Independence rises this Easter, as Yes campaign close the gap to just 3% in earth-shaking new poll from "gold standard" ICM

Santa was rather kind to us by delivering a swing to Yes in the last batch of polls before Christmas, and I'm delighted to say that the Easter Bunny hasn't let the side down either. Actually, that's putting it mildly. ICM are regarded by some commentators as the UK's "gold standard" polling organisation, and their Easter Sunday poll reveals that the pro-independence campaign are now within a hair's breadth of victory...

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 39% (n/c)
No 42% (-4)

With Don't Knows excluded, the position is -

Yes 48% (+3)
No 52% (-3)

These astonishing numbers drive a stake through the heart of the cherished belief of the No campaign that Panelbase are some kind of outlier with their relatively Yes-friendly results - although in truth several ICM and Survation polls earlier this year ought to have already done the trick. Apart from one Panelbase poll conducted last August that used an unusual question sequence, this is the very first poll of the campaign that constitutes what the Americans call a "statistical tie", meaning that even if the figures are accurate to within the standard margin of error, there is still a greater than 5% chance that the side that appears to be slightly behind is actually ahead.

Although the last few polls from Panelbase, Survation and TNS-BMRB have been generally very encouraging for the Yes campaign, the fly in the ointment (which John Curtice was all too eager to point out) was that the results were consistent with Yes consolidating their gains from the winter, but not actually generating any further momentum. This poll is admittedly not conclusive proof that more gains have been made in recent weeks, but it certainly points powerfully in that direction. And it's not simply that there has been a significant 4% decrease in the No lead since last month's poll from ICM. More tellingly, the gap has narrowed by an extraordinary 14% since ICM's first contribution to the campaign last September. If there was ever any such thing as an ICM "normal range" for the No lead, this poll is so far below it that it's almost impossible to believe that what we're seeing tonight is a statistical illusion.

Other than the wafer-thin gap between the two sides, the other thing that leaps out immediately from the headline numbers is the No campaign's unbelievably low share of the vote. The only other pollster that has ever placed No as low as 42% is TNS-BMRB - but of course that generally happens because TNS report a much higher number of undecided voters than other firms. Blair McDougall and co have no such alibi in this case.

ICM have also provided a fascinating breakdown of voting intention numbers by country of birth. Ipsos-Mori have done that in the past, but as you can probably guess the results could hardly be more different. Yes are now in the lead by 42% to 40% among Scottish-born respondents, and contrary to the impression given by Scotland on Sunday's analysis, that finding can be regarded as being more or less statistically credible. Because Scottish-born people make up the lion's share of the overall sample, the margin of error isn't all that much greater when you separate them out.

Strangely enough, though, what I find particularly exciting is the position among English-born respondents. A margin of 58% to 28% in favour of No might look like a handsome lead, but it's actually stonkingly good for Yes among a group of voters that have sometimes been lazily assumed to be a lost cause. It means, for example, that Yes are faring far better with English voters than the pro-sovereignty campaign in Quebec did among non-francophone voters back in 1995. That could make all the difference in a tight contest. Admittedly, though, there is a health warning on these numbers, because the sample size for English-born respondents is indeed very small.

A few eyebrows have been raised over the fact that 15% of ICM's sample are English-born, even though the 2011 census shows that just 9% of the population of Scotland fall into that category. It goes without saying that if English voters are being over-represented in the sample, then the headline numbers should be even better for Yes than they already are. But could there be a logical explanation for the discrepancy? If such an explanation exists, it seems to me that it would have to be a combination of two factors. Firstly, the census figures include children, and it's likely that the share of the over-16 population who hail from south of the border is slightly higher. Secondly, ICM may have reason to believe that a greater number of English people have moved here in the three years since the census was conducted. But for what it's worth, my own guess (and it is only a guess) is that the 15% figure is probably a bit too high. If so, we know that both YouGov and Ipsos-Mori have been making exactly the same mistake in at least some of their polls.

ICM's Martin Boon has penned a rather confusing article in Scotland on Sunday, which could (I only say could) be cynically interpreted as him saying that his company have been actively searching for reasons why they may have been overstating the Yes vote, and have introduced a methodological change in this poll to try to 'redress' the situation. But if I understand the slightly ambiguous explanation of the new procedures correctly, then it's not at all obvious to me that they would actually have the effect of decreasing the reported Yes vote. Perhaps things will become clearer when the datasets are published.

