This obviously further increases the chances that the ComRes poll may have been an outlier caused by random sampling variation. More details when I have them.
Saturday, May 1, 2021
Does the BMG poll show Yes on 50%?
I've just seen the front page of tomorrow's Herald on Sunday, and it appears that a BMG poll shows a 50-50 split on independence. Hopefully that means literally 50-50, because that will bring the little run of No majorities to an end. Although the Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll showed Yes just fractionally behind and was far better for us than the ComRes poll, I was in two minds about whether to give our unionist friends the chance to crow about "six in a row", but it seems that they'll only have had two short days to enjoy that.
May Day, May Day: Why it's become increasingly vital to vote SNP on the constituency ballot and Alba on the list
I must say as this campaign has worn on, I've become ever more convinced that I did the right thing by voting SNP on the constituency ballot and Alba on the list. In a couple of recent polls, including the one commissioned by this blog, the SNP's constituency vote has dipped very slightly below the 46.5% they took in 2016 - when of course the pro-independence majority in parliament was fairly slim. We simply cannot afford any more slippage. People playing silly buggers on the constituency ballot by abstaining, or voting for a unionist party, or even by voting Green or Bonnie Prince Bob, are at risk of waking up the next day with a unionist majority. I'm absolutely serious about that. It has to be SNP on the constituency ballot.
But by the same token, I am becoming less convinced by the day that a re-elected SNP government will deliver an independence referendum unless an Alba group is there to pressurise them. All the mood music points to more delays and excuses. Now, to be clear, I have no idea whether there will be an Alba group - the opinion polls are contradictory. Some say yes and some say no. So you could argue it's a 'risk' to vote Alba, because it might return no seats. But exactly the same risk applies to voting SNP on the list, and I would say the greater risk is not to at least attempt to change the political weather by electing politicians who actually have a sense of urgency about independence.
As I said a couple of weeks ago, I loved the SNP Party Election Broadcast and thought it was truly inspiring. ("And for that, we need to exercise our right to hold a referendum. A vote for the SNP will show Westminster and the world that we cannot, we will not, be denied our right to decide. As our country renews, we need to choose our own future, before somebody else chooses it for us. Then we can take the first steps towards a new nation that's fair, a nation that cares. Scotland's future is Scotland's choice, and nobody else's.") But I want Alba there to remind them of that broadcast and hold them to it. I have a horrible feeling that otherwise we could look back in 2026 and realise it was the equivalent of Nick Clegg practically signing in blood a promise to vote against any increase in tuition fees.
Friday, April 30, 2021
Le Royaume-Uni, nul points: Big majority of public demand a SCOTTISH ENTRY in the Eurovision Song Contest, in bombshell for the BBC from Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll
So you've got to allow me the occasional indulgence, OK? Out of a large number of questions in the Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll, I asked just ONE about the Eurovision Song Contest. Frankly, you should be praising me for my restraint, because I can think of at least two follow-up questions I could have asked.
At the forthcoming Eurovision Song Contest, there will be a United Kingdom entry. However, in 2019, Scotland and Wales both competed in the Eurovision Choir event as countries in their own right. In future years, how would you prefer Scotland to be represented in the Eurovision Song Contest?
By a Scottish entry: 60%
By a United Kingdom entry: 40%
That's much more decisive than the slim 53-47 majority in favour of a Scottish Olympic team in the Scot Goes Pop / Survation poll in January. I can think of a few possible explanations for the difference: a) it could simply be caused by pollsters' house effects, ie. perhaps Survation have fewer people in their panel with a strong Scottish identity, b) it may be that people have more of an emotional attachment to Team GB at the Olympics due to specific memories from the past (Torvill & Dean, Linford Christie, Steve Redgrave or whatever), or c) people might have been deterred from abandoning Team GB because larger countries tend to win more medals. The latter worry is irrelevant to the Eurovision, where smaller countries are not disadvantaged against larger ones. (Ireland are still the most successful country in the contest's history with seven victories, although they now have Sweden breathing down their necks with six.)
Another difference with the Olympics is that there's no rule that would prevent Scotland competing without first having to become independent - as can be seen not only from the participation of Scotland and Wales in the Eurovision Choir event, but also from Wales having twice had entries in the Junior Eurovision Song Contest. BBC Alba are believed to have toyed with the idea of a Scottish entry in Junior Eurovision but decided against it - although whether that was because of pressure from London isn't clear. The bottom line is that it's up to the BBC - if they tell the EBU they want a Scottish entry, it would almost certainly happen. Now that we know what licence fee payers in Scotland want, will they listen?
