Independence Live interview

Just a quick note to let you know I was interviewed earlier this evening by Dr Mark McNaught on Independence Live. Topics included opinion polls, media attitudes to independence, and whether it's realistic to expect Boris Johnson to grant a Section 30 order. You can watch the interview via the tweet below.

BSS Show - Dr Mark McNaught interviews James Kelly. https://t.co/5zVn6NGlR2

— Independence Live (@IndyLiveStream) January 28, 2021

Panelbase poll is better for Yes than it appeared at first glance

So just to tie up some loose ends from the weekend - the Panelbase datasets have been published, and contrary to some previous suggestions it turns out that the standard independence question was asked after all.  So the question wording isn't an alibi for the slight drop in the Yes vote, but what is a partial alibi is the rounding of the results.  The raw numbers show Yes on around 52.4% and No on 47.6%, so they were within a smidgeon of being rounded up to 53-47 rather than down to 52-48.  In the overall scheme of things it's not really that far away from the two Panelbase polls in the summer showing Yes on 54%, which at the time was a record high for the firm.

With Don't Knows left in, Yes leads by five percentage points even on the rounded numbers (Yes 49%, No 44%). That contrasts with last week's Survation poll for this blog, in which the equivalent gap was just two points (Yes 45%, No 43%). I'd suggest, then, that the Panelbase poll is somewhat better for Yes than it may have looked at first glance.  It also contained a multi-option question about the various constitutional options, and incredibly, independence is more popular than the two other options (the status quo and greater devolution).  Gone are the days when we knew that a multi-option referendum would kill independence off by making a win for Devo More inevitable.

Andy Wightman's independent future

With 100 days to go until the Scottish election, I am considering standing as an independent candidate in Lothian. What do you think? Should I go for it?

— Andy Wightman MSP (@andywightman) January 26, 2021

The Lothian MSP Andy Wightman, who resigned from the Green group in the Scottish Parliament a few weeks ago over the trans issue, is running a Twitter poll asking whether he should stand as an independent candidate in Lothian at the forthcoming election (by which he presumably means the Lothian list). Although Twitter polls are unscientific and self-selecting, it's not an irrational thing to do, because probably what he wants to know first and foremost is whether his keenest supporters are behind him and would campaign for him.  At time of writing, the poll is running at 3-1 in favour of his candidacy, so I would imagine he'll press ahead.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing for the independence movement?  Mr Wightman is one of a relatively small number of people with enough of a personal following to have a realistic chance of being elected as an independent - but he doesn't quite have the profile of a Margo MacDonald or a Dennis Canavan.  If I was going to hazard a guess, I'd say the odds are maybe slightly against him.  I could imagine him perhaps getting between about 2% and 6% of the vote, and he'd need to be at the upper end of that scale to be elected.

At the last election, he was one of two Green MSPs elected in Lothian on 10.6% of the list vote.  If that vote is split this time, it would need to be virtually split down the middle to maintain the status quo with one Green MSP and Mr Wightman as an independent MSP.  If, on the other hand, it splits 3% for Mr Wightman and 7% for the Greens, Mr Wightman would miss out and there would be only one Green MSP - which would probably cost us one pro-indy seat.

But of course it's not as simple as that, because Mr Wightman has admirers from outside his former party who would consider voting for him as an independent even though they would never have voted Green.  So it's possible that the combined pool of potential Wightman and Green voters is wider than the pool of potential Green voters alone.

In any case, this is about more than just crude considerations of electoral advantage.  Mr Wightman is by general consensus one of the most impressive MSPs, and the parliament would be of poorer quality without him.  While other parties (most obviously the SNP) have suffered terrible public divisions over the trans issue, the Greens have maintained a fiction of unity and seemingly imagined that there would never be any political cost to painting anyone who disagrees with the official party line as a transphobe, a bigot, and unfit for civilised society.  It may be no bad thing if they belatedly learn the hard way that such an intolerant stance does, indeed, carry a cost.

Why Boris is extremely welcome in Scotland

Just a quick note to let you know that I've written today's online-only National Extra piece - it's about Boris Johnson's apparent belief that visiting Scotland this week will "save the Union", and what past precedents tell us about how likely that is.  You can read it HERE.  

