The fury over the Downing Street party could be a Cummings-style game-changer triggering a big resurgence in the pro-independence vote

One thing I'm quite proud of (although obviously there was a high degree of luck involved) is that I commissioned the opinion poll in June 2020 that turned out to be the first in the historic unbroken sequence of twenty Yes-majority polls, which continued all the way into the first few weeks of this year.  The reason I decided to commission a poll at that particular time was that there had been dismay in the independence movement about how the Yes lead that was established in the immediate aftermath of the 2019 general election had quickly vanished in the early days of the pandemic, and there was a theory that Dominic Cummings' escapades in Barnard Castle may have reversed that trend - if only we had a poll to find out.  It turned out there had indeed been a Yes resurgence - although of course it was impossible to be 100% sure that Cummings had caused it.

My guess is that the recent revelations about the Downing Street party have similar game-changing potential, and may actually be of an even greater magnitude.  After Allegra Stratton's video was leaked, non-political friends started messaging me about it, which is always a strong clue that an event has really cut through.  The first batch of GB-wide polls since the news broke has shown a sharp swing from Tory to Labour - which is also exactly what happened after the Cummings episode.  There's no guarantee that a poll now would show a corresponding swing from No to Yes, but I personally think there's quite a high probability that it would.  On this occasion, there's no need to commission a poll for psychological reasons, because as it happens the most recent poll showed a huge Yes majority anyway.  (That's a relief for me, because I'm too mentally exhausted from our October poll to even contemplate doing another one until a reasonable amount of time has elapsed.) But nevertheless this turn of events could muddy the waters somewhat, because my own suspicion was that the main reason for Ipsos-Mori showing a Yes lead was the poll's telephone methodology - I thought it was likely that an online poll conducted at the same time would continue to show a modest No advantage.  If an online poll does turn up before Christmas and shows a Yes lead, people will inevitably say "this confirms the Ipsos-Mori trend" - but it'll be equally possible that the swing to Yes has occurred since the Ipsos-Mori poll was conducted, and that it's mostly caused by the fallout from the party.

*  *  *

Any Wikipedia editors around?  As I've pointed out before, the Wikipedia entry for the Alba Party is in an absolutely indefensible state, and was clearly written to a large extent by editors with an anti-Alba agenda.  It's entirely normal for any Wiki piece on a political party to have a section that summarises criticisms of the party - but what is totally abnormal is the proportion of the article which is taken up by the criticisms section, the scathing tone of that section which veers into outright bias at one or two points, and its 'everything including the kitchen sink' approach.  Compare it to the almost reverential tone of the Wiki entry for the Scottish Green Party and you'll see what I mean.

I do edit Wikipedia occasionally, but as I'm on the Alba NEC, I have a feeling someone would cry foul if I touched the Alba entry, and would probably start quoting some obscure Wikipedia rule at me (there's one for every occasion).  But I do think that article needs to be sorted out by other editors - just to normalise it and make it comparable to the equivalent articles for other political parties.

An offer to my keyboard warrior critics: step out of the shadows and debate me openly on the next Scot Goes Popcast

There are a number of keyboard warriors on the Wee Ginger Dug blog, the vast majority hiding behind a username that does not reveal their identity, who seem absolutely obsessed with me.  They regularly make passive-aggressive comments, some of which refer to me by name, others that don't but leave little doubt that I'm the target.  I made one of these individuals an offer earlier this evening - come out of the shadows and actually debate with me properly on the next edition of the Scot Goes Popcast.  Let's see if your claims about me, or about the Alba Party, or your absolute faith in the SNP leadership to deliver an independence referendum in the absence of external pressure, can withstand scrutiny or cross-examination.

So far I haven't heard back from him, so I'm now going to extend that offer to any of the regular tag-team on Wee Ginger Dug, or indeed to anyone who participated in the extended and often abusive Twitter pile-on as I was publishing the results of our comprehensive poll on GRA reform and related gender issues.  The deadline to email me and accept the offer is tomorrow night - the reason for that is simply that I'm keen to record one more podcast of some description before the end of the year, and if no-one comes forward I'll need time to contact potential guests.

