Scot Goes Pop / Survation poll reveals that the Scottish public want to be represented by Team Scotland, and not Team GB, at the Olympic Games

The biggest significance of the arrival of 2021 has of course been Brexit, which is why no fewer than five of the questions in this blog's exclusive start-of-year Survation poll have been related to the EU.  But this is also (at least in theory) Olympic year, so I thought it might be a good moment to ask a population - used to seeing Scotland compete as a nation in its own right in football, rugby, cricket, curling and many other sports - how they feel about the fact that there is still no Team Scotland at the Olympic Games.  Previous polls over the years on this subject have shown wildly contradictory results, probably due to differences in question wording.  But I defy anyone to say that the following question isn't neutral.  My original proposed question was significantly revised by Survation, and what we ended up with is scrupulously even-handed.  In fact, if anything it might very slightly favour the 'Team GB' option, because it reminds respondents that British representation is the status quo, and many people do tend to revert to the status quo as a default if they have no strong feelings on a subject.

Currently, Scottish athletes represent Scotland at the Commonwealth Games, and Great Britain at the Olympic Games.  Do you think Scottish athletes should represent Scotland or Great Britain at the Olympic Games?

Scotland: 47%

Great Britain: 42%

With Don't Knows excluded, it works out as - 

Scotland: 53%

Great Britain: 47%

I do sometimes think that the British Olympic Association are their own worst enemies.  If they would just chill out a bit and allow people to feel that Scottish athletes do represent Scotland as well as Great Britain, if only informally, the demand for change might not be quite so great.  But on past form their reaction to a poll result like this is more likely to be to double down on saltire bans and the like.

Curiously, there's a huge majority for Team Scotland among women, and a small majority for Team GB among men.  That really doesn't make any sense in view of what we know about national identity among the genders, and probably helps to explain the fact that men were significantly more pro-No on the independence question in this poll.  It looks like random sampling variation led to there being a disproportionate number of female respondents who strongly identify as Scottish.

Indeed, the detailed figures in the datasets look more like a map of Scotland's identity wars than anything else.  A thumping 72% of SNP voters want a Team Scotland (although it would be interesting to know more about the reasoning of the 17% who prefer GB), whereas voters for all three unionist parties want the status quo.  The narrowest majority - 55% to 35% - is among Labour voters, and I suspect that margin would have been even tighter a few years ago, before the party lost much of its traditional support base to the SNP.  The rump Labour vote these days has a very different and much more British nationalist character.

In general it seems to be that the older or more affluent you are, the more British you feel.  Obviously being Yes or No on independence is a very strong predictor of Olympic team preference, but interestingly that isn't really the case for Remainers and Leavers.  Remain voters lean a bit more towards Scotland, and Leave voters a bit more towards GB, but the difference isn't massive.

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I've had three pieces in The National this week about other questions in the poll - you can read them HERE, HERE and HERE.

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There's still one more result to come - the belated Holyrood voting intention numbers.  If you'd like to be the first to know when the results are published, you can follow me on Twitter HERE. 

If this is on-the-record rather than a deniable anonymous briefing, it'll set a lot of minds to rest, including my own. Nicola Sturgeon is phenomenally popular, and if she has an indyref Plan B we're undoubtedly a lot better off *not* changing leader.https://t.co/KX71q9uqWB

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) January 22, 2021

Well, even I have a 'but' - there needs to be a Plan C of a plebiscitary election just in case the UK govt's legal challenge to a referendum succeeds. But this sounds like a huge step forward, so I'm certainly not going to be churlish.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) January 22, 2021