I also had a piece in The National the other day about the Olymipc question in the Scot Goes Pop / Survation poll - you can read that one HERE.  

Memo to the Sunday Times: a legal referendum is not a "Catalan-style wildcat vote"

In a significant move, the SNP yesterday announced that it is prepared to call a wildcat referendum of its own if Boris Johnson refuses to grant one himself (4)

— The Sunday Times (@thesundaytimes) January 23, 2021

The Sunday Times also used the above language in its front page today, and added for good measure that the so-called "wildcat vote" would be akin to the one held in Catalonia - thus implying it would be illegal and presumably that its instigators could end up in jail.  All of that is completely and utterly untrue.  I've no idea whether it would be best characterised as a lie, or as utter cluelessness.

In reality, the plan Mike Russell set out the other day was to hold a legal referendum on independence, and to do it without Westminster's permission if necessary.  That is not a contradiction in terms.  "Westminster doesn't like it" is not synonymous with "illegal".  Any referendum would be held under the terms of an Act of the Scottish Parliament - which by definition means it would be the opposite of illegal or "wildcat".  If the UK Government feel that the Act in question exceeds Holyrood's powers, there is a well-established procedure for putting that to the test and obtaining a legal ruling.  There are three possible outcomes -

1) No legal challenge occurs, in which case an independence referendum is the law of the land.

2) The UK Government mount a legal challenge, but it is rejected by the Supreme Court, in which case an independence referendum is the law of the land.

3) The UK Government mount a legal challenge and the Supreme Court uphold it, in which case no referendum takes place.  (Although in a rational world the SNP would then move on to using a scheduled election as a de facto referendum.)

As you'll have noted, in none of those scenarios does an illegal or 'wildcat' referendum occur.  If anyone can face being royally mucked around and fobbed off with technicalities, there is - on paper at least - a strong case for complaining to the press regulator IPSO on the grounds that the Sunday Times' reporting is straightforwardly, demonstrably and verifiably inaccurate.

Scot Goes Pop / Survation poll: Nightmare on Ross Street as Tories face third place in Holyrood election - while pro-independence parties are on course to win 62% of seats

So in case you missed the video earlier (I thought I'd do something slightly different this time for the fun of it), here are the final results from the Scot Goes Pop / Survation poll - the Holyrood voting intention numbers.

Scottish Parliament constituency voting intentions (Scot Goes Pop / Survation poll, 11th - 13th January 2021):

SNP 51% (-2)

Conservatives 19% (-1)

Labour 19% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 9% (+3)

Scottish Parliament regional list voting intentions:

SNP 40% (-1)

Labour 19% (-1)

Conservatives 17% (-1)

Greens 11% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 8% (+1)

Seats projection (with changes from the 2016 election): SNP 69 (+6), Labour 23 (-1), Conservatives 19 (-12), Greens 11 (+5), Liberal Democrats 7 (+2)

This is the third Survation poll in a row to put the Tories in third place on the list - and the one prior to that had them in joint second place with Labour.  However, there's no sign of Labour making even the kind of modest recovery hinted at by the Westminster numbers from this poll - they're actually slightly down on both Holyrood ballots, and are facing a small reduction in their number of seats.  They're only in second place by default because the Tories are doing so badly.  

Another key difference with the Westminster results is that the SNP vote isn't down by as much.  A two point drop on the constituency ballot, and a one point drop on the list, could well just be margin of error 'noise'.

65 seats is of course the target for an overall majority, so the SNP's projected 69 seats would put them well over the top.  And the SNP and Greens in combination are projected to have 80 seats - meaning that pro-independence parties would have an extraordinary 62% of seats in the parliament.

Meanwhile, tonight has brought word of the twentieth poll in a row to show a pro-independence majority (or nineteenth in a row if you exclude one that asked a non-standard question).