* * *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Unsurprisingly, this update of the Poll of Polls sees the No campaign's lead tumble to yet another new record low - it's now below 12% for the first time ever. With undecided voters excluded, the Yes vote now stands at a new high watermark of 42.8%.

MEAN AVERAGE (not excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 35.4% (n/c)
No 47.3% (-0.6)

MEAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 42.8% (+0.3)
No 57.2% (-0.3)

MEDIAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 42.0% (n/c)
No 58.0% (n/c)

(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the pollsters that have been active in the referendum campaign, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are seven - YouGov, TNS-BMRB, Angus Reid, Survation, Panelbase, Ipsos-Mori and ICM. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample. Changes in the Poll of Polls are generally glacial in nature due to the fact that only a small portion of the sample is updated each time.)

I was planning to finally bite the bullet and remove Angus Reid in this update (because they haven't reported for a ridiculously long time), but I'm too sleepy to break the mould tonight! However, the advantage of sticking to the familiar method one more time is that it underscores the long-term movement towards Yes...

The No campaign's lead in the Poll of Polls headline figures :

Sep 2013 - 20.2%
Sep 2013 - 20.0%
Sep 2013 - 18.4%
Oct 2013 - 17.9%
Oct 2013 - 17.5%
Oct 2013 - 17.4%
Nov 2013 - 17.5%
Dec 2013 - 17.1%
Dec 2013 - 16.3%
Dec 2013 - 16.2%
Dec 2013 - 15.8%
Jan 2014 - 14.2%
Jan 2014 - 14.8%
Feb 2014 - 14.8%
Feb 2014 - 14.7%
Feb 2014 - 15.1%
Feb 2014 - 13.6%
Feb 2014 - 14.0%
Mar 2014 - 14.0%
Mar 2014 - 14.3%
Mar 2014 - 14.3%
Mar 2014 - 13.6%
Mar 2014 - 12.9%
Mar 2014 - 13.0%
Mar 2014 - 12.5%
Apr 2014 - 12.6%
Apr 2014 - 12.7%
Apr 2014 - 12.5%
Apr 2014 - 11.9%

Last but not least, because ICM are an online pollster (at least for the purposes of the referendum), we have the updated averages for the four online pollsters that have reported so far this year. These figures do exclude Angus Reid.

MEAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (not excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 38.3% (n/c)
No 46.5% (-1.0)

MEAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 45.2% (+0.6)
No 54.8% (-0.6)

MEDIAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 45.6% (+0.6)
No 54.4% (-0.6)

Sagacity on Saturday : The remarkably simple basis for nationhood

"Nations are nations if they feel themselves to be a nation. And Scotland overwhelmingly feels itself to be a nation."

Said by First Minister Alex Salmond. This quote may be of some assistance to any London media types still in a state of befuddlement about why "but Sunderland has to put up with an unwanted Tory government too" is not a good enough excuse for doing nothing to address Scotland's democratic deficit.

Dramatic TNS-BMRB poll shows pro-independence campaign closing the gap to the lowest level so far

This is hugely significant, more so than any Panelbase or even ICM poll. TNS-BMRB are different because they are one of only two non-online pollsters that have been active in the referendum campaign so far. The other one of the two, Ipsos-Mori, has persistently shown a much higher No lead than any of the online pollsters, so if TNS-BMRB were corroborating those results it would be a matter of some concern for the Yes campaign. But thankfully that isn't happening. The latest TNS-BMRB poll has just been released, and it's very much in line with the trend shown by the online pollsters.

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 29% (+1)
No 41% (-1)

The changes from last month may look modest, but as in the last YouGov poll they're enough to reduce the No lead to its lowest level of the campaign so far. The last TNS poll to show a No lead of lower than 12% was way back in early 2012 before the campaign got underway, when a radically different question and methodology was being used. The No lead is now less than half of what it was at its peak.

Because TNS always report a much higher number of undecided voters than other pollsters, the best way of making sense of the figures is to strip the Don't Knows out, which produces a position of -

Yes 41% (+1)
No 59% (-1)

That's more or less in line with the record high of 42% that YouGov found in their most recent poll, although of course it's still a few points short of the 44-47% Yes vote currently shown by Survation, ICM and Panelbase.