This is not in any way a trap - if you listen to the previous Popcast episodes you'll find that I don't hog the discussion and that guests are always given space to develop their points.  I won't edit the recording in any way unless there's an exceptionally good reason (for example a legal issue or something like that).

If you'd like to volunteer before the deadline, my email address is:  icehouse.250@gmail.com

On past form, this will be the moment when a large number of very noisy people suddenly fall totally silent.  But go on - prove me wrong.

Give me an effective tyrant?

For anyone who still doesn't understand - or pretends not to understand - why the Alba Party needs to exist, I can recommend Robin McAlpine's article from around a week ago that summarises the campaign of dirty tricks that the SNP leadership indulged in to essentially overturn the results of the democratic internal elections in November 2020 that saw candidates from the Common Weal slate and the Women's Pledge slate do exceptionally well.  As Robin notes, the end result of that campaign was that the victorious candidates were largely replaced by the very people they had been elected to replace, and without any further vote.  There can be no greater perversion of the democratic process than that.  Of course the leadership loyalist version of what happened is that some of the winners randomly took a huff and decided to leave the party, and that the runners-up valiantly stepped up to keep the show on the road.  The reality is more like the equivalent of constructive dismissal - if it's made impossible for you to fulfil the obligations of your elected role or of your mandate, departure is not really a voluntary choice.  Remember that not all of the people who resigned from the positions they had been elected to ended up joining Alba - some simply resigned and remained within the SNP.  If you genuinely have power and influence within a party of government, you're highly unlikely to relinquish that power to languish on the fringes of the party, and you're equally unlikely to give up that power to join a much smaller party.  The fact that so many people did resign is entirely consistent with Robin's account of a leadership that refused to accept the results of the vote.  The victorious candidates had been left, to coin a phrase, "in office but not in power", and they had nowhere left to go but the exit gate.

But this raises another question. However maddening and unacceptable these events were, are we missing a bigger picture? Some would phrase it this way: is taking a stand against the arrogance and entitlement of the likes of Alyn Smith and Fiona Robertson really more important than securing independence for this country?  If that was truly the choice, I would say no.  There has been many a tyrant down the ages who has nevertheless been an effective leader capable of guiding his followers to the promised land. (To take perhaps the most extreme example, it was the mass-murdering despot Stalin who was more responsible than any other leader for rescuing Europe from the Nazis.)  If I felt that the SNP leadership were serious about delivering an independence referendum and had a viable strategy to achieve that, I would say "let's ignore every provocation and maintain iron discipline behind that leadership". As much as almost everyone who has joined Alba feels far happier in their new political home and are now free to just be themselves, it would be much better being miserable within the SNP for a couple more years and actually getting our independence.  That's realpolitik.  Sadly, however, what we seem to be dealing with in this particular case is an ineffective tyranny, or a tyranny that doesn't even want to be effective.  The determination to achieve independence in the real world, not just as a nice theory, appears to be entirely absent - as does any credible thinking about how that might actually be done.  In the scenario we're actually living in, then, the natural human response to the leadership's outrageous "counter-revolution" a year ago does not in any way conflict with strategic good sense about how to achieve independence.  If the SNP's strategic vacuum can't be changed from within, external pressure from another party will have to bring about that change.

There is one big caveat, though.  If an independence referendum does actually take place in the next two or three years, either because pressure from Alba has paid off or because the SNP leadership's resolve suddenly stiffens for some other reason, it will at that point become counterproductive for Alba to keep harrying Nicola Sturgeon - the only opponents we'll need to be fighting are unionists.  A lot of self-discipline will be required, because the SNP are unlikely to reciprocate with magnanimity towards Alba. Given one or two depressing precedents in recent weeks, I can well imagine that an umbrella Yes campaign will be set up that includes the SNP and the Greens but excludes "the Alba bigots".  If so, that will be an act of monumental stupidity and self-harm, reminiscent of Labour's catastrophic decision to exclude "the filthy SNP separatists" from the main Yes campaign in the 1979 devolution referendum.  But nevertheless, we in Alba will just have to turn the other cheek and get on with our own positive Yes campaign - because independence comes before everything.

