two things - a) the Yes vote has reached an all-time high, even after undecideds are excluded, and b) the No lead has fallen to its lowest ever level, regardless of whether undecideds are excluded or not.  Here are the figures when rounded only to one decimal place -

Should Scotland be an independent country? 

Excluding Don't Knows :

Yes 47.1% (+0.5)
No 52.9% (-0.5)

Not excluding Don't Knows :

Yes 40.9% (+2.1)
No 46.0% (+1.6)

So it's not actually true to suggest, as a commenter did on the previous thread, that Don't Knows are "at best" splitting more or less evenly.  Obviously we have to take account of the margin of error of this poll, but the above figures indicate there's a slightly greater than 50% chance that the undecideds who have recently jumped one way or the other have broken more for Yes than for No.

Unfortunately, I have to put the same health warning on this poll that I put on last month's Survation poll.  The most Yes-friendly age group is 16-24 year olds, and they've been upweighted almost three-fold from 44 real respondents to 125 'virtual' respondents.  That effectively increases the poll's margin of error, and makes it more likely that Survation will produce volatile results (although admittedly that hasn't been the case so far), because any random sampling variation in the small sample of young voters will be magnified in the overall results.  However, the fact that roughly the same findings for 16-24s have been produced twice in a row decreases the likelihood that this is just a freakish occurrence, and it has to be said that it's not as if an 11% lead for Yes among young people has been an unusual finding for other pollsters - even the saintly "we're right and everyone else is wrong" YouGov have been known to produce similar numbers on more than one occasion.

In last month's Survation poll, the raw numbers were very similar to the weighted results, but that isn't the case this time - Yes have been upweighted from 42.7% to 47.1%.  Normally when other pollsters show a disparity like that, there's a very obvious, elephant-sized explanation - Yes-friendly lower income people have needed to be weighted up sharply, and No-friendly older people have needed to be weighted down sharply.  But that isn't the case with Survation - they haven't had to adjust the figures by social class much at all, and although over-65s are as usual breaking heavily for No, that age group have actually been upweighted slightly.  I thought the explanation might lie in the regional weighting, but again, that seems to be helping No - the No-friendly samples in the Highlands and the south have been upweighted, while the Yes-friendly samples in Glasgow and the north-east have been downweighted.  So I'm slightly baffled as to where the overall upweighting for Yes is coming from.  OK, women have had to be significantly downweighted, and there's the aforementioned issue with young respondents, but that wouldn't explain all of the disparity.  I can only assume it must be an accrual of a large number of relatively minor factors (for example Tory and Lib Dem voters from 2011 have had to be downweighted a bit).

One issue that Peter Kellner made a song and dance about in his recent attack on Survation was recall of 2010 vote - although both YouGov and Survation find that far more people recall voting SNP than actually did (almost certainly because they're getting mixed up with how they voted for the Scottish Parliament a year later), Kellner pointed out that Survation were actually showing that more people claim to have voted SNP than Labour, which he regarded as self-evidently ludicrous.  Survation noted in their very robust response that if it was accepted that 2010 vote recall is fundamentally unreliable, it seemed distinctly peculiar to attempt to use that as a measure of a firm's overall accuracy.  As it happens, though, the divergence between Survation and YouGov on 2010 vote recall has now narrowed somewhat - in this poll, 35.8% of respondents recall voting Labour, and 32.0% recall voting SNP.  Presumably if he's being logically consistent, Kellner will now declare that Survation's referendum findings must be a bit more accurate than before?

Support for independence soars to highest ever level in landmark Survation poll

The new Survation poll for the Daily Record has just been released, and it shows a strikingly similar picture to Sunday's TNS poll, which had the Yes vote at its highest level of the campaign so far, but also recorded an increase in the No vote as undecideds were squeezed.  The similarity between the two polls will of course be masked by the fact that TNS are a No-friendly pollster, and even with them showing Yes at a new high watermark, that still only amounted to 41.4% after undecideds were excluded.  By contrast, Survation are one of the more Yes-friendly pollsters, and tonight they're showing the pro-independence campaign on the brink of victory -

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 41% (+2)
No 46% (+2)

With Don't Knows removed, it works out as...