The figures for respondents who say they are certain to vote (which some pollsters would use as the headline numbers) also show a slightly narrowing lead -

Yes 33% (+1)
No 46% (n/c)

That isn't actually the lowest the No lead has been on that measure - it fell to as low as 9% in a poll conducted in late January, and had already been at 10% a few weeks earlier. However these figures have proved to be much more volatile than the headline numbers, probably due to the low sample size once you strip out the huge number of undecideds and people who are less than 100% certain to vote. So I doubt if there's any great significance to the fact that the gap isn't quite the narrowest it has been so far. The salient point is that the No lead among certain voters has slipped by 9% since September, and by 5% since October.

With Don't Knows excluded, the position among certain voters works out as -

Yes 42% (+1)
No 58% (-1)

One of the irritating things about TNS-BMRB is the long gap between the fieldwork taking place and the results being reported. Incredibly, this poll was conducted between the 21st of March and 2nd of April, which means that it entirely predates the most recent Panelbase and Survation polls. So in a sense we're just looking into history with these numbers - they don't get us any closer to knowing whether the pro-independence campaign have been making further gains in the most recent period, or simply consolidating the gains they've already made. However, this poll certainly bolsters the impression that, at the very least, Yes gained a little more ground over the course of February and March.

* * *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Tonight's update of the Poll of Polls equals the record for the lowest No lead to date, and indeed it's only the rounding that cheats us of a new record being set.

MEAN AVERAGE (not excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 35.4% (+0.1)
No 47.9% (-0.1)

MEAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 42.5% (+0.1)
No 57.5% (-0.1)

MEDIAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 42.0% (n/c)
No 58.0% (n/c)

(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the pollsters that have been active in the referendum campaign, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are seven - YouGov, TNS-BMRB, Angus Reid, Survation, Panelbase, Ipsos-Mori and ICM. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample. Changes in the Poll of Polls are generally glacial in nature due to the fact that only a small portion of the sample is updated each time.)

You may have seen that the Financial Times have introduced their own Poll of Polls for the referendum - the first chart can be found HERE. I know the trend they're showing looks thrillingly good, but unfortunately it's slightly misleading. Unlike the method I use on this blog, the FT are using a rolling average of the last seven polls to be published, regardless of which pollster conducted them. That means the current sample of seven polls contains five from the more Yes-friendly companies, including three from Panelbase alone. If the next seven polls come mainly from No-friendly pollsters, the FT are bound to report a substantial increase in the No lead even if the individual polls all show the complete opposite to be happening!

So I do think my own method is more appropriate for this very unusual campaign where the results from different polling companies are diverging to a highly significant degree. It does have one big disadvantage, though, which is that I don't know what to do about Angus Reid - I'm still including their most recent poll in the sample, even though it was conducted last summer. If they don't make a reappearance soon I'll have to remove them, but I'm reluctant to do it because it will make the long-term trend figures less meaningful. Talking of those figures, here is the latest update -

The No campaign's lead in the Poll of Polls headline figures :

Sep 2013 - 20.2%
Sep 2013 - 20.0%
Sep 2013 - 18.4%
Oct 2013 - 17.9%
Oct 2013 - 17.5%
Oct 2013 - 17.4%
Nov 2013 - 17.5%
Dec 2013 - 17.1%
Dec 2013 - 16.3%
Dec 2013 - 16.2%
Dec 2013 - 15.8%
Jan 2014 - 14.2%
Jan 2014 - 14.8%
Feb 2014 - 14.8%
Feb 2014 - 14.7%
Feb 2014 - 15.1%
Feb 2014 - 13.6%
Feb 2014 - 14.0%
Mar 2014 - 14.0%
Mar 2014 - 14.3%
Mar 2014 - 14.3%
Mar 2014 - 13.6%
Mar 2014 - 12.9%
Mar 2014 - 13.0%
Mar 2014 - 12.5%
Apr 2014 - 12.6%
Apr 2014 - 12.7%
Apr 2014 - 12.5%

What Better Together would be saying about their YouGov poll if they had just taken a truth drug

What Better Together actually said : This latest poll, which saw 1148 adults surveyed in Scotland between 8 and 11 April 2014, also confirms a drop in support for separation compared to a recent YouGov poll that showed 37% of those surveyed in favour of leaving the UK compared to 52% who backed remaining in the UK.