As I always point out, no Scot has even represented the UK since Scott Fitzgerald in 1988. Incredibly, Cyprus and France have both been represented by Scots more recently than that. (Karen Matheson of Capercaillie fame sang for France in 1996.) The lack of Scottish representation deprives us of a golden opportunity to promote Scottish culture and boost tourism.
I shall now embark on the unusual task of giving you the Eurovision preferences of various demographic and political groups. Women are significantly keener on a Scottish entry - the majority is 64-36 among female respondents, compared to a narrower 55-45 among men. Yes voters from 2014 are overwhelmingly in favour of Scottish representation, and among current Yes supporters there's near unanimity - only 7% want to be represented by the UK. The position isn't quite so clear-cut among No voters - 34% of people who voted against independence in 2014, and even 25% of people who would vote No in a new referendum, would like a Scottish entry. Labour voters are close to being evenly divided (44% for Scotland, 56% for the UK), which suggests that even the rump Labour vote still includes a decent number of people who strongly identify as Scottish.
There's a big age divide - under-35s prefer Scottish representation by a majority of almost 3-1, while over-55s are split right down the middle. And fascinatingly, there's a narrow majority among English-born respondents (53-47) for a Scottish entry.
It's worth making the point that because the Eurovision question is to some extent a proxy for Scottish/British national identity, and because 40% of respondents plumped for the British option, it may well be that certain people in the SNP are over-optimistic about the prospect of Yes support rising consistently above 60%. The idea that we should wait for that to happen before firing the starting gun on a referendum may be tantamount to giving up on independence completely.
Now, I'm not necessarily going to claim there's a strong thematic link here, but the next two questions in the poll are about nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons were banned by an international treaty that came into force in January this year. However, the nine countries that are currently believed to possess nuclear weapons, including the UK, have so far refused to sign the treaty. Do you think the UK should join the treaty and dismantle its nuclear weapons?
Yes: 47%
No: 33%
With Don't Knows removed -
Yes 59%
No 41%
There have been polls in the past that have purported to show support for Trident in Scotland, so this could be an early indication that the new treaty is a game-changing moment that will make it a lot easier for campaigners to make the case for disarmament. As you'd expect, the figures for SNP and Tory voters are reverse mirror images of each other (71% of SNP voters support disarmament and 71% of Tory voters oppose it), but what's much more significant is that Labour voters break 46-37 in favour of joining the treaty and disarming. That suggests the type of 'atomic unionism' espoused by Jackie Baillie has the potential to cost Labour a lot of votes. Additionally, 30% of people who voted No in 2014, and 22% of people who would currently vote No, want to sign up to the nuclear ban - which highlights a possible means by which a future Yes campaign could win more converts.
The UK government argues that its nuclear weapons protect the public due to a 'deterrent' effect. However, others argue that the presence of nuclear weapons on the Clyde puts the public in greater danger by making the area a target for nuclear attacks, and by creating a risk of serious accidents. Do you personally feel more safe or less safe due to the presence of nuclear weapons on the Clyde?
More safe: 24%
Less safe: 42%
Makes no difference: 34%
After I saw this result, it occurred to me that some of the 34% who chose the "makes no difference" option may be people who live nowhere near the Clyde and are naive enough to think that makes them safe. In reality, you'd probably need to be in Shetland to escape the effects of a nuclear attack on Faslane.
There's an age and gender divide on the nuclear questions as well. Although a plurality of over-55s want rid of the UK's weapons and say they feel less safe because of them, it's a fairly tight result in each case. And women are significantly less likely than men to think Britain should not disarm or that nuclear weapons make them safer.
* * *
There are still more results to come from the poll. If you'd like to be the first to know, feel free to follow me on Twitter HERE.
BBC Scotland's exclusion of Alba from the leaders' debates is now utterly indefensible after BBC Wales set a precedent with an ultra-inclusive debate night featuring leaders of several tiny anti-devolution parties
The Alba party have been excluded from every single leaders' debate so far. I'm currently watching the BBC Wales leaders' debate for the Senedd election, and the fringe party "Abolish the Welsh Assembly" is fully represented.
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 29, 2021
The BBC, ladies and gentlemen. Unspoofable.
Oh God, it gets even better: immediately after the main BBC Wales debate, there's an additional 30 minute debate for the Greens, UKIP and Reform UK. BBC Scotland haven't got a leg to stand on here. They've failed the public by not even attempting to find a format including Alba.
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 29, 2021
Of course the simplest shortcut for small parties that want to get on the BBC is to be right-wing, anti-devolution, or anti-Europe.