Yes 47% (n/c)
No 53% (n/c)

Although the latter set of figures appear to be unchanged, it's worth remembering that prior to rounding Yes were actually on 46.6% last month.  So unless the rounding has flattered Yes again, it seems highly likely that they've reached a new record high with Survation even after undecideds are stripped out.  We'll find out for sure when the datasets are released, presumably tomorrow.

I think this could be one of the most important polls of the campaign to date, and I'll explain why.  In spite of the similarity to the TNS trend, a key difference is that TNS have shown Yes hovering at the same record high level (after Don't Knows are excluded) for several months now, without making any further significant progress, and without suffering any reverses.  Survation on the other hand only put Yes at 47% for the first time last month.  As I noted at the time, I was slightly concerned that poll might prove to be an outlier, because alarm bells were ringing in my head due to odd patterns in the datasets.  Time well tell what the datasets look like this time, but it's dramatically less likely that Survation would produce two very similar 'rogue polls' in consecutive months. So it seems reasonable to conclude that these numbers are probably being caused by a real increase in support for Yes, which is most likely to have occurred at some point over the last two months.

That's important, because the picture painted by the previous six polls was as clear as mud, and until tonight it was scarily unclear which way the wind was blowing.  We had Panelbase, Survation and TNS all showing Yes at a high watermark for the campaign - albeit only by the tiniest of fractions in the case of TNS.  We had ICM showing a decrease in the No lead, but that was only a reversion to the previous 'norm'.  We then had YouGov with two successive polls that showed small increases in the No lead - and crucially the fieldwork for the second of those polls was more recent than all of the other polls.  So until tonight, there was the tantalising possibility for the No campaign that YouGov might not merely have punctured the sense that Yes had reached an all-time high, but could actually be showing a new and potentially decisive trend in the opposite direction.  Well, that theory has just gone out of the window, because whatever Survation's fieldwork dates were, they'll certainly have been much more recent than YouGov's.

Admittedly, it's still very hard to reconcile the trend reported by YouGov with what we've been seeing from elsewhere.  We can now very safely assume that the apparent increase in the No lead was just margin of error 'noise', but if Panelbase and Survation are right, you'd have expected YouGov to show a further boost for Yes, not merely a static position disguised by noise.  So there's still at least a small degree of uncertainty about the underlying trends, and it may take two or three more polls for the mists to entirely clear.

The biggest effect of the new Survation poll will of course be psychological.  It's just been bad luck, but the last three polls to be published were all from No-friendly firms, and that allowed the false impression to take root in a few sections of the media that there was some kind of polling consensus of a significant No lead.  Tonight's numbers will very abruptly break that spell.  (Except maybe in those publications which always report "ANOTHER blow for Salmond" regardless of what the numbers show!)

*  *  *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Tonight's update of the Poll of Polls sees the No lead hold steady at 11% when Don't Knows are taken into account - but that remains lower than any No lead seen prior to a few weeks ago, and is barely half of the lead recorded back in September.  Meanwhile, after undecideds are stripped out, the gap has slightly narrowed again.

MEAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 43.6% (+0.1)
No 56.4% (-0.1)

MEAN AVERAGE (not excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 37.2% (+0.4)
No 48.2% (+0.4)

MEDIAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 43.3% (n/c)
No 56.7% (n/c)

(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the pollsters that have been active in the referendum campaign since September 2013, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are six - YouGov, TNS-BMRB, Survation, Panelbase, Ipsos-Mori and ICM. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample. Changes in the Poll of Polls are generally glacial in nature due to the fact that only a small portion of the sample is updated each time.)

Here are the long-term trend figures, with updates prior to Easter recalculated to remove the inactive pollster Angus Reid ...

