Heartbreak for Sunday Mail as they commission Survation poll expecting a No lead - and instead end up with the TWENTY-FOURTH consecutive poll to show Yes on 50% or higher

"Bombshell poll" screamed the traditionally Labour-supporting Sunday Mail, and I just knew that had to mean they were gloating that the run of twenty-two consecutive Yes majorities had come to an end, and that they had probably commissioned one of the two least Yes-friendly firms (either Survation or YouGov) in the hope of producing exactly that effect.  But here's the odd thing: there isn't a No lead.  They must be genuinely gutted about that, because both of the last two Survation polls showed only a two-point Yes lead if Don't Knows were left in.  If the Sturgeon-Salmond controversy had produced a really significant effect on public opinion, you'd certainly expect a swing bigger than the trivial one required to take us to 50/50.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Survation)

Yes 50% (-1)

No 50% (+1)

That's potentially just margin of error noise, and suggests that public opinion has remained fairly static since the Survation poll of early December.  There's no particular reason, therefore, to assume that a poll produced right now by one of the more Yes-friendly firms (Ipsos-Mori, Panelbase, Savanta ComRes or perhaps JL Partners) would no longer show a Yes lead.

The reality is that the sequence of Yes-majority polls was always going to be broken at some point - unless there was a further swing to Yes.  Why?  Because previous polls by several firms had put Yes on either 51% or 52%, which made it statistically inevitable, due to the margin of error, that an individual poll would eventually produce a figure of 49% or 50% even if public opinion remained static.  So in a sense we're just getting the inevitable out of the way today, and we can now look forward to future polls which still have a very decent chance of showing a Yes lead.

And in one sense the unbroken run for Yes actually continues - because this is the twenty-fourth consecutive poll to show Yes on 50% or higher, ie. either ahead or level.  That sequence stretches all the way back to a Panelbase poll commissioned by Wings last May which also showed a 50/50 split.

UPDATE:  I was chatting to my mum a few minutes ago, and I happened to mention the poll to her.  She said: "Well, in a way it's not that surprising, because even Alex Salmond said Scotland is not ready for..."  And I practically screamed: "WHAT?!  HE NEVER SAID THAT!"  She looked at me incredulously as if she knew for a fact that Alex Salmond had said Scotland wasn't ready for independence.  It was as if I was trying to convince her the sky is green.  "HE DIDN'T SAY THAT!" I repeated.  "Who did say it, then?" she asked me.  "NOBODY!  IT WAS A LIE!  THEY JUST MADE IT UP!"  She couldn't believe it.

If even my independence-supporting mum truly believed that Alex Salmond had said something he didn't, then this is a particularly dark episode for what passes for 'journalism' in this country.  This goes way, way beyond the usual sailing close to the wind - a downright lie has been told in the service of a sinister political agenda, and clearly members of the public have been successfully duped.  I trust there will be complaints lodged with the newspaper regulator IPSO about the Express front page, and in spite of IPSO's reputation, I see no reason why those complaints won't be upheld.  Given the seriousness and sheer cynicism of the intentional lie, the Express may even be forced to make a front page correction.

I gather also that one or two BBC journalists have given viewers the impression that Mr Salmond made the fictitious statement - if so, there may also be a case for complaints to the BBC, and then to Ofcom after the standard fobbing-off arrives in a thousand inboxes.

UPDATE II: I see that the Sunday Mail's report on the poll falsely claims that the Yes vote has fallen to 50% from 58% in October.  I suppose they can technically claim that isn't a direct lie, because there were polls from Ipsos-Mori and ComRes putting Yes at 58%.  However, it's deliberately misleading, because trends can only be measured by looking at polls from the same firm, and the highest Yes vote Survation have reported is 54%.  So in fact there's only been a four-point drop from the peak.