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 30, 2021
Thursday, April 29, 2021
Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll: Voters say UK Government are WRONG to launch legal challenge to the new Scottish law protecting children's rights - and tell Douglas Ross it was *Brexit* that was irresponsible in the middle of a pandemic
Even the unionist media acknowledged that the UK government walked straight into a trap at the start of this election campaign by needlessly launching a Supreme Court challenge to a Holyrood law that is aimed at protecting children, and that was passed with Scottish Tory support. The blunder has a dual effect - it makes the UK government look as if they don't care about children, and it also deepens the suspicions that they are at war with devolution and may eventually abolish or neuter the Scottish Parliament (if we don't vote for independence first). I added a question to the Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll to discover whether this episode is playing as badly with the public as has been suspected.
The Scottish Parliament recently passed legislation that incorporates the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into Scots Law. The law seeks to protect children's rights by forbidding public authorities from acting in a way that is incompatible with the UN Convention. However, the UK Government are challenging the law in the Supreme Court on the basis that it would interfere with the UK Parliament's right to make laws for Scotland. Although the UK Government are allowed to challenge laws that they think may exceed the Scottish Parliament's powers, they are under no obligation to do so. Do you think the UK Government are right or wrong to challenge the new Scottish law on children's rights?
Right: 33%
Wrong: 42%
With Don't Knows excluded -
Right: 44%
Wrong: 56%
Although that's the expected result, the detailed breakdown is fascinating. Women are entirely responsible for the majority against the legal action - female respondents break almost 2-1 against, while men are evenly divided. And it's not as if there's a persistently large gender gap throughout the poll - it's specific to this particular question. At the risk of gender stereotyping, I would guess that probably means women are concerned about the impact on children, perhaps more than they are about the impact on devolution. And although respondents divide to some extent on Yes/No lines, it's not totally uniform - 17% of current Yes supporters think the UK government are right to challenge the law, and 18% of current No voters think they are wrong. (Which maybe raises a question mark over whether all Yes supporters fully understood the question, but obviously that's just speculation.) Respondents who were born in England are split down the middle, while a decent plurality of Scottish-born respondents are opposed to Westminster's actions.
Every time Douglas Ross says with an apparently straight face that the Scottish Government are "irresponsible" to be planning for a referendum during a pandemic, I always imagine a nation in unison saying "Hello? Hello? Brexit, Douglas?". So I asked the obvious question...
The Conservatives claim that the ongoing pandemic means that it is irresponsible for the Scottish Government to be making plans for an independence referendum. In response, the Scottish Government say that they do not intend to hold the referendum until the pandemic is over, and point out that the Conservative Government at Westminster has already taken Britain out of the EU single market and customs union during the pandemic. In your view, which is more irresponsible?
Taking Britain out of the EU single market and customs union during the pandemic: 39%
Planning for an independence referendum to take place after the pandemic is over: 38%
Neither of these are irresponsible: 24%
So the right result, but it's bizarrely tight given that the Tories self-evidently don't have a leg to stand on with this. I would guess the explanation for the closeness of the outcome is that a substantial minority of independence supporters are also in favour of Brexit, and therefore the presence of a 'neither' option gave them an easy out. A total of 62% of respondents either don't think indyref preparations are irresponsible, or think going ahead with Brexit during the pandemic was more irresponsible.
Again, there's a reasonable amount of 'cross-voting' - 18% of current Yes supporters think that indyref planning is more irresponsible, while 17% of current No supporters take the same view about Brexit.
* * *
There's lots more to come from the poll - several supplementary questions of interest to the independence movement, and also Westminster voting intentions. If you'd like to be the first to know the results, feel free to follow me on Twitter HERE.
EXCLUSIVE: Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll shows a virtual tie on the headline independence numbers, leaving today's Savanta ComRes poll looking like a possible outlier
When I first received the tables from the new Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll, I was tearing my hair out slightly, because the numbers were pretty good for Yes in many ways, but just two respondents swung the balance, ie. if just two people who said they were No voters had been in the Yes column instead, the headline numbers would have been rounded to 50-50. You'll get the best sense of how close it is by looking at the numbers rounded to one decimal place, which make it Yes 49.3%, No 50.7%. With Don't Knows left in, even the rounded numbers show only a statistically insignificant one-point lead for No.