The No campaign's lead in the Poll of Polls mean average (not excluding Don't Knows) :

Sep 2013 - 21.6%
Sep 2013 - 21.4%
Sep 2013 - 19.4%
Oct 2013 - 18.8%
Oct 2013 - 18.4%
Oct 2013 - 18.2%
Nov 2013 - 18.4%
Nov 2013 - 18.0%
Dec 2013 - 17.0%
Dec 2013 - 16.8%
Dec 2013 - 16.4%
Jan 2014 - 14.4%
Jan 2014 - 14.2%
Jan 2014 - 14.2%
Jan 2014 - 15.2%
Feb 2014 - 15.0%
Feb 2014 - 15.5%
Feb 2014 - 15.5%
Feb 2014 - 13.7%
Feb 2014 - 13.3%
Feb 2014 - 14.2%
Mar 2014 - 14.2%
Mar 2014 - 14.5%
Mar 2014 - 14.5%
Mar 2014 - 14.7%
Mar 2014 - 13.8%
Mar 2014 - 13.0%
Mar 2014 - 12.5%
Apr 2014 - 12.5%
Apr 2014 - 12.7%
Apr 2014 - 12.7%
Apr 2014 - 12.3%
Apr 2014 - 11.4%
May 2014 - 11.2%
May 2014 - 11.2%
May 2014 - 11.5%
May 2014 - 13.3%
Jun 2014 - 12.1%
Jun 2014 - 12.1%
Jun 2014 - 11.3%
Jun 2014 - 9.9%
Jun 2014 - 10.3%
Jun 2014 - 10.7%
Jul 2014 - 11.0%
Jul 2014 - 11.0%

Believe me when I say to you, I hope the Middlelanders love their children too

Well, it's now official from the BBC website - the unspoofable Tory MP Rory Stewart has abandoned his "Hands Across the Border" wheeze of 100,000 people forming a human chain in a location up to 68 miles south of the Scotland-England border.  He's taken this tragic decision for "logistical" reasons.  Hmmm.  I wonder if those "logistical" problems might conceivably include - a) not enough people, and b) the wrong border?

Rory's Plan C (it shouldn't be forgotten that "Hands Across the Border" was itself a replacement for an earlier plan to organise a mass walk) is the building of a border cairn to symbolise the love and respect that at least seven members of his local Conservative association have for Scotland - but only if it doesn't have the impudence to become an independent country, of course.  It remains to be seen whether the "border" where this cairn is to be located will be the actual border, or instead the border between the bit of England south of Hadrian's Wall and the bit of England north of Hadrian's Wall.  It would be rather amusing if Rory still hasn't worked out where Scotland starts.

The BBC article also contains the funniest caption on a photo I've seen for a long time.  It reads : "Rory Stewart said Scotland would be missed for personal reasons."  That's a bit like the brief, apologetic obituary that a family member might write for a mass murderer : "OK, we know, but we'll still miss him for personal reasons."

"Obituary" being the operative word.  If there is a Yes vote in September, it wouldn't surprise me if the London media don't report on Scotland becoming an independent country, but instead declare : "Scotland died today at the age of 307.  She wasn't much cop at anything, but she'll still be missed by one or two people as she was occasionally known to make a half-decent cup of tea."

Wisdom on Wednesday : Never forget how fortuitous our opportunity is...

"If I had the chance to be independent from the Tory-Liberal-New Labour bunch, I'd jump at it."

Film director Ken Loach.

Anecdotal evidence for Shy Yes Syndrome

You might remember that ICM tainted the results of their last-but-one referendum poll by asking a creepy introductory question that enquired how "comfortable" people felt about being asked the question they were about to be asked, ie. should Scotland be an independent country.  The firm's stated reason for doing this was that there were "anecdotal" suggestions of the existence of Shy No Syndrome, ie. people telling pollsters that they plan to vote Yes or are undecided when they actually plan to vote No.  The "comfort" question was intended to test whether the "anecdotes" were grounded in reality.