What Better Together would say after the truth drug : OK, we're trying it on a bit here. We're making an entirely spurious comparison with a poll that asked the real referendum question, whereas our own poll forced people to make a straight choice between independence and an option of enhanced devolution that will not be on the ballot paper in September. (And to be frank, we were a bit taken aback by how resilient support for independence was in the face of our leading question - it was almost as high as in YouGov's real referendum poll.) The most recent poll that can be considered roughly comparable to ours was one that we commissioned in December, and a comparison between the two shows that underlying support for independence has risen by 6% over the last four months, very much in line with the trend shown by YouGov in their real referendum polls.

Independence 35% (+6)
More powers 57% (-5)*
Don't Know 8% (-1)

* The December figure of 62% was made up of combined support for more powers and no change.

* * *

What Better Together actually said : This latest YouGov poll also reveals that two-thirds of the Scottish population are clear about the implications of a vote to leave the UK, suggesting that nationalist arguments that as people learn more about separation they are more likely to vote Yes is bogus and baseless.

What Better Together would say after the truth drug : OK, we're insulting your intelligence a bit here. A large number of the people who say they are clear about the implications of independence are likely to be people who are already planning to vote Yes. The argument that the Yes campaign is actually making is that No voters are less likely to have clarity in their minds than Yes voters, and are likely to move to Yes as they become better informed. So what matters on this question is not the results for the overall population, but a comparison between the figures for Yes voters and No voters. Unfortunately, we've made it impossible to make that direct comparison, because we didn't bother asking the real referendum question in our poll, meaning that we can't separate out Yes and No voters in the sample. However, what we could have done as a second-best option is provide a breakdown of results on the 'clarity' question based on whether people prefer enhanced devolution to independence, or vice versa. Mysteriously, we failed to do that - it must have been an innocent oversight. (No, no, don't increase the dose!)

* * *

What Better Together actually said : A YouGov survey of 1,148 Scottish adults, on behalf of Better Together, found that 59% of people in Scotland believe that the SNP should not seek another referendum in the future if people in Scotland vote No in September. In a blow to Alex Salmond, 37% of SNP voters do not want another referendum.

What Better Together would say after the truth drug : Well, it might be a blow to him if he had any intention of holding another referendum in the event of a No vote, but what he has actually said is that this referendum will settle matters for "a generation", meaning that by the time a second referendum became even a possibility, he would have long since retired and left the matters for others to decide. Incidentally, that's why we didn't specify any timescale in the wording of our poll question - it was intended to make people think about what should happen in the short-to-medium-term after a No vote, and yet still allow us to spin the responses as a verdict on what should happen in the long-term as well. If we'd directly asked people whether it would be reasonable to hold another referendum after 20 or 25 years, we'd have got a very different response.

* * *

What Better Together actually said : This poll comes just a day after a YouGov survey of over 1100 Scots found that support for separation has dropped to 35%, whilst those backing further devolution within the UK now stands at 57%.

What Better Together would say after the truth drug : Well, we've already 'fessed up to the fact that yesterday's poll actually showed a 6% increase in support for independence, not a decrease. And incidentally, "yesterday's YouGov survey" is exactly the same one as today's. Our decision to release this particular bit of the poll comes just a day after our decision to release another bit of the poll. That's just the way us crazy guys roll.

* * *

What Better Together actually said : SNP should ditch separation.

What Better Together would say after the truth drug : For everyone's sake we should really stop conjuring up such challenging mental images. Where will it all end? After the SNP have finished ditching separation, will we call on them to crush vacancy, and pulverise abstraction?

Sagacity on Saturday : A Non-Sagacity Special

"A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us."

Said by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. I'm not making this up - she had honestly convinced herself the world was LESS dangerous as a result of the existence of weapons capable of wiping out most of the human race within a matter of minutes.

Poll commissioned by anti-independence campaign backfires catastrophically, with almost as many people backing independence even when confronted with a leading question

One day, very very soon, we're going to start calling a brass neck a 'McDougall'. Just 24 hours after mocking the Yes campaign for using a supposedly leading question in their Panelbase poll (which, incidentally, was merely a supplementary question that was asked AFTER the real referendum question), the anti-independence camp's embarrassment of a campaign chief has brazenly published a poll in which the real referendum question was replaced lock, stock and barrel by a leading and entirely hypothetical one asking whether people would prefer independence or a devolved parliament with enhanced powers (as opposed to the status quo that is actually on offer in exchange for a No vote). It's always been assumed that such a question would produce an entirely different result, given that a number of Yes voters are really Devo Max supporters who are plumping for their second preference. So there must have been profound shock over at McDougall Central when the numbers from YouGov came back looking like this -

If you had to choose one or the other, which of the following would you prefer for Scotland?