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Panelbase)

Yes 52% (-4)

No 48% (+4)

The percentage changes are from the most recent Panelbase poll, which was the one I commissioned in November, and which put Yes on an all-time high for Panelbase of 56%. The four-point drop for Yes needs to be seen in that context - after a record-breaking result it's not unexpected to see a reversion to the mean in the next poll.  That said, the last four Panelbase polls have all shown Yes on between 54% and 56%, so tonight's 52% may indicate a genuine reduction (with one possible explanation being the Sturgeon/Salmond controversy).  On the other hand, if the true Yes vote had remained static on around 54%, the occasional result two points higher or lower than that would be totally normal due to the margin of error.  As ever, we'll just have to await more information from more polls.

UPDATE: Someone on the previous thread suggested that Panelbase may have asked a non-standard question this time, which would obviously render the percentage changes meaningless.  But I'm not sure whether that's really what happened, or whether the Sunday Times gave a misleading impression with their summary of the results.

Video Exclusive: the Scottish Parliament voting intention numbers from the Scot Goes Pop / Survation poll

Scot Goes Pop / Survation poll reveals that the Scottish public want to be represented by Team Scotland, and not Team GB, at the Olympic Games

The biggest significance of the arrival of 2021 has of course been Brexit, which is why no fewer than five of the questions in this blog's exclusive start-of-year Survation poll have been related to the EU.  But this is also (at least in theory) Olympic year, so I thought it might be a good moment to ask a population - used to seeing Scotland compete as a nation in its own right in football, rugby, cricket, curling and many other sports - how they feel about the fact that there is still no Team Scotland at the Olympic Games.  Previous polls over the years on this subject have shown wildly contradictory results, probably due to differences in question wording.  But I defy anyone to say that the following question isn't neutral.  My original proposed question was significantly revised by Survation, and what we ended up with is scrupulously even-handed.  In fact, if anything it might very slightly favour the 'Team GB' option, because it reminds respondents that British representation is the status quo, and many people do tend to revert to the status quo as a default if they have no strong feelings on a subject.

Currently, Scottish athletes represent Scotland at the Commonwealth Games, and Great Britain at the Olympic Games.  Do you think Scottish athletes should represent Scotland or Great Britain at the Olympic Games?

Scotland: 47%

Great Britain: 42%

With Don't Knows excluded, it works out as - 

Scotland: 53%

Great Britain: 47%

I do sometimes think that the British Olympic Association are their own worst enemies.  If they would just chill out a bit and allow people to feel that Scottish athletes do represent Scotland as well as Great Britain, if only informally, the demand for change might not be quite so great.  But on past form their reaction to a poll result like this is more likely to be to double down on saltire bans and the like.

Curiously, there's a huge majority for Team Scotland among women, and a small majority for Team GB among men.  That really doesn't make any sense in view of what we know about national identity among the genders, and probably helps to explain the fact that men were significantly more pro-No on the independence question in this poll.  It looks like random sampling variation led to there being a disproportionate number of female respondents who strongly identify as Scottish.

Indeed, the detailed figures in the datasets look more like a map of Scotland's identity wars than anything else.  A thumping 72% of SNP voters want a Team Scotland (although it would be interesting to know more about the reasoning of the 17% who prefer GB), whereas voters for all three unionist parties want the status quo.  The narrowest majority - 55% to 35% - is among Labour voters, and I suspect that margin would have been even tighter a few years ago, before the party lost much of its traditional support base to the SNP.  The rump Labour vote these days has a very different and much more British nationalist character.

In general it seems to be that the older or more affluent you are, the more British you feel.  Obviously being Yes or No on independence is a very strong predictor of Olympic team preference, but interestingly that isn't really the case for Remainers and Leavers.  Remain voters lean a bit more towards Scotland, and Leave voters a bit more towards GB, but the difference isn't massive.

*  *  *

I've had three pieces in The National this week about other questions in the poll - you can read them HERE, HERE and HERE.

*  *  *

There's still one more result to come - the belated Holyrood voting intention numbers.  If you'd like to be the first to know when the results are published, you can follow me on Twitter HERE. 