Massive 21% increase in vote share for pro-independence parties in the Fort William & Ardnamurchan by-election

So I'm quite excited to be able to report on a local by-election result from a ward I spent a couple of nights in during the summer, although it's so geographically enormous that probably quite a lot of us have been there recently! While the Westminster village was preoccupied with a routine Tory hold in Sir Edward Heath's former constituency, for Scottish politics-watchers yesterday was all about Fort William & Ardnamurchan.

Fort William & Ardnamurchan by-election result (2nd December 2021):

SNP: 39.6% (+6.7)

Conservatives: 21.2% (+8.5) 

Greens: 14.3% (+14.3) 

Liberal Democrats: 10.1% (+5.5) 

Independent - McKenna: 8.5% (+8.5) 

Independent - Matheson: 3.8% (-0.5) 

Independent - Drayton: 2.4% (+2.4)

Almost every time I report on an STV by-election result, I have to explain that things are not quite as they seem - the result might be billed as a "hold" for a party that has jumped from second place to first in the popular vote, or as a "gain" for a party that has merely remained in first place in the popular vote.  Our old friend Mike Smithson was left red-faced after misunderstanding that point on one celebrated occasion - and he's a renowned letter-writing totally objective Liberal Democrat election expert, so it's very easily done.

Fort William & Ardnamurchan is a particularly complicated example, though, because yesterday's result is technically an SNP gain from the Conservatives - in spite of the fact that a) neither party topped the poll last time around (an independent candidate did), b) the SNP were well ahead of the Tories last time around, and c) there was actually a small swing from SNP to Tory yesterday.

The percentage increases that all of the parties enjoyed can be mostly explained by a large number of votes that went to the victorious independent candidate in 2017 being up for grabs this time, and splitting multiple ways.  That said, the SNP are still entitled to regard their own increase as impressive, if only because it was achieved in spite of a Green intervention - in other words they didn't face competition for the pro-indy vote in 2017, but this time there was competition and it was remarkably stiff.  The combined vote share for the pro-indy parties is actually a whopping 21 points higher than it was four years ago.

Pro-independence parties on course to win combined 56% share of the vote on the Holyrood list ballot - and Alba are still registering

Today's astonishing Ipsos-Mori / STV poll, which showed 55% support for independence, also had encouraging news for all three of the major pro-independence parties in the Holyrood voting intention numbers...

Scottish Parliament constituency voting intentions:

SNP 52%

Conservatives 19%

Labour 17%

Liberal Democrats 5%

Greens 3%

Scottish Parliament regional list voting intentions:

SNP 43%

Conservatives 20%

Labour 15%

Greens 12%

Liberal Democrats 6%

Alba 1%

Seats projection (with changes from May 2021): SNP 68 (+4), Conservatives 24 (-7), Labour 20 (-2), Greens 12 (+4), Liberal Democrats 5 (+1)

So Alba continue to register in the polls - and it can't be underestimated how important it is for the party to retain that toehold of credibility when it's trying to establish itself and is being starved of media publicity.  The fact that the Greens are so close to matching Labour on the list vote would have been a matter of huge concern for unionists if it had happened five or ten years ago, because it would have opened up the possibility of the main left-of-centre opposition to the SNP being a pro-independence party in the future.  However, that *ought* to be an academic consideration now, assuming the promise of a referendum by the end of 2023 is honoured.

As for the SNP, these numbers suggest they'd improve on May's result markedly in any new election and win an overall majority.  However, as mentioned in the previous post, Ipsos-Mori don't weight by recalled vote, and also overestimated the SNP's support back in the spring.  So it could be that a systemic error simply hasn't been corrected yet.