But the obvious question to ask is - where exactly were these "anecdotes" originating from?  ICM are a London-based firm, so it's highly unlikely that their employees had been randomly picking up intelligence on the street.  I was very struck the other night when I read an Alex Massie blogpost that I overlooked a few weeks ago, which paraphrased the No campaign's private spin on the polling situation in terms that were eerily similar to Martin Boon's explanation of what ICM were testing for - ie. this could be 1992 all over again, but with shy Tories replaced by shy Nos.  Could it be that ICM's political contacts in London (who are, let's face it, likely to be overwhelmingly sympathetic to the No campaign) have been whispering in their ear : "Listen chaps, you're making a big blunder here.  You'd better start introducing a Shy No Adjustment, otherwise you're going to have egg on your face on September 19th."

The reality is, of course, that if ICM had the same number of contacts on the Yes side, they'd be hearing an altogether less fantastical message - that it is much, much harder for people to openly admit to supporting independence, and therefore the existence of Shy Yes Syndrome is far more probable than the existence of Shy No Syndrome.  For pity's sake, I'm a pro-independence blogger, and I blog under my real name and a real photo, but even I had to force the words out last year when a group of English people asked for my opinion on independence.

To reinforce that point, it's well worth taking note of something that Scottish Skier told us on a recent thread.  He revealed that the mother of a friend of his had been interviewed by Ipsos-Mori, and had told them she was undecided about how to vote, even though she actually plans to vote Yes.  That's fairly clear-cut anecdotal evidence for Shy Yes Syndrome, and must rival anything that was being whispered in ICM's ear a few weeks ago by the siren voices of the London establishment.  The only health warning I would put on this is that there can't be all that many Yes voters in Ipsos-Mori's sample who are pretending to be Don't Knows, for the simple reason that there aren't all that many Don't Knows in Ipsos-Mori's results, and at least some of them must be genuinely undecided.  But we shouldn't discount the possibility that there also Yes people who are so embarrassed that they pretend to be straight Nos, and indeed Don't Knows who pretend to be Nos.

ICM followed up their initial test by asking the same 'comfort' question in last month's poll, but mercifully shifted it to the end of the question sequence where it couldn't taint the headline results.  But they also kept the results a secret that time, which is mildly disturbing.  The question is - are they just doing this testing for research purposes, or are they seriously toying with the idea of artificially adjusting the No vote upwards in future polls?  After the 1992 disaster, they did introduce a "spiral of silence" adjustment which artificially increased the reported Tory vote - but the difference in that case was that the existence of Shy Tory Syndrome had been conclusively proven by the small matter of a general election result.  If they start playing silly buggers in their referendum polls on the basis of no concrete evidence at all, and if there's clear reason for suspecting that they're doing it after pressure was applied by the No camp, then it will be nothing short of outrageous.

The next ICM poll for Scotland on Sunday should be out either this coming weekend, or the weekend after that.  In the past, methodological changes have not always become apparent straight away, so it will be well worth keeping an eye out for anything in the results that doesn't entirely make sense.

*  *  *

I was canvassed for only the second time in my life yesterday - and I'm delighted to say that it was by Yes Scotland!  It was very brief and to the point - have I given any thought to how I will vote in the referendum, which party do I normally vote for, and thanks for your support.  However, he did identify which side he was on before he asked the questions, so that will obviously be impacting on the results that the canvassing produces.

I was feeling slightly harassed when I came to the door, so my apologies to the man in question, just in case he's reading this!

A few more bits and bobs from the TNS-BMRB poll

One thing that always amuses me when I read through the TNS datasets is the crossbreak that shows how the people who are certain not to vote in the referendum are planning to vote in the referendum.  In this case, 50% of definite non-voters are "planning to vote No", 10% are "planning to vote Yes", and the remainder are "undecided".  What exactly is the point of the voting intention numbers taking account of people who have already decided not to vote?  I can only think of two realistic explanations - a) it's assumed they might not have properly understood the question about how likely they are to vote (in which case it would probably be better to improve the wording of the question), or b) it's assumed they might not be telling the truth.

For what it's worth, though, if we take those people at their word and strip them out of the voting intention numbers, it's enough to reduce the overall No lead by 1.2% at a stroke (the 58.6%-41.4% lead becomes a 58.0%-42.0% lead).