If this is on-the-record rather than a deniable anonymous briefing, it'll set a lot of minds to rest, including my own. Nicola Sturgeon is phenomenally popular, and if she has an indyref Plan B we're undoubtedly a lot better off *not* changing leader.https://t.co/KX71q9uqWB

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) January 22, 2021

Well, even I have a 'but' - there needs to be a Plan C of a plebiscitary election just in case the UK govt's legal challenge to a referendum succeeds. But this sounds like a huge step forward, so I'm certainly not going to be churlish.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) January 22, 2021

VIDEO: Preview of Friday's question in the Scot Goes Pop poll

Scot Goes Pop / Survation poll: A majority of Scottish voters think it "should be a priority" for the Scottish Government to regain our European citizenship rights and access to Erasmus - and Labour/the Lib Dems should act on the basis that Scotland voted to remain in the EU

At 11pm on Hogmanay, the people of Scotland (with the exception of the minority lucky enough to hold citizenship of an EU state) lost our automatic right to live, work and study in other European countries.  With a single bong of Big Ben, our horizons shrunk dramatically - they used to stretch as far as Athens, or Warsaw, or the Algarve, but now the Scilly Isles is about as exotic as it gets.  This has happened in spite of the fact that we resoundingly voted to remain full members of the EU.  It has happened in spite of the fact that our elected parliament repeatedly withheld legislative consent for laws that paved the way for an utterly unwanted Hard Brexit.  It has happened in spite of the fact that the anti-indepedence campaign in the 2014 referendum promised us that voting No would guarantee our European citizenship.  It is, not to put too fine a point on it, completely outrageous.

And yet now all three unionist parties tell us that we must "move on" and not try to regain what we've lost through no choice or fault of our own.  The SNP are repeatedly lectured about how they should abandon constitutional "obsessions" that would ultimately, let's not forget, have the enormous tangible benefit for people of restoring their full EU citizenship rights.  And yet the Tories just somehow know that the voters don't care about any of that, and would rather the Scottish Government concentrated on more mundane matters.

But is that actually true? There's only one way to find out...

As a result of the end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020, British people have lost their rights as EU citizens.  Do you think it should be a priority for the Scottish Government to regain these rights for the people of Scotland, such as being able to live and work in any EU country?  (Scot Goes Pop / Survation poll, 11th-13th January 2021):

Yes 52%

No 30%

There's a fairly solid desire to get EU citizenship rights back across most demographic and political groups - the main exceptions are Leave voters (albeit they don't reject the idea by as much as might be expected), Tory voters, and, weirdly, Liberal Democrat voters - who you'd expect to be strongly pro-European, and yet don't seem to be too fussed about getting their EU citizenship back.  However, that may just be a freakish finding caused by the small number of Lib Dem voters in the sample.

At the end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December, the UK Government chose to withdraw from the Erasmus programme, which has given university students the opportunity to study in other European countries.  Do you think it should be a priority for the Scottish Government to regain access to the Erasmus programme for Scottish students?

Yes 52%

No 29%

You'll be relieved to hear that Lib Dem voters do at least want to rejoin Erasmus! And among Leave voters it's a startlingly close result - not far off being a dead heat.  Unsurprisingly, it's the two youngest age groups, the ones who stand to suffer the most from Westminster's decision, that are keenest on making Erasmus a priority.  

Now that Brexit has been completed, what attitude do you think Labour and the Liberal Democrats should take to Scotland's relationship with the EU?

They should seek to regain EU citizenship rights for the people of Scotland, on the basis that Scotland voted to remain in the EU: 44%

They should accept Brexit, on the basis that the UK voted to leave the EU: 41%

This is a complex result, partly because it's so close, but also because Labour's and the Liberal Democrats' own voters take the opposite view from the sample as a whole, and think Brexit should be accepted.  But Labour are never going to win much on the basis of their current vote, and if they have any real ambition at all to get back into the game, they'll need to win back some of the voters they lost to the SNP in 2015.  And it looks like most of those people want Labour to change course and push back against Brexit.  No fewer than 70% of SNP voters take that view.  Sir Keir Starmer may have just put up another needless (and massive) obstacle to repairing his relationship with former Labour voters in Scotland.

* * *

There are more questions to come from the poll, including (belatedly) the Holyrood voting intention numbers.  If you'd like to be the first to know when the results are published, you can follow me on Twitter HERE.