Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll: Douglas Ross is "not an appropriate person" to be a party leader or candidate for First Minister due to his 'gypsy traveller' comments, say voters by huge margin

Regular readers may remember that on both of the last two occasions I commissioned Scot Goes Pop polls, I was very tempted to chuck in a question about whether Douglas Ross should give up being a football referee and get on with the day job.  I decided against that because it seemed like a relatively frivolous question.  (And Craig Murray felt strongly that it would trivialise the whole exercise.)  But all of a sudden, it doesn't seem frivolous at all.  Douglas Ross is currently planning to hold four jobs simultaneously, and his dual Westminster / Holyrood mandate will be particularly complex, because he'll have to represent Moray at Westminster and the entirety of the Highlands & Islands at Holyrood.  It's getting a bit beyond a joke now, so I decided the time was right to use the new Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll to find out what the public think.

The Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross has said that if he is elected to the Scottish Parliament in May, he will not give up his seat in the UK Parliament until 2024, and that he will also carry on working part-time as an assistant football referee unless he becomes First Minister. Do you think he should give up one or more of these additional jobs to concentrate on his role as party leader? (Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll, 21st -26th April)

Yes 54%

No 26%

With Don't Knows excluded, that works out as a 67-33 split.

Of course the caveat you always have to put on this sort of result is that the Conservatives are an extraordinarily unpopular party in Scotland, and the people who don't like them will take any opportunity in an opinion poll to give them a good kicking.  But on this occasion that isn't so much of an alibi for Ross, because his own voters are split down the middle on the subject.  41% of people who voted Tory in the 2019 general election think he should stop being a referee and/or MP, and only 44% disagree.  

Women are slightly more forgiving of his extra-curricular activities than men (could that be because men are more likely to watch football and are therefore sick of the sight of him?).  But that's not much consolation for the Tories, because the gender gap is completely reversed on our next Ross-themed question.

  

Before becoming Scottish Conservative leader, Douglas Ross said his priority if he became Prime Minister for a day would be "tougher enforcement against gypsy travellers". He had previously said, also in relation to travellers, that he didn't like having to "bend over backwards for this ethnic minority". He has since apologised for his comments. In light of this track record, do you think Douglas Ross is an appropriate person to be leader of a major party and a candidate for First Minister? 

Yes 28%

No 52%

With Don't Knows excluded, a majority of 65-35 feel that Ross isn't a proper person to hold his current position.  It's hard to disagree with that - his comments as a councillor were pretty extreme and suggested to me that in those days he was only interested in entrenching his own position by pandering to the worst instincts of his narrow support base.  You live by the sword and you die by the sword - if you go down that road, you shouldn't really be expecting to hold senior office later in your career.

And what never ceases to amaze me is the chirpy, breezy way he gave the notorious "tougher enforcement against gypsy travellers" answer only four years ago - it was as if he'd been asked what his favourite flavour of ice cream was.

As I mentioned above, women seem to find his views especially repugnant - 56% of female respondents think he is not an appropriate person to be leader, and only 20% disagree.  Naturally SNP voters are the hardest on him, but pluralities of both Labour and Lib Dem voters think his comments should disqualify him.

It strikes me that this means, paradoxically, that the Tories remaining in second place in this election would be a good outcome for the pro-independence movement.  It would make Ross the de facto leader of the No campaign in any second referendum, and the public really don't seem to hold him in high regard.

I was keen to ask a question or two in the poll about the absurd contradiction at the heart of the Tories' pitch in this campaign.  They say that electors have the "opportunity" to stop a referendum by voting Conservative, which you'd think would automatically imply that there's also an opportunity to bring a referendum about by voting for other parties.  But no, apparently we can't have a referendum no matter how we vote.  So why would we need to vote Conservative to stop a referendum?  Answers on a postcard, folks.

In the initial draft of questions for the poll, I had this - 

The Conservatives say that they will not allow a second independence referendum to take place, regardless of the result of the Scottish Parliament election. They also say that an independence referendum can only be stopped if people vote Conservative in the Scottish Parliament election. What is your view of the Conservatives' position on whether an independence referendum can be held? 

a) It makes logical sense 

b) It is contradictory

I took that out, because it was more like a joke with a punchline rather than a meaningful poll question, but hopefully the point is made.  Instead, I went with this for tonight's third question...

The Conservatives claim that the current Scottish Parliament election is an opportunity for voters to stop an independence referendum by voting Conservative. Do you think this means that if pro-independence parties win a majority in the election, the Conservatives must logically accept that the people of Scotland have decided that an independence referendum should take place? 

Yes 43%

No 37%

With Don't Knows removed, it's a 54-46 split.  A closer result, but you'd expect that because anything to do with an independence referendum tends to divide opinion along unionist/Yesser lines.  74% of SNP voters think the logic of the Tories' campaign pitch is that a pro-referendum mandate must be respected, while 78% of Tory voters naturally take the opposite view.  As on many indy-related questions, Labour voters are intriguingly divided - 30% think a referendum mandate must stand, and 51% do not.

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There are lots more questions to come from this poll - Westminster voting intention numbers, independence voting intention numbers, and several more supplementary questions that should be of considerable interest to the whole independence movement.  If you'd like to be the first to know when they're released, feel free to follow me on Twitter HERE.