Although this shouldn't really matter, it's intuitively encouraging to see that the Yes vote in this poll is very nearly as high on the raw numbers as it is on the weighted results.  That doesn't often happen, because Yes support is concentrated in groups that typically need to be upweighted in polls (such as younger and lower-income people).  It's also a relief to see that respondents' vote recall on the raw numbers reflect the fact that the SNP won the 2011 election comfortably.  There have been so many previous TNS polls in which more people recalled voting for Labour than for the SNP that I was beginning to wonder if false memory might be mucking up the weighted results, but thankfully that's not a concern in this particular poll.

As we've discussed a number of times before, TNS have a very odd weighting scheme which essentially assumes a 100% turnout.  People who say they didn't vote in 2011 or who can't remember how they voted are sharply upweighted to match the rate of abstention in the 2011 election.  But for the life of me, I just cannot understand the logic of treating people who can't remember how they voted as if they were non-voters.  Again, the assumption must be that all of them are lying or misremembering, but even if that's the case (highly unlikely), how can TNS possibly calculate the correct target figures for the proportion of 2011 non-voters who can be assumed to now be wrongly saying that they voted but can't remember how?  It's hard not to conclude that there must be a hell of a lot of random guesswork going on here.  As it happens, people who say they can't remember how they voted in 2011 almost always break heavily for No in TNS polls, which means that if the upweighting doesn't have a rational basis, then it will be artificially boosting the No lead (albeit only by a modest amount) in the headline numbers.  In this case, the 92 'can't remembers' in the raw numbers are upweighted to count as 135 'virtual' respondents.

The reality is that a lot of people who didn't vote in 2011 are probably embarrassed to admit that to pollsters, which means that what TNS are doing is fundamentally misconceived - if they want to ensure non-voters are properly represented, they should really be looking for some of them in the "voted Labour/SNP/Tory" columns.  The mistake may not be having a huge net impact on the headline numbers, because people who openly admit to not having voted in 2011 (as opposed to the 'can't remembers') actually split between Yes and No in much the same way as the rest of the sample, meaning that upweighting them sharply may not cause a massive distortion.  But an unwise weighting scheme still introduces a degree of uncertainty into proceedings that we could well do without.

Extraordinary : the opinion poll the No campaign were gloating about last night actually shows a DECREASE in the No lead

There have been a lot of contradictory suggestions about what "the main lesson" of the new TNS-BMRB referendum poll is, but to my mind the most important lesson is that when the No campaign crow about a poll in advance, it's no longer safe to automatically conclude that the No lead must have increased, or even remained static.  With the TNS datasets having been released on Tom Hunter's website, we now know that the No lead has in fact fallen by 0.6% after undecideds are stripped out.

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 41.4% (+0.3)
No 58.6% (-0.3)

41.4% is also (albeit only fractionally) a new high watermark for the Yes vote with TNS-BMRB in the campaign so far - the previous high was 41.3%.

Even on the headline numbers that take account of Don't Knows, it turns out that No have been heavily flattered in the published figures by the effect of rounding.  Here is the position when rounding is only to one decimal place -

Yes 32.2% (+2.6)
No 45.6% (+3.2)

So the "widening of the gap" that the No campaign are wittering about (spin which one or two media outlets have stupidly - if predictably - fallen for hook, line and sinker) amounts to a statistically insignificant 0.6% - exactly the same amount by which the gap has narrowed on the more important measure that excludes undecideds.

The one silver lining I can see for No in this poll is that, in contrast to the last couple of TNS polls, respondents who say they are certain to vote are only very fractionally more likely to say they will vote Yes.  However, the TNS figures after turnout filters are applied have tended to be much more volatile than the headline numbers, so not too much should be read into that.  And the news is actually pretty good among respondents who say they are either certain or very likely to vote - the Yes vote among that group (with undecideds excluded) stands at 42.6%, which is very similar to last month's figure of 43.4%.

