This morning brings word of a new Survation poll for Angus Robertson's Progress Scotland organisation, which goes 1990s retro by asking a multi-option question on Scotland's constitutional future, rather than a straight Yes/No question on independence. The results have been given as an exclusive to the Daily Record, which is fair enough - if you can get Pravda to report on a bad news story for Labour and their Precious Union, why not? The only snag, though, is that the Record have - true to character - presented the results in a somewhat garbled manner. But as I understand it, these are the top preferences of voters:
Independence inside the EU: 34%
Independence outside the EU: 8%
More powerful Scottish Parliament inside the UK: 19%
The status quo inside the UK: 22%
Abolition of the Scottish Parliament, return to direct rule from London: 17%
There are two ways of looking at these numbers. If the two pro-independence options are combined, they come to 42%, and if the three non-independence options are combined, they come to 58%, which is a bigger gap than in conventional Yes/No polls. But that can perhaps be partly explained by the very fact that there are more non-independence options than pro-independence options - some people without strong views tend to gravitate towards the middle option, no matter what it might be.
On the other hand, the three options that involve a more powerful Scottish Parliament command the support of 61%, compared to only 39% for either the status quo or for fewer powers. So clearly the "line in the sand" and "enough is enough" narrative from unionists has failed to chime with voters.
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Something very peculiar has been going on in the comments section of this blog over the last five days or so. What appears to be one person has been posing as an army of befuddled and indignant "casual readers", all posting anonymously and all with suspiciously identical writing styles, who purport to be downright *furious* that this blog used the easy-to-grasp concept of swing, introduced by David Butler as long ago as the 1950s, to extrapolate from last Thursday's local by-elections to a potential general election result. He's tried to dismiss Butler's concept as "hocus pocus" or "not cutting the mustard" - well, good luck with that, mate. The true reason for his anger is likely to be that the calculation shows that the SNP would have a national lead of around eight percentage points, putting them into landslide territory in Westminster terms. But he doesn't actually dispute the calculation, and nor can he, because anyone can replicate it for themselves. Instead, all he's left with is repeatedly spluttering "you can't extrapolate from local elections to Westminster".
Of course you can. In doing so, all you're saying is that if people vote in the same way in a general election as they do in local elections, and if last Thursday's results were typical, the SNP would win big across Scotland in a general election. So is there any particular reason to think people vote differently in general elections from local elections? Well, yes, recent history shows there is a modest amount of divergence. But here's the thing - the SNP have actually tended to do less well in local elections than in other types of elections. So if you make an adjustment to take account of that phenomenon, the SNP's big projected national lead would actually increase in a general election context, not decrease.
As the president of the Donald Trump Fan Club Of Somerset might put it: "what's your point, caller?"
