Congratulations to the Scottish Tories on entering the Guinness Book of Records for the most lies told about a single opinion poll

A week on, further details have been released from the Panelbase poll for the Sunday Times - thus allowing the Tories to triple the number of brazen and genuinely enormous lies that they've told about the findings.  Here is a full list of the whoppers so far...

1)  Ruth Davidson claimed that the poll shows support for an independence referendum has fallen to 27%.  In fact, it shows that 49.4% of respondents want an indyref within the next two years.  The claim of a decline in support is also misleading because the question asked was different from previous Panelbase polls.

2) Davidson claimed today that the poll found an increase in support for the Tories in Westminster voting intention after the Scottish budget.  In fact, the fieldwork was entirely carried out before the budget.

3) The Tories claimed today that the poll shows a 6% increase in support for themselves, and a 3% drop in support for the SNP.  In fact, it only shows a 3% increase for the Tories, and no drop at all for the SNP, who remain on 47%.

To be fair, there's a potentially innocent explanation for Whopper 3, because Panelbase had to issue a correction in September after inaccurate figures from their last poll got into circulation.  John Curtice's What Scotland Thinks website still lists those wrong numbers, which do indeed give the bogus impression that the new poll shows a 6% boost for the Tories and a 3% drop for the SNP.  For clarity, here are the correct figures -

SNP 47% (n/c)
Conservatives 27% (+3)
Labour 15% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 4% (-1)

The movement towards the Tories could just be margin of error noise, but if it's real, it does look very much like the new support is coming from other unionist parties, rather than from disgruntled SNP voters (as Davidson would have you believe).

As far as I can see, Labour's 15% support is a new all-time low for the party in Westminster voting intentions - although that can possibly be explained by the extreme scarcity of Scotland-only Westminster polls since a big chunk of Labour's core support drifted off to the Tories.

Jason Allardyce revealed on Twitter that the poll also shows that a majority of respondents believe independence is inevitable.  The Tories may find it harder to bluff their way out of that one.  Presumably there are more details in the Sunday Times, but I don't pay the Murdoch Levy, so I'll have to wait for the Panelbase datasets to appear (hopefully tomorrow).

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UPDATE : Having recalled the incorrect reporting of the previous Panelbase poll in September, I did some double-checking and discovered that What Scotland Thinks also still lists the incorrect figures from that poll on the independence question.  John Curtice seems to have relied on his own site's archive rather than the Panelbase datasets when he did his write-up last week, because he overlooked the error and incorrectly stated that support for independence had dropped by 2% (from 48% to 46%) whereas in fact it had only dropped by a statistically insignificant 1% (from 47% to 46%).  There do seem to be a whole string of errors on What Scotland Thinks related to Panelbase polls - not just the numbers, but also inaccurate reporting of question wording which leads to misleading comparisons between apples and oranges.  I don't think there's any malicious intent at all behind the mistakes, but given how much trust is placed in that site by the mainstream media and political parties, it's becoming a bit of a problem.  Hopefully someone will go through the archive with care and make corrections where needed, because it's clear that Curtice and co are beginning to confuse the hell out of themselves, never mind the rest of us.

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