*  *  *

In other polling news, the Tories once again seem to be standing on the brink of crossover in the GB-wide polls for next year's general election.  The last couple of YouGov polls have shown Labour's lead shrink to just 1 and 2 points respectively.  What will be the implications for the referendum if it becomes unambiguously clear over the next few weeks that David Cameron is heading for another five years in Downing Street?  I think we can all hazard a guess...

New TNS-BMRB poll shows 2% increase in support for independence

Well, the plot thickens.  As we were waiting for a poll in the Sunday Post that No campaign staffers seemed to be crowing about on Twitter, a post quietly appeared on John Curtice's blog revealing figures from a new TNS-BMRB poll commissioned by Tom Hunter, showing a marked increase in support for both Yes and No.

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 32% (+2)
No 46% (+4)

Don't be fooled by the fact that support for No appears to have increased more than support for Yes.  As the numbers of Don't Knows decrease, the side in the lead actually needs a bigger increase just to stand still on the underlying figures.  And stand still is exactly what the No campaign have done.  Here are the figures with Don't Knows stripped out...

Yes 41% (n/c)
No 59% (n/c)

There have now been several TNS-BMRB polls in succession showing exactly the same 41/59 split.  That's a double-edged sword - although it fails to provide any corroboration for the Panelbase and Survation polls last month that saw the No lead slumping to an all-time low, it also fails to back up the contrary suggestions in the two most recent YouGov polls (both conducted later than the Panelbase and Survation polls) that Yes have gone into reverse.  According to Professor Curtice, the fieldwork for this poll was conducted over two weeks in mid-June, placing it earlier than the YouGov poll that was published on Monday evening, but around the same time as the previous YouGov poll.  If we're being invited by the No campaign to take the two YouGov polls as a package, which between them point to a new pro-No swing, then the fieldwork for TNS should have come late enough to detect the same trend - but fortunately it's detected no such thing.  That increases the likelihood that what we've been seeing from YouGov has simply been meaningless margin-of-error 'noise'.

However, the jury must remain out on that question until we see what the Sunday Post have for us in the morning.  I suppose there's an outside chance that Hunter may have given the Post permission to use his figures, but there's certainly no mention of any such arrangement in Curtice's post.  So my best guess is that there must be another poll, possibly from Survation. (UPDATE : I'm not quite so sure now.  McDougall has just excitedly tweeted the TNS numbers, which might conceivably indicate that's the poll he was so pumped up about earlier.  Is a poll showing a 2% increase in support for independence really the best they've got? Time will tell.)

There's also no mention in Curtice's post of what the TNS numbers are after turnout filters have been applied - in the last couple of polls those figures were markedly better for Yes than the headline numbers, and were more in line with what we're used to seeing from Yes-friendly pollsters such as Panelbase.  We may have to wait for the publication of the datasets to discover whether that is still the case.

*  *  *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Although the No lead has crept up very fractionally in this update of the Poll of Polls, I suspect that may well be an illusion caused by the effect of rounding.  We'll have to wait for the datasets to find out, but a rough calculation suggests it's perfectly possible that the unrounded Yes vote in the TNS poll is identical to last time around after Don't Knows are excluded, or has even increased very slightly.

The No lead in this update remains lower than at any time prior to last month.

MEAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 43.5% (-0.1)
No 56.5% (+0.1)

MEAN AVERAGE (not excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 36.8% (+0.3)
No 47.8% (+0.6)

MEDIAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 43.3% (-0.3)
No 56.7% (+0.3)

(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the pollsters that have been active in the referendum campaign since September 2013, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are six - YouGov, TNS-BMRB, Survation, Panelbase, Ipsos-Mori and ICM. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample. Changes in the Poll of Polls are generally glacial in nature due to the fact that only a small portion of the sample is updated each time.)

Here are the long-term trend figures, with updates prior to Easter recalculated to remove the inactive pollster Angus Reid ...