All of which tells a far better story for Yes than today's Savanta ComRes poll, which is left looking like a possible outlier. Bear in mind that the Panelbase and ComRes fieldwork dates overlap to a significant extent - the Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll was conducted between Wednesday of last week and Monday of this week, while the ComRes poll was in the field between Friday of last week and Tuesday of this week. It would be a bit of a stretch to claim that the ComRes poll is more up to date and picked up a swing that Panelbase couldn't. Remember also that recent Survation and Ashcroft polls are bang in line with Panelbase in showing Yes on 49%, and while the last YouGov poll put the figure at 47%, that was only a 2% decrease from a firm that is typically on the No-friendly end of the spectrum. So that's all fairly consistent with the suspicion that the new ComRes poll may be underestimating Yes due to random sampling variation. For now at least, it looks like public opinion on independence continues to be essentially split down the middle, which is an excellent starting point for a referendum campaign.
Here are the headline numbers from the Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll...
Should Scotland be an independent country? (Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll, 21st-26th April 2021)
Yes 49%
No 51%
Before Don't Knows are removed, the numbers are -
Yes 47%
No 48%
Undecided 6%
(1075 respondents were interviewed. The percentages add up to more than 100 due to rounding.)
As ever, the figures for Labour voters are of particular interest - 28% are pro-independence and 72% are anti-independence, which is not quite as good for Yes as some previous Panelbase polls. That partly explains why Yes don't have an outright lead.
* * *
There's lots more to come from the poll - several supplementary questions of interest to the independence movement, and also Westminster voting intentions. If you'd like to be the first to know the results, feel free to follow me on Twitter HERE.
Alba vote increases in new Savanta ComRes poll
I didn't in any way blame Savanta ComRes for the #Matchettgate episode, because I'm quite sure the fault lay at Scotland on Sunday's end. However, I think eyebrows are going to be quite rightly raised at the ComRes spokesman's comments about today's new poll, because they do appear to dispense with political impartiality in two key respects. It's a poll that shows pro-independence parties with a very clear majority of seats in the next Scottish Parliament, and yet the ComRes spokesman feeds into a Tory narrative by casting doubt over whether that would represent an "unequivocal mandate" for a referendum. I'm not sure it's for a pollster to suggest that a majority of seats isn't a proper mandate in a parliamentary system.
He also describes the Alba Party as "ever-unpopular", which is a truly extraordinary remark. Alba are a minority party in the hunt for seats in a proportional representation system - just like the Greens, just like the Liberal Democrats, just like the SSP in the old days. Nobody would call the Greens "unpopular" just because 90% of people aren't going to vote for them. The ComRes poll actually shows the Alba vote increasing slightly, which reinforces the message from other recent polls that their support is holding up.
Scottish Parliament constituency ballot (Savanta ComRes/The Scotsman):
SNP 45% (-1)
Conservatives 23% (-2)
Labour 23% (+3)
Liberal Democrats 7% (+1)
Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:
SNP 36% (-2)
Conservatives 22% (-1)
Labour 19% (+2)
Greens 10% (+3)
Liberal Democrats 5% (-)
Alba 2% (+1)
Seats projection (with changes from the 2016 election): SNP 61 (-2), Conservatives 28 (-3), Labour 24 (-), Greens 11 (+5), Liberal Democrats 5 (-)
Pro-independence parties: 72 seats (55.8%)
Anti-independence parties: 57 seats (44.2%)
PRO-INDEPENDENCE MAJORITY OF 15 SEATS
There are quite a number of plus points here - although Savanta ComRes have joined Panelbase in showing the lowest SNP constituency share since 2019, the SNP lead has actually increased due to the Tories dropping back. And in the constituency section, it's the gap between the first-placed and second-placed party that really matters. The 25% Tory share in the last ComRes poll always looked a bit odd in the context of other polls. And it now seems pretty likely that the relatively poor Green showing in the last ComRes poll was a freakish finding caused by sampling variation - 10% in the new poll is much more in line with others firms' polls, and it naturally has a very positive effect on pro-indy representation.
Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes 46% (-2)
No 54% (+2)
(UPDATE: I've corrected the percentage changes above because I was accidentally looking at the last-but-one ComRes poll as the baseline. The actual numbers in the last poll were Yes 48%, No 52%, so the swing this time is 2% rather than 4%. Bear that in mind when reading the analysis below.)
I don't think there's much doubt that Yes support has dipped a little over the course of the campaign, which is what traditionally happens due to the SNP campaigning on bread and butter issues and leaving the pitch clear for unionist parties to relentlessly bash independence. But there is *considerable* doubt over whether Yes have dipped by anything like as much as ComRes are reporting. At some point soon I'll be releasing the independence numbers from the Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll, which had overlapping fieldwork dates with ComRes. Part of the reason I held the numbers back for a few days was just in this case this sort of scenario occurred.
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