Breakthrough: Sky News poll is first since the spring to show an outright pro-independence majority

Opinium / Sky News poll:

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 51% (+1)

No 49% (-1)

I can't help but raise a wry smile at Sky News reporting their own poll as "Scotland remains evenly split" - that's technically accurate because a 1% increase could very well just be margin of error noise, but I don't seem to recall that being the interpretation when No moved into a slight lead early this year.

It's important to stress that until today there had only been four polls on independence since the Holyrood election.  One of those was a dead heat and the other two showed reasonably narrow No leads.  It may be that if there had been a larger number of polls over the last few months, we'd have seen the occasional Yes lead as a natural result of clustering around the 50/50 mark.  So today's poll isn't necessarily evidence of a swing back to Yes - but the good news is that it may be evidence that things have been better than they've looked all along.  I suspect we may have been led astray by ComRes polls in particular, which seem to have displayed a No-friendly house effect in recent months (which is ironic, because at the turn of the year ComRes looked like a Yes-friendly firm).  If you strip out ComRes from the list of this year's polls, there's very little sign of No opening up a substantial lead at any point - it's remained pretty tight for the most part.

You'd need to have a heart of stone not to laugh at Scotland in Union's unfortunate timing.  It was only this morning that they published a propaganda poll purporting to show that Scots don't want to "leave the United Kingdom" and are opposed to a second indyref.  Within just hours, a bona fide poll commissioned by a mainstream media outlet has shown a pro-indy majority, and a plurality (albeit a narrow one) in favour of holding an independence referendum within the next five years.

I suspect the unionist parties will be reeling with disbelief at the party political voting intention numbers, which suggest that the SNP's "honeymoon" is still ongoing after fourteen-and-a-half years, and arguably point to a whole new honeymoon that started after the May election.

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election:

SNP 51% (+4)

Conservatives 21% (-4)

Labour 17% (-3)

Liberal Democrats 5% (-1)

Seats projection (with changes since 2019 election in brackets): SNP 57 (+9), Conservatives 1 (-5), Labour 1 (-), Liberal Democrats 0 (-4)

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot voting intentions:

SNP 51%

Conservatives 21%

Labour 18%

Liberal Democrats 6%

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot voting intentions:

SNP 40%

Conservatives 21%

Labour 16%

Greens 8%

Liberal Democrats 5%

Alba 0%

Seats projection (with changes from 2021 election in brackets): SNP 65 (+1), Conservatives 28 (-3), Labour 21 (-1), Greens 10 (+2), Liberal Democrats 5 (+1)

Although Alba have been rounded down to zero on this occasion (as far as I can recall the first time that's happened in any poll), I know party members will be relieved they were at least offered to respondents as an option - which strangely wasn't the case in the most recent Panelbase poll.  Two respondents did say they'd vote Alba, but the result perhaps isn't so surprising when you bear in mind how starved the party has been of media attention recently.

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Scot Goes Popcast: You can watch the full videos of my recent interviews with Yvonne Ridley and William Duguid HERE and HERE.