Scotland becoming an independent country : 35%

Scotland remaining part of the UK with increased powers for the Scottish Parliament : 57%

The support for independence is just TWO PER CENT lower than when YouGov posed the actual referendum question a couple of weeks ago, and the support for more devolution is just FIVE PER CENT higher than the No vote in that poll (although of course opposition to independence and support for enhanced devolution are far from being the same thing). This suggests that underlying support for independence has considerably deepened.

Why on Earth have they willingly published such catastrophic findings? It seems that after a run of polling setbacks, bad really is the new good for the No campaign.

(PS.  Can we now look forward to John Curtice referring to YouGov as "the No campaign's favourite pollster"?  Fair's fair.)

YouGov continues to cynically mislead its own respondents - but still finds a DECREASE in English opposition to a currency union with an independent Scotland

Terribly mysterious thing, this - Blair McDougall has decided to ignore the results of a new poll showing his anti-independence campaign are within a mere 3% swing of losing the referendum, and instead seems much more interested in the results of a YouGov poll that excluded everyone who actually has a vote in the referendum, ie. it's a poll of voters who live in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Now, as I've said before, YouGov have their faults but they're not blithering idiots - so they must know perfectly well that, as a matter of straightforward legal fact, it simply would not be possible for the rest of the UK to deny Scotland the use of the pound after independence. The only conclusion it's possible to draw from the way these two questions are worded, therefore, is that YouGov have consciously and cynically decided to mislead their English respondents. The first question implies that a rejection of a formal currency union would be exactly the same thing as the utterly impossible "prevention of Scotland from using the pound" (it isn't the same thing), and the second question implies that usage of the pound on an informal basis would not be available as a possible "Plan B" if a formal currency union is rejected (it would be available).

It's amusing to note that in spite of these heroic efforts to bolster the UK government's propaganda campaign, YouGov have still managed to uncover a slight DECREASE in English opposition to a currency union since they asked the question at the time of George Osborne's speech.

If Scotland did become independent, would you support or oppose it continuing to use the pound as its currency?

Support 26% (n/c)
Oppose 53% (-2)

Suppose an independent Scotland is not able to use the pound as its currency. Do you think Scotland does or does not have a Plan B for a currency?

Does 18%
Does not 52%

As the second question makes about as much logical sense as enquiring which of your seven feet you most like to kick footballs with, the results are quite literally irrelevant. In the highly unlikely event that a Plan B is required, we know that it is likely to involve retaining the pound in some form or another - either literally, or by pegging a nominally independent currency to sterling.

Much more interesting is the finding that a paltry 8% of respondents in England, Wales and Northern Ireland think they would be financially better off if Scotland became independent. It seems that deep down, voters south of the border do have a sense that London media mythology about resource-rich Scotland being "subsidised" is probably garbage.

Two new referendum polls put support for independence at the heady heights of 47% and 44%

Well, that's the last time I take anything the Political Editor of the Daily Record says on Twitter at face value.  Last night, he teased us with the observation that his paper's new Survation poll was "fascinating".  Combined with the fact that the anti-independence campaign went out of their way to retweet Survation's own poll alert, I took that to mean that No finally had something to cheer about after a relentless series of polling setbacks.  But no, it didn't.  When the numbers finally came through after an interminable wait, they turned out to be very similar to the previous two Survation referendum polls, with a No lead that is way down on the firm's first contribution to the campaign early in the year. 

In the referendum, voters will be asked, "Should Scotland be an independent country".  If this referendum were held today, do you think you would vote "Yes"? or "No"?

Yes 44% (-1)
No 56% (+1)

And on the headline numbers including Don't Knows, it's -

Yes 37% (-2)
No 47% (-1)

In characteristically broken record style, the No camp's embarrassment of a campaign chief Blair McDougall responded to the statistically insignificant changes from last month's poll with a peculiar line he's used several times before : "No complacency but credit to our volunteers."  I don't want to be unkind to anti-independence volunteers, but given that they're widely accepted to be incredibly small in number, does anyone seriously think they're capable of being directly responsible for a margin-of-error 1% drop in the No vote in a Survation poll?  No complacency, Blair, but I really don't think they are.
Just in case anyone needed comfirmation that Blair was deluding himself about his campaign making some kind of recovery, along came yet another Panelbase poll right on cue, showing support for independence at the record-breaking high of 47% for a third time in a row...

