Wings Over Scotland

We’ve long known that Labour’s attachment to the Union was founded on the belief – though a statistically erroneous one – that it couldn’t form a secure UK government without the block of MPs (currently 40) that it sends to Westminster from Scotland.

But a fascinating article from YouGov president Peter Kellner on the YG website today suggests that the party’s desperate and eventually successful efforts to secure a No vote could turn out to be the most Pyrrhic victory of all time.

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As the Smith Commission continues its fundamentally pointless and impossible deliberations, in which it’s expected to digest and consider many thousands of submissions (including hundreds of detailed ones from political organisations and “civic Scotland”) in around three weeks, the Scottish and UK press is still casually and inaccurately tossing around the term “devo-max”.

There seem to be essentially two competing interpretations of the term – the previously-understood meaning (also known as “Full Fiscal Autonomy”) in which all powers are devolved to Holyrood except foreign affairs and defence, and a new one which simply refers to whatever devolution Westminster is prepared to grant. (Justified semantically by the claim that it’s the maximum devolution Scotland’s going to get.)

So when we commissioned our latest Panelbase poll, we decided that rather than the usual checklist of “which powers should be devolved”, to which the answers have remained the same for years, we’d ask some slightly different questions about the relationship between Holyrood and Westminster, and the process of devolution itself, to see if we could determine what it is that the people of Scotland really want from their Parliament.

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When we commissioned our latest poll, the candidates for the Scottish Labour sort-of leadership hadn’t yet been finalised. In fact, we’re not even sure whether the post of deputy “leader” was up for grabs at that point, with Anas Sarwar having said that he had no intention of stepping down, shortly before stepping down.

But in any event we thought it’d be much more interesting to see who people actually thought should be the leader, rather than just who they regarded as the least-worst option out of whoever put their head above the parapet and took on the least attractive job prospect in Scottish politics.

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As part of our latest Panelbase poll, we wanted to explore the so-called “2017 Scenario” hinted at by new SNP leader and First Minister-elect Nicola Sturgeon, whereby the Tories control the UK parliament, the SNP have another majority at Holyrood, and the UK holds a referendum on the EU where England/the rUK votes to leave and Scotland votes to stay in.

To that end, we asked two key questions. Our findings are below.

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We try to deploy the money that generous readers send us during our fundraisers very carefully, so we were annoyed last week when we commissioned a new opinion poll from Panelbase with a few thousand quid left over from the Wee Blue Book campaign, only to have every other pollster and his dog release the results of their own surveys the very next day.

So sadly (for us) the following figures won’t have quite the dramatic impact that they might have commanded otherwise, but they’re still pretty interesting, particularly in the context of how they relate to the findings from Ipsos MORI, YouGov and others.

(Our poll also covered some ground that nobody else has done, but to add excitement and build a little suspense we’ll save that for a wee bit later on today.)

Let’s get to it, then.

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We thought you might be interested to see some of the working of this post from yesterday. Of the 2.4m votes cast in Scotland in the 2010 UK general election, not far short of a million – if a recent YouGov poll is to be believed – are currently likely to be cast for different parties in 2015. And it’s intriguing to see where they’ll go.

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Some SNP supporters have – rightly, in this site’s view – called for calm and caution over this week’s opinion polls, showing the Nats at stratospheric support levels and, supposedly, on course to win either 54 or 47 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats next May. Given the huge gaps that the SNP would have to close in order to take each individual seat, those numbers seem extremely optimistic to anyone familiar with First Past The Post, even given Scottish Labour’s ongoing implosion.

So rather than rely on dodgy uniform-swing predictors, we thought we’d try something a bit simpler but also more scientific and likely to come up with a believable result.

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There’ll be some more psephology coming up on Wings next week, readers, so we thought we’d get prepared by having a delve around in the inner workings of this week’s YouGov findings and seeing if we could find a few interesting nuggets.

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An alert and concerned reader living in the USA sent us a survey this week. It claimed to be from a charity called The Friends Of Scotland, which first rang a bell with us in relation to a very popular article we ran about six weeks ago, and which referred to a committee in the US Senate called the Friends Of Scotland Caucus.

However, it turned out to be nothing to do with them. The Friends Of Scotland charity was actually the organisation which brought us Jack McConnell in a pinstripe kilt a few years back, and – some might say deservingly, if for that reason alone – it went bust last October. Its website is now vacant, and the most recent archived version of it that actually had any content dates back to September 2012.

We’ve as yet found no reference anywhere to the organisation being revived, so we’ll have to treat their credentials as suspect, but that’s not particularly relevant to us. Of more interest is that the questionnaire says the results of the poll will be forwarded to the Scottish media, and we thought you might want a little heads-up on its nature, just in case any of them decide to run with it.

We think it’s fair to say some of the questions may be very slightly biased.

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The Daily Record has a new poll from Survation today, with the same razor’s-edge findings as their last one. With don’t-knows excluded, the vote is poised at 47 Yes 53 No, which is statistically a dead heat (as polls of this size have a 3% margin of error).

The paper oddly chooses to lead not on the headline figure but on a finding which shows one in five Scots have had an argument with a friend or family member over independence, which seems a remarkably low figure to us in the circumstances. But the thing that made us smile was the analysis of the poll by Scotland’s Only Living Psephologist, the esteemed Professor John Curtice.

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After some nudging from us, YouGov have now slightly belatedly added the data tables and question text from their recent “Better Together”-commissioned poll on benefits and tax receipts to their website.

Strangely, none of the media reports of the poll mentioned the fact that in addition to quizzing Scots, the company asked the same set of questions* to full-sized samples of English and Welsh voters too. (Indeed, the samples for England and Wales were both bigger – 1051 Scots were polled, 1116 Welsh people and 1744 English.)

We don’t know why nobody cares about the opinion of the Northern Irish. But the data highlighted some interesting discrepancies, and one very surprising thing.

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We’re still waiting for YouGov to publish the data tables for the survey they conducted for “Better Together” and which was reported on Sunday and Monday in the Herald, the Courier, the Scotsman and possibly others. As far as we can see, publication is now overdue under British Polling Council rules.

In the meantime, though, we’ve had an email from one of the poll’s respondents – alert reader Nikkii Hall – which offers a revealing insight into how it’s possible to manipulate surveys to get the answers you want. We thought you might find it interesting.

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