This rips up everything we thought we knew: Ipsos-Mori TELEPHONE poll shows massive majority support for Scottish independence

Before today, there had been eleven polls since the Holyrood election showing a No lead (albeit for the most part a slim No lead), one showing a tie, and just one showing a slim Yes lead.  The big majorities for independence that we got so used to in 2020 had begun to look, at least for the time being, like a thing of the past.  And yet, all of a sudden, today brought word of a poll that wouldn't have looked at all out of place one year ago.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Ipsos-Mori / STV, 22nd-29th November 2021)

Yes 55% (+5)

No 45% (-5)

Can one extremely good opinion poll negate the previous thirteen? (Or, to be more precise, eleven of the previous thirteen?)  In usual circumstances, the answer would be no - the suspicion would be that this is probably an outlier result caused by random sampling variation.  At the very least, we'd be cautiously waiting for one or two more polls before jumping to the conclusion that the new trend is real.  But with Ipsos-Mori, in general the only firm to conduct Scottish polls by telephone, it's a different story.  There's still no consensus on whether telephone polls are superior to online polls, or vice versa, and the only reason the vast majority of polls are conducted online is to sharply reduce costs.  If the only telephone poll you have shows a picture that is wildly out of line with the sea of online polls, there are very good reasons for seriously considering the possibility that the telephone poll is actually the accurate one - or closest to being the accurate one.

To be clear, there's no great surprise in Ipsos-Mori showing a Yes lead - in recent years they've been on the Yes-friendly end of the spectrum, so a slim No lead with Panelbase or YouGov might be expected to translate into a slim Yes lead with Ipsos-Mori.  But what is genuinely startling is that Ipsos-Mori are showing a completely different trend from the online firms.  The No leads in the online polls have generally represented little or no change since the latter stages of the Holyrood campaign, whereas today's poll suggests there has been a massive Yes resurgence since the election.  That seriously calls into question the story we have been telling ourselves, and more importantly the story the media have been telling us, about the state of public opinion over the last few months.

Having said all that, the slight health warning that needs to be added is that data collection by telephone is not the only thing that sets Ipsos-Mori apart from other polling companies - they also have a different attitude to weighting by recalled vote.  So in theory that could be an alternative explanation for the disparity.

As Marcia has pointed out in the comments section below, there is a clear Yes majority in today's poll even if Don't Knows are left in: Yes 52%, No 43%, Don't Know 4%.  It's to be hoped that the SNP leadership don't repeat the mistake of last year by treating this Yes lead as a precious piece of china that might break if anyone so much as sneezes, and instead use it to loudly demonstrate that there is a strong appetite for a choice on independence in the near future.

This must be the line in the sand - Nicola Sturgeon's promise of a referendum by the end of 2023 must be honoured to the letter

Nicola Sturgeon: "In the course of next year, I will initiate the process necessary to enable a referendum before the end of 2023."

In fairness to Ms Sturgeon and the rest of the SNP leadership, that's a reasonably clear and specific promise compared to some we've heard in the recent past - which means it will be possible to objectively determine on certain cut-off dates whether the promise has been kept or broken.  If, by 31st December 2022, action has not been "initiated" that would "enable" a referendum to take place, then the promise will have been reneged upon - and that initiated action will clearly have to go significantly further than simply sending another letter requesting a Section 30 order, because it's abundantly clear by now that would only result in a firm "no" from London and a dead end.  Realistically, the minimum required for the promise to have been kept will be the tabling of referendum legislation in the absence of a Section 30.

If you read carefully, the promise does not, strictly speaking, require a referendum to have been actually held by 31st December 2023, but from Ms Sturgeon's other comments it's clear that the only reason envisaged for delay beyond 2023 would be the continuation of the pandemic.  So if normal life has more or less resumed by 2023 but no referendum occurs by the end of that year, it'll also be reasonable to conclude the promise has been broken.

