Sensational Panelbase poll shows SNP have further increased their enormous lead over the Tories

A few people have mentioned over the last few days that they'd just taken part in a Scottish voting intention poll for Panelbase. My assumption was that it was probably a private poll that would never see the light of day, because I couldn't believe a newspaper would commission such a poll in the middle of an unprecedented global crisis, but amazingly it turned out to be for the Sunday Times. The Holyrood figures are almost unbelievably good for the SNP - they're marginally better even than the figures in the previous Panelbase poll, which was commissioned by this very blog in late January.

Scottish Parliament constituency voting intentions:

SNP 51% (+1)
Conservatives 26% (n/c)
Labour 14% (n/c)
Liberal Democrats 6% (-1)
Greens 3% (n/c)

Scottish Parliament regional list voting intentions:

SNP 48% (+1)
Conservatives 26% (+1)
Labour 13% (-1)

I'll have to wait a few hours to find out the list numbers for the Lib Dems and the Greens, because I don't pay the Murdoch Levy and the preview of the article cuts out at that point!  But there's no doubt that the SNP would win a comfortable outright majority on results such as these.

I know from what people have said that the poll also asked about independence and the Alex Salmond trial (the latter possibly explains the weird timing of the exercise), but I can't see any information about those results yet.

I have to say I feel slightly cheated, because until I found out about the Panelbase poll a few minutes ago I was all set to write a blogpost entitled: "Hello!  Is it me you're looking for?"  One of our resident trolls had left a comment on the previous thread saying he couldn't wait to see how I would "spin the poll showing a 9% swing from the SNP to the Tories".  It turned out there was no such poll - he was referring to a tweet by a journalist from Hello! magazine (I'm genuinely not making this up) who apparently couldn't tell the difference between a poll and a tiny subsample of 99 people.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Paul Martin for sending me the full Sunday Times article.  The Liberal Democrats and Greens are both on 6% of the list vote - that's a 1% drop for both since January.

The independence figures are...

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 49% (-3)

No 51% (+3)

Luckily the Sunday Times are measuring percentage changes from their own previous poll in November, rather than from the more recent Panelbase poll commissioned by this blog, so they're very helpfully reporting this as a 2% increase for Yes!  For my money the Yes vote has held up remarkably well given that people tend to be much more cautious and conservative in the middle of a crisis.  A virtual 50/50 split in the current circumstances suggests there is considerable potential for Yes to build up a sustained lead if and when the attention of the public returns to the Tories' plans for an extreme Brexit.

Respondents to the poll feel that Nicola Sturgeon is responding better to the current crisis than Boris Johnson - she gets a net rating of +54 compared to Johnson's rating of +17.  That's highly significant, because fieldwork took place entirely after Johnson's much-lauded TV address announcing the lockdown.  Bear in mind, though, that it may be harder for Ms Sturgeon to keep such a high profile going forward, now that BBC Scotland are cutting back on TV news bulletins.  (It's hard to be too critical of that decision given the need for social distancing and to keep the number of people travelling for work to an absolute minimum.  Nevertheless, it does illustrate again that the BBC tend to regard London-based news as 'essential' and Scottish news as an optional extra.)

On the Alex Salmond trial, the poll finds that the impact on Nicola Sturgeon's reputation has been more or less neutral.  Mr Salmond himself fares somewhat less well, but it's scarcely a disaster for him - a majority of the sample either say that their opinion of him has not been changed, or that they now have a more positive view.