*******FACTUAL INACCURACY IN A POLL QUESTION KLAXON*******

On the day that Kate Forbes delivered the Scottish Budget, the controversial anti-independence journalist Kevin Schofield made a trademark straw man reply to one of my own tweets.  He said he couldn't think of a bigger story that day than the SNP Finance Secretary being forced to resign just hours before he was due to give his Budget address.  It was an incredulous-sounding defence of the extreme prominence being given to the story across the media, ie. "how could anyone seriously doubt that it's justified?".  Now, it's quite true that Derek Mackay was the author of his own downfall and that his resignation was a significant embarrassment for the Scottish government, but there are reasonable suspicions that the timing of the Sun's exposé was just a bit too convenient from a journalistic point of view. Had they been sitting on the story for some time with the irresponsible intention of sabotaging the Budget process?  If so, was it tantamount to a declaration of war against a government that they urged their own readers to vote for?  And is the new hostile posture as a result of orders from the rabidly pro-Brexit Rupert Murdoch, who will presumably want the SNP to cease being such a thorn in the side of Boris Johnson?

We'll have to wait for more full-scale Scottish polls to find out whether Murdoch's tactics are succeeding in chipping away at public support for the SNP, and possibly for independence itself.  But there's a reassuring straw in the wind from the new GB-wide Opinium poll, which shows the SNP on an unusually high 6% of the vote.  (4% or 5% of the vote is more typical, although a post-election revision of the weighting scheme may be having an impact.)

Actually there are a number of supplementary questions about Scotland in the poll as well, but unfortunately one of them starts with a blatant factual inaccuracy, which misinforms respondents and thus effectively invalidates the results.  Here is the full wording -

An independence referendum in Scotland can only legally be held if the UK government agrees to it.  The UK government agreed to the 2014 referendum after the SNP won a landslide in the 2011 Scottish Parliament elections.  Supporters of another referendum argue that:

*Circumstances have fundamentally changed since 2014 where one of the main arguments was that Scotland would have been forced to leave the European Union if it became independent.  

*Scotland has now been "dragged out of the EU against its will" given that 62% of voters in Scotland voted Remain.

Opponents argue that:

*The 2014 vote was "once in a generation" and settled the issue.

*Holding another one opens the door to a "neverendum" where the question gets repeated until Scots eventually vote for independence.

Which comes closest to your view?

You probably won't need me to point out the inaccuracy, but I'll do it anyway.  It is flatly untrue to claim that an independence referendum "can only legally be held if the UK government agrees to it".  The UK is not Spain, and even private citizens in this country can legally organise consultative referendums, as Brian Souter proved two decades ago.  It may even be legally possible for the Scottish Parliament to specifically legislate for a consultative referendum without Westminster's consent - legal opinions differ on that point, and it has never been tested in court.  Essentially Opinium's question presents the UK government's untested opinion as indisputable fact.  That's an outrageous thing to do, although arguably the Scottish Government have to accept a small share of the blame, because they've been far too hesitant and apologetic in challenging the London narrative of "illegality".  Hopefully this sort of incident will be a wake-up call.

For what little it's worth, the result of the inaccurate question was that 43% of respondents across Britain think there should be another indyref, and 57% don't.  That's a bit closer than I would have expected.

Another question finds that 44% of respondents think that majority support for Yes in the opinion polls should be the determining factor in whether a referendum takes place, and only 23% say election results are more important.  In a way that suits us well enough, because Yes are in the lead in the most recent polls.  But as I've said many times, giving opinion polls a de facto status in the British constitution is utterly ludicrous.  There are never any guarantees that pollsters are getting it right.

35% of respondents expect Scotland to leave the UK within the next decade.  That's not a bad figure, but we could do with working on it a bit, because a greater sense of inevitability would undoubtedly work in our favour.