Titbits from the Survation data tables: it looks as if 2014 weighting has once again transformed a Yes lead into a No lead

The Survation data tables are now out, and accordingly I can address the question that someone asked me yesterday about the impact of 2014 recalled vote weighting on the independence numbers.  On the raw unweighted numbers, Yes are ahead by 54% to 46% (compared to a 51% to 49% lead for No in the published headline results).  It doesn't necessarily follow that Yes would have such a big lead if you simply stripped out the 2014 weighting, because other more innocuous demographic weightings are also applied, but nevertheless it does look likely that 2014 weighting has once again been enough to transform a Yes lead into a No lead.

Survation would probably say that is fully justified, because there are far too many Yes voters from 2014 in the raw sample, perhaps because independence supporters are more highly motivated to join online polling panels in the first place.  But more than a decade after the referendum, that's becoming a harder argument to sustain.  Ipsos have publicly stated that one of the reasons they don't weight by recalled indyref vote is the danger of false recall, which presumably becomes a bigger and bigger problem with every passing year.  I also suspect there might be a phenomenon of people who in retrospect wish they had voted Yes saying they actually did so.

A few months ago, our resident unionist trolls were trying to implant the idea that the traditional age divide on independence was becoming less clear-cut and that the very youngest voters were becoming more unionist.  There's certainly no sign of that pattern in this poll: 16-24 year olds would vote Yes by a monumental 83% to 17% margin, outstripping 25-34 year olds, who would 'only' vote Yes by 72% to 28%.  The youngest age group that would (narrowly) vote No is 45-54 year olds.

There's a similar neat pattern in party political voting intentions, with the Reform vote going up with each successive age group, apart from over-65s who to their credit ruin things by being less pro-Reform than 55-64 year olds.  The opposite pattern is seen with support for Greens - they have 28% support with 16-24 year olds, but only 5% with over-65s.  

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I've been asked whether in spite of my issues with the Alba Party, I would at least give Kenny MacAskill some credit for supposedly "reaching out" and trying to build "pro-independence unity" for the 2026 election.  The answer is a flat no, and that's simply because of the neverending incongruity between what Alba say and what they actually do.  You can't run a Mafia-style organisation that regularly expels good independence supporters for factional reasons and still expect to be taken seriously when you innocently issue calls for unity.  You can't vote in the Scottish Parliament to bring down a pro-independence government (as Ash Regan did last year) and still expect independence supporters to trust you when, with a sense of entitlement the size of Saturn, you demand that they lend you their vote on a supposedly "tactical" pro-indy basis.  You certainly can't expect much trust when you do a grubby deal to prop up the minority Tory administration on South Ayrshire Council in return for nothing more than an extra title and a fatter monetary allowance for the local Alba councillor.  And when a senior Alba member calls openly for the abolition of the Scottish Parliament just because of some obscure dispute over the deputy convenership of a committee, the issue goes beyond trust.  Yes supporters will quite rightly wonder whether a belief in independence and self-government are even in Alba's DNA, or whether if you scratch deep enough you'd find something very different there.  

At the very least, the empirical evidence demonstrates that Alba's leadership would always sell the independence movement down the river for a bauble or two without a second thought.  Yes, it's true that I remained committed to Alba until I was betrayed by people I had been foolish enough to trust (McEleny, Ahmed-Sheikh, Josh Robertson, Hamish Vernal and perhaps even Salmond himself to some extent), but that was simply because I didn't want to change parties too casually, and I thought the priority had to be to fight for positive change within the party I was actually a member of.  But my misgivings were always there in private.  Now that I've been expelled by the Stalinist extremists who own the party, I owe Alba no further loyalty and am free to say what I see.  And what I see of Alba is not pretty.  It's certainly not an organisation worthy of the trust of any independence supporter.