A major polling silver lining for the SNP: their leader has a positive net rating, something that would have been unimaginable during the Yousaf leadership

As you'll probably have seen, the Redfield & Wilton poll over the weekend was poor for the SNP, but there were two notable silver linings.  Firstly, support for independence continues to hold up astonishingly well in the context of SNP decline.

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 48% (-3)

No 52% (+3)

The apparent 3-point swing to No is almost certainly just margin of error noise, because the Yes lead in the previous poll was unusual for Redfield & Wilton, so we're probably just seeing a reversion to the mean. 48/52 or thereabouts has been fairly typical.

Perhaps even more important is that John Swinney has a positive net approval rating of +7.  That's pretty extraordinary if you think about it, because we've seen a number of polls over the last year in which every single politician asked about had a net negative rating.  Because perceptions of the leader are so important to election outcomes, that offers a glimmer of hope to the SNP.  Humza Yousaf consistently had dismal net ratings with Redfield & Wilton, so if anything, the assumption had to be that the SNP might perform worse under him than standard voting intentions suggested.  It's now at least possible to construct a scenario in which the moderately high regard that the public hold Swinney in could help the SNP perform better than the polls currently suggest.  The popularity of Kate Forbes should also help now that she's been made deputy in a blaze of publicity.

One important caveat is that the wording of the question about John Swinney was different from the one that has been used for Yousaf over the last year, so it may be that once people are asked about Swinney's actual performance as First Minister, he'll slip into negative territory.  However I doubt his ratings will be as bad as Yousaf's, and as I've said before, I'm pretty confident that when Redfield & Wilton start asking the head-to-head question about whether Swinney or Anas Sarwar would make the better First Minister, Swinney will hold a good lead.  It's also encouraging that 35% of respondents support Swinney becoming SNP leader and First Minister, with only 18% opposed.

I was asked on the previous thread whether Reform UK's 4% showing in the poll is implausible and therefore casts doubt on the rest of the results.  The simple answer is no.  There's been a consistency to the way Reform UK have crept upwards in recent Scottish polling, but they remain below their UK-wide numbers, which is what you'd expect based on how their predecessor parties performed.  Remember that Scotland proved itself perfectly capable of electing a UKIP MEP on one occasion, so there is a natural constituency for Reform here.  They could actually do the independence movement a favour by splitting the Tory vote and helping the SNP to win one or two key seats.

*  *  *

After the Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday, right-wing nutters were lauding the UK public for supposedly backing Israel, while left-wingers were bewildered and expressed disgust that the British people had indirectly backed a regime that is committing genocide.  The reality is that both groups are wrong, because the ordinary UK public probably had very little to do with the UK giving maximum points to Israel.  There was a determined internet advertising campaign, seemingly originating from the Israeli state itself, to persuade sympathisers across Europe to vote for the song up to twenty times each, which is the maximum allowed under the rules and would cost as little as £2.  The likelihood is that the vast majority of votes that Israel received in the UK came from a relatively small number of Israeli and American ex-pats, plus those politically sympathetic to Israel.  Just 2000 people could have generated as many as 40,000 votes, and remember with the non-political votes split between 25 different songs, it wouldn't necessarily have taken all that many votes to push Israel into the lead.

How would you prevent that kind of manipulation, which is tantamount to vote-rigging?  The obvious way would be to restrict each person (or each phone number) to only one vote.  But that would ruin the fun for a lot of people, myself included, who like voting for more than one song.