Wings Over Scotland

We’ve talked a bit today about a fascinating poll by Survation for the Daily Mail last month, whose findings got very little coverage in the media, perhaps because they revealed the rather off-message fact of how ineffectual two of the No campaign’s three great pillars of propaganda have been proving.

But there was another interesting snippet in the results, which could confound the flurry of recent polls all showing the SNP with a commanding lead for the 2016 Holyrood election, regardless of whether it’s for an independent Scottish Parliament or a devolved one.

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Last month there was a mild flurry of activity in the press about the so-called “missing million” – Scots entitled to vote, but who choose for one reason or another not to. Catchy as it is, the phrase seems a significant understatement. Around four million people in Scotland meet voting criteria, but fewer than half of those turned out for the 2011 Holyrood election, and under 2.5m at the 2010 Westminster one.

Obviously that’s a bad thing in principle in its own right. But it could also be seriously distorting polling for the independence referendum, because – perhaps for the only time in their lives – an awful lot of those missing millions ARE going to go out this September and put a cross in a box. And nobody knows which one.

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As commissioners of opinion polls ourselves, we know all too well that one of the more unwelcome aspects of the pursuit is that sometimes you don’t like the answers you get – we were noticeably dismayed, for example, by one or two of the things revealed about social attitudes in our last poll.

Today’s media extensively covers a Survation poll for the Daily Record which finds the highest Yes vote in some time (despite an “if the referendum was today” preamble, which generally works against Yes), equating to 45% Yes 55% No, with almost a quarter of Labour voters now planning to vote for independence.

The full tables aren’t yet available for analysis as we write this, so to while away the time we decided to have a proper delve in the last one from the same company, run on behalf of the Daily Mail last month. And a couple of things leapt right out at us.

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We’ve commented before on the odd way that newspapers can reveal their bias in the way they phrase their reporting, rather than in the actual content of it, which can be entirely factually accurate. As we noted, a particular giveaway is the angle from which they view statistics, and especially opinion polls.

A poll showing 35% of people backing independence will almost always be reported as “ONLY a third back Yes”, whereas one with the exact same numbers for a different question might be presented as “OVER a third distrust Alex Salmond”. The proportion “one third” is in such a manner portrayed as being both a small and a large one, to suit whatever position the publication wishes to promote.

It’s in such a context that we invite readers to ponder today’s Mail On Sunday.

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As alert readers know, we don’t get ourselves overly excited about individual opinion polls, even when they’re like today’s Survation one showing a big 5.5% swing to Yes in the wake of George Osborne’s intervention on a currency union last week.

What we DO like to ponder is the more interesting data buried in such surveys.

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We don’t normally post stuff straight out of SNP press releases, but we’re about to have some sort of breakdown today on account of the appalling Windows 8, and this is some powerful polling data, so we hope you’ll forgive us a bit of a cut-and-paste job.

The Nats commissioned a poll this month from Panelbase of 1,011 people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, which found overwhelming support for the rest of the UK sharing Sterling and the Common Travel Area with an independent Scotland.

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As we’ve been poring over old opinion polls today, we thought we may as well share this with you. We make no suggestions that it proves anything about anything, it’s just fascinating. (It is to us, anyway, because the alternative is Strictly Come Dancing.)

It’s hopefully pretty self-explanatory. It charts the SNP’s lead (or, for much of the time, otherwise) in Holyrood opinion polling in the 16 months leading up to the 2011 Scottish election. And it’s interesting to ponder the timing of some of its peaks and troughs.

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Isn’t it weird how since we did this, everyone’s suddenly started asking much more interesting questions in opinion polls about independence?

After months with almost no polling at all, and what there was being restricted to boring Yes/No affairs, there’s been an explosion in surveys conducted by every conceivable pollster for everyone and his dog, and nearly every one has followed our lead in digging below the headline response and trying to find out what makes Scottish voters tick when it comes to their views on the constitution.

Today has two new sets of data to chew over, with fascinating results.

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Alert readers will doubtless have spotted the news that the UK government is to press ahead with the sell-off of the Royal Mail. After all, with brutal job cuts under both Labour and Tory/Lib Dem governments having put over 50,000 people out of work in recent years the post is now not just viable but profitable, and we couldn’t possibly have hundreds of millions of pounds in annual profits flowing back into the Treasury’s hands to provide public services for taxpayers when they could be flogged to private companies to enrich the wealthy.

The sale is overwhelmingly opposed by Royal Mail employees, and by the public at large, across party boundaries. But it’s far from unique in that regard. It’s just hard to see how anything can be done about it.

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In so far as there’s any actual reasoning or hard data supporting the Scotsman’s front-page lead story today at all, it’s when the American pundit Nate Silver claims that “Historically, in any Yes or No vote in a referendum, it’s actually the No side that tends to grow over time, people tend not to default to changing the status quo.”

Shall we just check whether that does indeed “tend” to be true, readers?

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We’ll be brief about the Eastleigh by-election result.

For all sorts of reasons.

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We should get one thing straight from the start: the only thing on Earth more tedious than a conspiracy theorist is a conspiracy denier. For every swivel-eyed nutter you find shouting hysterically that the government and royal family are 12-foot-tall shape-shifting lizards from space, there’ll be an equally (but differently) dim-witted Pollyanna at the other end glibly sniggering about “tinfoil hats” and rubbishing the mad notion that a group of people might ever get together and covertly seek to achieve an aim.

Because the history of humanity is the history of conspiracies. From Guy Fawkes to various military coups, revolutions and civil wars to the burning of the Reichstag and right up to the present day, mankind’s records are littered with events which, had anyone actually warned of them before they happened, would have been dismissed by smug idiots as the deranged fantasies of the comically paranoid.

As recently as last year we saw one right here in our very own country, when the South Yorkshire police were found to have perpetrated a co-ordinated, decades-long cover-up over the Hillsborough tragedy. Yet like moths which keep flying into lightbulbs over and over again in the irrational hope that THIS time they’ll turn into the moon, we stubbornly refuse to entertain – indeed, openly mock – even the abstract possibility that anyone in a position of power might ever be up to no good.

So, then, to the Scottish media.

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