If words and promises were enough to get the job done, we'd all be able to relax on the basis of what Ms Sturgeon has now said.  But unfortunately, there have been very similar promises made in the past about the dates by which action would be taken, and those were not honoured.  Even after we were marched back down from the top of the hill in the wake of - ironically - the SNP's landslide victory in the 2017 general election, we were still being told that there would be a referendum once the terms of Brexit became clear, but before Brexit actually occurred.  That simply did not materialise, and no, Covid is not an alibi for that.  Brexit Day was at the end of January 2020, and the threat of Covid was not being taken seriously in this country until late February 2020.

I totally understand the desire to give Ms Sturgeon the benefit of the doubt and assume she means what she says, because I fully shared that desire myself in 2017.  There are still hardcore Wings devotees who excoriate me for my supposed "naivety" back then, but I would strongly argue that it was rational to cut the SNP leadership a little slack at that point.  Less than three years had passed since the first indyref and there was not yet any track record of broken promises.  It would have been wildly premature to assume bad faith - but it's certainly not premature now.

Some people retrospectively justify the lack of a referendum before Brexit by saying "it would have been suicidal to hold one" - well, I'm sorry, but that's just nonsense. The results of referendums are decided during referendum campaigns, not before, and the idea that Yes in the mid-to-high 40s was not a good enough starting position to make victory a possibility is just so ludicrous as to be, frankly, not even worthy of serious consideration.  In any case, there were no conditions attached to the promise of a pre-Brexit referendum.

So I really urge people who have remained loyal to the SNP leadership to make this latest promise your line in the sand.  Believe it to be genuine, by all means, but if it turns out not to be, admit to yourself what has happened.  Don't pretend to yourself that the promise was never really made or that it somehow didn't really count, or that the next promise to hold a referendum in 2030 or 2035 or whenever is somehow the 'real' promise.

This is it.  A referendum by the end of 2023, and certainly the start of a referendum process by the end of next year - or it'll be time for the current SNP leadership to make way for people who are actually serious about independence.

IPSO is a sham regulator which knowingly issues rulings that endorse lies as the truth - and THIS is the press regulation system that Lady Dorrian thinks justifies bloggers not enjoying equality before the law with journalists? Seriously?!

As mentioned in my previous post, Craig Murray is expected to finally be released from prison on Tuesday morning. One of Lady Dorrian's eyebrow-raising justifications for incarcerating him was a novel principle that mere bloggers should not enjoy equality before the law with mainstream journalists - and her excuse for that was the observation that mainstream journalism, unlike blogging, is "regulated". That means she was according a tremendous amount of significance to the jurisdiction of the press regulator IPSO - an entirely voluntary body which "enforces" an entirely voluntary code. For the new Dorrian Doctrine to have any credibility, then, and certainly for it to have sufficient credibility to even begin to justify imprisoning someone for writing internet articles, it would have to be assumed that the voluntary IPSO system is working exceptionally well. 

Just by complete chance, a truly dreadful example of Scottish political journalism came along recently to give us a golden opportunity to assess whether IPSO is regulating the press as effectively as Dorrian would have us believe - or indeed whether it is regulating the press in any real sense at all. On 20th September 2021, the Daily Record published an article entitled "Scottish independence support drops in new opinion poll on constitution". Both the headline and the main thrust of the article was a downright, deliberate lie. The opinion poll being referred to was a Redfield & Wilton survey showing Yes on 44% and No on 47%, which represented no change whatsoever from the firm's previous poll which also showed Yes on 44% and No on 47%. As a technical justification for the lie, presumably intended as a shield against any complaint to IPSO, the eighth paragraph of the Record article hinted (but didn't state directly) that the claim of a drop in support for independence was based on a comparison with an Opinium poll which had showed a slim Yes lead - but any such implied comparison was an utter nonsense and an insult to the intelligence of every reader. Not only was the Opinium poll conducted by a completely different firm with a completely different methodology (thus meaning that the numbers from the two polls cannot be directly compared), it wasn't even the most recent poll by any firm. Nor was it the second most recent poll by any firm. There were in fact two polls prior to the Redfield & Wilton poll that had fresher fieldwork than the Opinium poll - one conducted by Savanta ComRes and one conducted by Panelbase. The Record had essentially delved back into history with the intention of cherry-picking any poll they could find that would artificially produce the "drop in support for Yes" they wanted to report, but that inconveniently didn't actually exist. 