There will be a referendum on an independent Scotland on the 18th of September. How do you intend to vote in response to the question: Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 47% (n/c)
No 53% (n/c)

With Don't Knows included, it's -

Yes 40% (-1)
No 45% (-1)

The fieldwork dates for the two polls were near-enough identical, with both getting underway on the 4th of April.  However, the Panelbase poll can technically be regarded as the most up-to-date, because respondents had until yesterday to respond, while the Survation poll closed on Monday.

No-one should mistake the significance of the recent run of findings from Panelbase.  Until a few short weeks ago, every Panelbase poll conducted during the campaign had shown a No lead of between 8% and 13%.  (That excludes only the famous poll last summer which used a different question sequence and found Yes in a 1% lead.)  The firm made a small methodological adjustment a few months ago to correct the under-representation of No-friendly older voters in their sample, so taking that into consideration it seems likely that the true 'normal range' was no lower than 9-14%.  Even if we're ultra-conservative and assume that the average No lead tended to be about 10%, that would mean that there has been a recent slump of about 5% - and with three successive polls replicating the same findings, there's no way we're being misled by normal sampling variation.  This is real progress for the Yes campaign, and it's substantial.

It's harder to make a similar judgement about the trend shown by Survation, because they don't have such a long track record.  However, their first poll this year showed a No lead that was 10% higher than in today's poll.  It's not possible to make a direct comparison between those two polls because there has been a huge methodological change in the intervening period, but a rough extrapolation suggests that the No lead in the first poll would have been about 4% higher than now had the current methodology been used.  So unless the first poll was a bit of a rogue (which is admittedly perfectly possible), it looks as if Survation have found a very similar drop in the No lead to the one suggested by Panelbase.

As John Curtice points out, the flip-side of this good news is that the picture over the last few weeks now appears to have been one of the Yes campaign consolidating its recent gains, rather than making even further gains.  But whether that's any great cause for disappointment depends on how far back you actually think Yes are at the moment.  If Panelbase are correct and the pro-independence campaign are just 3% short of the winning post, they don't actually need to be making relentless progress week on week - they're already in an enviable position with more than five months still to go, and consolidation is more than enough for now.  But obviously if No-friendly pollsters such as Ipsos-Mori are closer to the money, it would be a different story.

Since Survation made a very sensible revision to their weighting procedure a couple of months ago, they've suggested a number of times that their polls can now be considered directly comparable to ICM's and Panelbase's due to methodological convergence.  As today's numbers may testify, though, that's close to the truth but not the whole truth.  The big remaining difference between Survation and the other two is that they ask respondents how they would vote in a hypothetical referendum today, rather than how they plan to vote on the actual referendum date.  It's assumed that wording is likely to make people respond with at least a tad more caution.

Incidentally, something which puzzles me about this new Survation monthly series is the fact that James Mackenzie's blog Better Nation is listed as one of the three commissioning clients, alongside the Daily Record and the 5 Million Questions project.  Admittedly, there's no longer anything unusual about alternative media commissioning opinion polls - both Wings Over Scotland and Newsnet Scotland have done it.  But the difference is that both of those sites have run a high-profile fundraiser, which as far as I'm aware Better Nation hasn't.  So it's a bit of a mystery where the funding is coming from.  It seems to me there are four logical possibilities -

1) James Mackenzie is funding it himself (but given that it's an ongoing monthly series it's hard to believe he would go to those lengths).

2) Better Nation has one or more private benefactors (although that would be surprising, given that the site isn't as active as it was in its heyday when Mackenzie was a co-editor alongside Jeff Breslin, Malcolm Harvey and Kate Higgins).

3) Survation are for some reason providing the service for free.  There's a precedent for that, because in the run-up to the 2010 general election Angus Reid provided regular polls to Political Betting without charge.  But they only did it to raise their raise their profile in the UK, and it's very hard to see what Survation's motivation would be.

4) Another organisation is funding the polls and using Better Nation as a proxy.  The Green Party would be one obvious suspect, given that James Mackenzie used to be their press officer. The fact that Survation recently changed their methodology to make it easier for respondents to give their backing to small parties would be consistent with that theory.

Number 4 seems the most likely possibility to me, but who knows?

*  *  *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

With two polls today showing a slight drop in support for both Yes and No, that is obviously reflected in the Poll of Polls, but the gap between the two sides remains pretty much where it was in both of the last two updates.

