Breaking : Survation telephone poll underway

I've been contacted by a reader whose daughter has just been polled by Survation over the phone.  Questions included Yes or No to independence, Holyrood voting intention, and whether Jeremy Corbyn makes you more or less likely to vote Labour.

It's rare for Survation to conduct Scottish polls by phone (they generally use their volunteer online panel), but it's not completely unheard of.  We saw two telephone polls from them immediately before the referendum, and one immediately afterwards.  The first of the pre-referendum polls was commissioned by McDougall HQ, and unusually for a No campaign internal poll, was published - probably because they were panicking about the polling narrative in the media and wanted to calm things down.  The second was an eve-of-polling special for the Record, who in normal circumstances save money by commissioning online polls from Survation.

The new poll could be a private commission from Labour, in which case it'll never see the light of day, but I think it's more likely that a newspaper is splashing out on a telephone poll to mark the anniversary of the referendum.  If so, it's going to be absolutely fascinating to see what the findings are on independence, because this will be the first time we've ever seen the combination of a 'real world' data collection method (which in recent weeks has produced clear Yes leads) and weighting by recalled referendum vote (which more often than not has produced very slender No leads).  I genuinely don't know what to expect.

We'll also get the first meaningful pointer to whether the SNP's massive Scottish Parliament lead has been dented by Corbyn becoming UK Labour leader.