The No campaign's lead in the Poll of Polls mean average (not excluding Don't Knows) :

Sep 2013 - 21.6%
Sep 2013 - 21.4%
Sep 2013 - 19.4%
Oct 2013 - 18.8%
Oct 2013 - 18.4%
Oct 2013 - 18.2%
Nov 2013 - 18.4%
Nov 2013 - 18.0%
Dec 2013 - 17.0%
Dec 2013 - 16.8%
Dec 2013 - 16.4%
Jan 2014 - 14.4%
Jan 2014 - 14.2%
Jan 2014 - 14.2%
Jan 2014 - 15.2%
Feb 2014 - 15.0%
Feb 2014 - 15.5%
Feb 2014 - 15.5%
Feb 2014 - 13.7%
Feb 2014 - 13.3%
Feb 2014 - 14.2%
Mar 2014 - 14.2%
Mar 2014 - 14.5%
Mar 2014 - 14.5%
Mar 2014 - 14.7%
Mar 2014 - 13.8%
Mar 2014 - 13.0%
Mar 2014 - 12.5%
Apr 2014 - 12.5%
Apr 2014 - 12.7%
Apr 2014 - 12.7%
Apr 2014 - 12.3%
Apr 2014 - 11.4%
May 2014 - 11.2%
May 2014 - 11.2%
May 2014 - 11.5%
May 2014 - 13.3%
Jun 2014 - 12.1%
Jun 2014 - 12.1%
Jun 2014 - 11.3%
Jun 2014 - 9.9%
Jun 2014 - 10.3%
Jun 2014 - 10.7%
Jul 2014 - 11.0%

Marking your card for tomorrow

There's a new referendum poll out tomorrow in the Sunday Post.  If it follows the same pattern as the last poll in the paper on Easter Sunday, the results won't appear online until relatively late in the morning, in which case I may not be able to post anything about them for a few hours.  So to tide you over, here is the little I know at time of writing -

1) The No camp's embarrassment of a campaign chief Blair McDougall has tweeted about there being a poll tomorrow, so if he's referring to the one in the Sunday Post it must be at least spinnable as good for No - although that could mean anything from a statistically irrelevant margin-of-error increase in the No lead to something more substantial.  (I haven't seen any more immature gloating from the No campaign's "Director of Communications" Rob Shorthouse yet, although that probably just means that he's out drinking again.)

2) The last Sunday Post poll was conducted by Survation.  That doesn't necessarily mean this one is another Survation poll, but they'd be the most obvious suspect.  If so, any change will be from the wafer-thin 5% No lead recorded in the company's last poll - an all-time low.  As I pointed out at the time, the last poll was slightly questionable because 16-24 year olds were breaking unusually well for Yes, and that part of the sample had been very sharply upweighted, meaning that any error caused by random sampling variation would have been magnified.  So when you bear that in mind, a reversion to the mean in this new poll (assuming it is from Survation) would not be at all surprising.  An 8-10 point lead for No has been much more typical for Survation.

3) A Sunday Post journalist has tweeted that the poll shows "some unexpected findings".  One way of interpreting that (although this is just wild speculation) is that the increase in the No lead is over and above a reversion to the mean, which might be said to be surprising in the sense that this week's YouGov v Survation dispute was predicated on the assumption that Survation are a much more Yes-friendly pollster than YouGov.  But even if this does turn out to be a Survation poll with a No lead above the company's normal range of 8-10 points, it's important not to jump to conclusions.  It's perfectly possible that random sampling variation could cause one poll with an unusually low No lead to be followed by one with an unusually high No lead.  That's exactly what happened with ICM recently - a low lead of 3 was followed by a high lead of 12, and the next month it settled back down to a more typical figure of 7.  In reality, all of those apparent shifts in opinion were probably illusions.

UPDATE : An anti-independence troll on Twitter has claimed that it's a TNS poll rather than Survation.  I'm inclined to say that seems implausible, although I wouldn't completely dismiss the idea out of hand, because it's amazing how many Twitter trolls turns out to be salaried, in-the-loop No campaign staffers.

UPDATE II : Mystery solved - there's a TNS poll out, but on Tom Hunter's website.  Survation remain the favourites for the Sunday Post, who I imagine would be unlikely to simply recycle figures from Hunter's website (although you never know, I suppose).