Bombshell Redfield & Wilton poll shows a clear majority for independence, but the SNP slip to second place in YouGov poll, posing the question for SNP members: is factional Humza rule REALLY worth losing the general election for?

It's been an ongoing frustration that although the monthly Redfield & Wilton polls tend to show a high Yes vote in the upper 40s, it's been a long time since they've shown an outright lead for Yes.  I had to check back to see when it last happened, and it was the autumn of 2022, so a year and a half ago.  It's finally happened again.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Redfield & Wilton)

Yes 51% (+3)

No 49% (-3)

It may be, of course, that in a monthly poll that typically shows Yes in the high 40s, you're bound to eventually get one putting Yes in the low 50s sooner or later due to normal sampling variation.  So the breakthrough may not be real - we'll have to wait and see what next month's poll brings.  But even taking into account the standard margin of error, support for independence must at the very least be in the upper 40s, which means it's held up extraordinarily well as the SNP's own vote has slipped back.

And by goodness have the SNP slipped back.  Full-scale Scottish polls from YouGov are rarer than the monthly Redfield & Wilton polls, and so attract more interest when they pop up - and the new one is a landmark because it shows the SNP in second place in Westminster voting intentions for the first time since the independence referendum a decade ago.

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election (YouGov):

Labour 33% (+1)

SNP 31% (-2)

Conservatives 14% (-6)

Reform UK 7% (+5)

Liberal Democrats 7% (+2)

Greens 5% (-)

Seats projection (with changes from 2019 general election): Labour 28 (+27), SNP 18 (-30), Conservatives 6 (-), Liberal Democrats 5 (+1)

I've heard it suggested recently that at least Humza Yousaf has steadied the ship for the SNP and things haven't been getting any worse.  These numbers would perhaps suggest that isn't true.  The percentage comparisons are with the previous YouGov poll, which was conducted last October when Yousaf had already been in harness for six or seven months.  So it looks as if things have got signficantly worse since then.  The painful truth for SNP members is that it just doesn't seem to be working with Yousaf as leader, and it may well be that if defeat is to be averted, the leadership problem will have to be addressed before the general election.  Ideally that means a change of leader (bearing in mind that unlike the Tories, the SNP are blessed with a popular alternative leader), but at the very least it means putting an end to the factional rule that has been going on since the leadership election, by bringing Kate Forbes and her key allies back into the heart of government.

As I've noted before, if you're more loyal to your faction than you are to your party or your movement, that tends to imply you think you have the luxury of guaranteed power.  Those days are over, but the psychology of Humza's followers may not have caught up with that reality yet - which could prove deadly.

Although YouGov are showing a modest No lead on the independence question, they nevertheless are in agreement with Redfield & Wilton that the trend on independence support seems to be completely unaffected by the slump in the SNP vote.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (YouGov)

Yes 47% (-)

No 53% (-)

So there are still more than enough independence supporters out there to theoretically win a first-past-the-post election for the SNP, but it ought to be a statement of the obvious that this will depend on the SNP making the election about independence and actually giving Yes supporters something to vote for.  At the moment, perversely, they seem to think doing the complete opposite of that is the key to victory, and it's therefore perhaps unsurprising that YouGov are showing the SNP currently have the backing of just 56% of people who voted Yes in 2014, compared with 21% for Labour.

Now, here's a question which I'm not claiming to know the answer to.  Why do Redfield & Wilton self-fund a full-scale Scottish poll every single month even though they have no obvious Scottish connections and it must cost them a small fortune each year?  Is there a story behind the funding of these polls that we're not aware of, and could there be a partisan agenda at play?  One possible clue is in the nature of the write-ups that Redfield & Wilton provide on their website, and which as I've pointed out before seem to have a distinct unionist slant.  Month after month, they make a song and dance about the fact that independence trails behind one or two bread-and-butter issues such as health when Scottish voters are asked what is most important to them, even though that is completely normal and has been the case in pretty much every poll since time immemorial.

But this month Redfield & Wilton have dropped all subtlety.  They've mentioned the outright lead for Yes as an afterthought at the end of their long write-up, as if it's only a little curiosity of marginal interest, whereas in fact it's self-evidently and by some distance the most newsworthy part of the whole poll.  What's going on, guys?  What's the game?