Wings Over Scotland

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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For quite some time now, and in particular since the turn of the year, this site’s been pointing out two things about polling for the 2015 UK general election.

One is that Labour’s lead has been in steady decline since 2012. The other is that the polls present a falsely optimistic picture for Ed Miliband’s party, as ultimately a significant proportion of UKIP support is likely to vote tactically, because only two people have a chance of becoming Prime Minister and only one of them is promising what UKIP supporters want above all else – a referendum on leaving the EU.

Pleasingly, on one level at least, today we were proved right.

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We learned a couple of moderately interesting things today. One was the result of our politely pestering Sunday Mail editor Jim Wilson, who agreed to release the data tables from the paper’s poll earlier this month which showed a 20-point No lead.

The pollster who conducted the survey, Progressive Partnership, isn’t a member of the British Polling Council, which meant the Mail was under no obligation to make the data available, but the editor very kindly chose to anyway in the interests of transparency and they can be found here.

What they reveal is that PP neither asked, nor weighted its results for, respondents’ party affiliations. That isn’t necessarily any sort of smoking gun – the referendum isn’t a party issue, and it may be that the sample happened to be reflective of voter distribution anyway – but the one thing it DOES tell us is that comparing the results with a party-weighted YouGov poll (as “Better Together” did in a desperate attempt to present a major swing to Yes as one towards No) is a complete nonsense.

The other thing we found out today was more disturbing.

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In our poll results earlier today, we found out what Scots thought about the past and the present. But we also asked them to look ahead at the sort of Scotland (and UK) they see developing over the space of the next decade.

Here’s what they thought.

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The chance presented itself recently to conduct a quick bit of snap opinion polling at a lower cost than our usual, so it seemed daft not to jump on it. The data below comes from the same Panelbase survey whose headline findings (Yes 46% No 54% excluding don’t-knows) were reported in the Sunday Times at the weekend, and sampled 1046 Scottish adults earlier this month.

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There’s been a fair bit of crowing from “Better Together” about some recent poll results. Which is fair enough – almost everybody likes to shout when they get some good news (though this site has consistently urged caution over polling findings months before a vote, whether favourable or not).

It is, however, always wise to look at the small print.

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The Sunday Mail has a surprisingly low-key piece today about a new opinion poll commissioned by the paper through the little-known pollster Progressive Partnership (who aren’t a member of the British Polling Council) and conducted by YouGov.

Oddly, it seems to have produced two very different sets of results.

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