If it's journalistically acceptable for a newspaper to behave in that way, the reporting of polls becomes an anything goes funfair. Any poll can be reported as showing any trend the journalist wants. A pro-independence journalist, for example, could claim that absolutely any poll shows an increase in support for Yes, as long as they chuck in the disclaimer "oh and by the way I'm making the comparison with a System Three poll published in 1994". Fortunately, however, the IPSO code makes clear that sleights of hand of that sort are not a valid excuse - not only are outright inaccuracies forbidden, but so are "distortions". There was therefore no doubt whatsoever that the Record article was in breach of the code - it was a cynical attempt to hoodwink readers into falsely believing that independence support had fallen. 

But do IPSO actually enforce their own code? You probably won't faint with amazement at the revelation that they don't. A Scot Goes Pop reader lodged a complaint with IPSO, and it was summarily dismissed without even being considered by the Complaints Committee. What was truly staggering, though, was not so much the dismissal itself but the stated reasons for dismissal, which read like the judgement from a show trial in an authoritarian state. They brazenly turned reality on its head by accusing the complainant of doing the exact thing that the Record had done in the offending article - ie. of cherry-picking a poll for comparison.

"While we understand that you considered this inaccurate, as you had found another poll with identical figures preceding the one reported on by the article, where the article made clear on what basis it reported that “independence support drop[ped]”, we found no possible ground to investigate a possible breach of Clause 1."

"As you had found"?  "As you had FOUND"? What?!  What in the name of mercy do these people even think they are talking about?  The complainant hadn't "found" anything - he was simply making a statement of indisputable fact that the poll showed no change from the previous poll conducted by the same firm, which is the universally accepted way of accurately reporting opinion poll trends.  It was the Daily Record that had gone on a mission to "find" a poll that they could use to make the new poll show something it did not show.  What IPSO did was the rough equivalent of playing a piece of CCTV footage backwards to make it look like the victim of theft was the perpetrator.  "Cynical" doesn't even begin to cover it.

On the basis of IPSO's rules, the complainant had a right to appeal, which he naturally did, just on the off-chance that IPSO somehow didn't understand any of the above and had made a catastrophic mistake in good faith.  But no go.  The appeal was summarily rejected as well, and this time they didn't even bother offering reasons, beyond the generic and content-free "your complaint did not raise a possible breach of the Code".

Make no mistake - IPSO is a sham regulator conducting sham investigations. The intent is not to correct lies and to punish journalists who are guilty of them, but instead to buttress lies and glorify them, and effectively provide lying journalists with "truth-teller of outstanding integrity" certificates.  This is the sort of thing you'd expect to happen in a cultish one-party state, not in an allegedly mature western democracy.

Perhaps none of it would matter if we all just pointed and laughed at IPSO as a joke regulator run by the press for its own self-interested purposes.  But once you have a High Court judge praying in aid this nonsense as part of her reasoning for sending a writer to jail, we are into very sinister and dangerous territory.

News on Craig Murray's release, plus a weary reply to Ipsos-Mori's in-house identity politics extremist

I've been meaning to post this since an email I received about it four days ago, so I hope the information isn't out of date by now!  Craig Murray is expected to be released from prison on St Andrew's Day (next Tuesday) at around 10am.  There's an open invitation for all independence supporters to attend a rally at that time outside Saughton.  Craig will hopefully get an opportunity to make a statement for the media.