MEAN AVERAGE (not excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 35.3% (-0.4)
No 48.0% (-0.3)

MEAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 42.4% (-0.1)
No 57.6% (+0.1)

MEDIAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 42.0% (n/c)
No 58.0% (n/c)

(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the pollsters that have been active in the referendum campaign, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are seven - YouGov, TNS-BMRB, Angus Reid, Survation, Panelbase, Ipsos-Mori and ICM. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample. Changes in the Poll of Polls are generally glacial in nature due to the fact that only a small portion of the sample is updated each time.)

Here are the updated long-term trend figures -

The No campaign's lead in the Poll of Polls headline figures :

Sep 2013 - 20.2%
Sep 2013 - 20.0%
Sep 2013 - 18.4%
Oct 2013 - 17.9%
Oct 2013 - 17.5%
Oct 2013 - 17.4%
Nov 2013 - 17.5%
Dec 2013 - 17.1%
Dec 2013 - 16.3%
Dec 2013 - 16.2%
Dec 2013 - 15.8%
Jan 2014 - 14.2%
Jan 2014 - 14.8%
Feb 2014 - 14.8%
Feb 2014 - 14.7%
Feb 2014 - 15.1%
Feb 2014 - 13.6%
Feb 2014 - 14.0%
Mar 2014 - 14.0%
Mar 2014 - 14.3%
Mar 2014 - 14.3%
Mar 2014 - 13.6%
Mar 2014 - 12.9%
Mar 2014 - 13.0%
Mar 2014 - 12.5%
Apr 2014 - 12.6%
Apr 2014 - 12.7%

And as Panelbase and Survation are both online pollsters, it's also time for an update of the averages for the four online pollsters that have reported so far this year. These figures exclude Angus Reid, who are an online pollster but haven't reported since last summer.

MEAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (not excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 38.3% (-0.7)
No 47.5% (-0.5)

MEAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 44.6% (-0.2)
No 55.4% (+0.2)

MEDIAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 45.0% (-0.4)
No 55.0% (+0.4)

Wisdom on Wednesday : The biggest 'known unknown' is that we know we're going to be wrong sometimes, but don't know when

"I believe...that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system."

Fantasy author Neil Gaiman, in his novel 'American Gods'. Although in all honesty I'd still be opposed to state murder even if I could be 100% sure that every criminal conviction in known history was sound.

More details from today's Panelbase poll

Many thanks to Oldnat for pointing me in the direction of the datasets for today's Panelbase/Wings Over Scotland poll, which have been published unusually early, and which answer all the questions I raised in my previous post.  I'm relieved to find that Panelbase have stuck with their new, more neutral preamble for a third time in a row, although it remains to be seen whether they will continue with that good practice the next time they are commissioned by an anti-independence client.  The headline numbers were filtered by likelihood to vote, so are directly comparable with recent Panelbase polls - which is good news for me, because it means I won't have to recalculate the Poll of Polls figures!  And the fieldwork was conducted between the 28th of March and the 4th of April, which means that the hammerblow that the No campaign suffered on the 29th of March with the leak in the Guardian is not wholly factored into the numbers.  A large number of people are likely to have responded to the poll as soon as email invitations were sent out on the 28th.

Here are the figures from the poll down to one decimal place, with Don't Knows excluded -

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 47.2% (+0.2)
No 52.8% (-0.2)

And with Don't Knows included, it's...

Yes 40.8% (+0.8)
No 45.6% (+0.4)

So on these more precise figures, the No lead has actually fallen fractionally since the last Panelbase poll for Newsnet Scotland.

Much has been made of the big gender gap in this poll, but as the Newsnet Scotland poll was unusual for showing a small gender gap, it's probably reasonable to assume that normal sampling variation is at play, and that the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes.

It's also fascinating to see RevStu on Twitter mentioning a rumour that a trade union recently commissioned a referendum poll from No-friendly outliers Ipsos-Mori, but withheld the results after they turned out to be better than expected for Yes.  Obviously it's impossible to know whether there's any truth in that, but if there is it would, if anything, be an even more significant development than today's poll.  Ipsos-Mori are of course the only firm conducting referendum polls by telephone (they're also one of only two non-online referendum pollsters), so the fact that they've been producing much better results for No has been a crucial comfort blanket for the anti-independence campaign.  But if that blanket was ever suddenly snatched away...