It'll be a tremendous relief if Craig gets back home more or less in one piece.  The big concern was always that he has several health conditions and that he might not make it through a few months in prison, particularly in the context of a pandemic - and some would argue that was the whole purpose of inappropriately incarcerating him in the first place.

ᴡᴏᴍᴘ ᴡᴏᴍᴘ pic.twitter.com/g4fZZxJdhP

— Mark McGeoghegan (@markmcgeoghegan) November 23, 2021

There are many mysteries about modern life, but perhaps the greatest of all is: why has Ipsos-Mori employed someone who a) is a toddler, b) speaks like a toddler, and c) cannot differentiate between 'neutrality'and sparing the feelings of fellow toddlers?https://t.co/XKjgyrN6HL

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) November 26, 2021

Leaving aside the supreme irony of being called "the lad" by Ipsos-Mori's paid toddler, the very simple answer to his question is something that - ironically - doesn't seem to have even occurred to him yet. (Did he actually read the question?) https://t.co/DGXJTQzYVE

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) November 26, 2021

The wording "which point of view do you find most persuasive?" actually renders the issue of mutual exclusivity moot - the respondent is simply asked to give a view on whether one view is more persuasive than the other.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) November 26, 2021

That said, I would strongly dispute any suggestion that they aren't mutually exclusive options in the real world, and the fact that he thinks they aren't tells its own story about how he totally identifies with one side of the debate and is utterly incapable...

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) November 26, 2021

...of commenting on it in even a moderately clear-sighted way, let alone objectively.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) November 26, 2021

Yes vote holds up in new YouGov poll

As you may have seen, YouGov's first full-scale Scottish poll for six months was published yesterday, and it showed no change on the independence question.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (YouGov, 18th-22nd November 2021)

Yes 47% (-)

No 53% (-)

There's no cause for concern that Yes are holding steady at 47% rather than the 48% or 49% that has been typical of other firms, because YouGov have consistently been on the No-friendly end of the spectrum in recent times.  In fact, the last three YouGov polls, in April, May and November respectively, have all shown an identical 53-47 lead for No, and you have to go back to March for the last narrower No lead of 51-49. That gives the impression that Yes slipped back a bit in the run-up to the Holyrood election but have since held totally steady.  The pattern shown by other pollsters is for the most part consistent with that, even if they show Yes holding steady at a slightly higher level.

Although it's frustrating to be talking about a no-change scenario which maintains a slim No lead, especially after the giddy heights that Yes hit last year, the current position of a persistently even divide in public opinion is actually an excellent starting position for any referendum campaign, and a good platform on which to build a Yes victory if that campaign is well-judged.  The real problem is that we appear to have an SNP leadership that is privately opposed to holding an indyref in anything like the foreseeable future, so an ongoing modest No lead may be eagerly seized upon as a bogus excuse for further inaction.  That said, they weren't exactly short of excuses even when there was a huge Yes lead, so perhaps it doesn't make all that much difference.

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election:

SNP 48% (-)

Conservatives 20% (-2)

Labour 18% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 6% (+1)

Greens 3% (-1)

Reform UK 2% (+1)

Scottish Parliament constituency voting intentions:

SNP 48%

Conservatives 21%

Labour 19%

Liberal Democrats 7%

Greens 2%

Scottish Parliament regional list voting intentions:

SNP 38%

Labour 19%

Conservatives 19%

Greens 11%

Liberal Democrats 7%

Reform UK 2%

Alba 1%

UKIP 1%

All for Unity 1%

David Clark said the other day that the only way for unionist politicians to get their way by having us "move on from the independence debate" would be for Scotland to actually become independent.  And on these numbers you can see what he means - after a decade and a half the SNP's 'honeymoon' is still ongoing, and they're on course to actually gain yet more seats at Westminster.  For as long as that's the case, simply remaining in the UK will not make the issue of independence disappear in a puff of smoke.