A series of super-short snippets from our splendid survey.
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VOTERS MOST AFRAID OF TERRORIST ATTACKS
Conservative: 55%
Lib Dem: 42%
Labour: 32%
SNP: 26%
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VOTERS MOST AFRAID OF SPACE MONSTERS
Conservative: 6%
Labour: 5%
SNP: 4%
Lib Dem: <1%
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A series of super-short snippets from our splendid survey.
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UNDECIDED WHICH WAY THEY’LL VOTE IN THE REFERENDUM
Men: 22%
Women: 38%
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Earlier this week, mad Labour activist Ian Smart posted a tweet – now deleted – in which he referred to Labour For Independence as “fifth-columnists”. (Which caught our eye as Labour types unfailingly leap on any renegade cybernat types intemperately denouncing Unionists as “traitors” or “Quislings”.)
But the phrase reminded us of something Labour like to keep pretty quiet. Their own camp is divided into not just supporters of devolution and independence (and undecideds), but also contains a sizeable faction of prominent voices who don’t just want to freeze devolution in its current position, but demolish it entirely.
This is the last of the political data from our Panelbase survey of Scottish opinion. The full data tables should now be available to the media from the pollster.
(But a quick word to all the Scottish journalists who we know read this site – had a single one of you had the courtesy, wit or basic journalistic initiative to actually contact us and ask us for the tables directly, we’d gladly have given them to you 24 hours before your competitors. Just a wee tip there.)
We know our chums at “Better Together” have been looking forward to this one for days, so we won’t keep them waiting any longer.
We didn’t just go for big blockbuster revelations with our Panelbase poll. We thought it’d also be interesting to delve a little deeper into voters’ party affiliations, since the referendum isn’t a party political issue (despite the determined attempts of the No camp to make it all about the SNP rather than independence).
Given the gulf between how Scotland votes in Westminster elections and Holyrood ones, we were particularly curious to find out to what degree the constitution was colouring party loyalties, one way or another. Here’s what we discovered.
We learned yesterday, in perhaps not the most groundbreaking journalistic scoop of all time, that people don’t much trust politicians. While Scots were much more inclined to believe what they were told by the Yes campaign than the No one, the majority still thought they were being told more fibs than truth by everyone concerned.
What, then, of those whose job it is to scrutinise our politicians, dig down through all the spin and evasion for the facts and tell the public what they need to know?
We thought we might as well take advantage of an excellent new facility revealed to us by an alert reader last night, whereby we can now link you to permanent full copies of web pages without directing traffic to the website in question or faffing around with awkward and flaky things like Google Cache.
Unsurprisingly totally ignoring yesterday’s dramatic poll revelations, the Scotsman’s big political story this morning is “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall throwing a barely-believable playground tantrum about Alex Salmond saying some words that Mr McDougall likes to say.
You can read it, without earning the Scotsman any undeserved ad revenue, here.
Our poll has already established that the Scottish public is deeply sceptical of the No camp’s vague, equivocal dangling of unspecified new powers as an incentive to reject independence. But we also wanted to find out how much they believed the output of the two official campaign groups in general.
As mainly politicians are involved, you can probably guess the results.
Let’s start with a bang, then.
Since nobody wants to define devo-max and the parties of the Union won’t let anyone vote for it anyway (preferring the “Oh, we’ll sort it out for you later, just trust us” argument they so often berate the SNP for), the independence referendum has a great big hole in it where a very substantial proportion of the population would like to be.
So while the press constantly talks about “more powers” (and repeats the falsehood that the London parties are committed to them) without ever saying what the phrase means, and as Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems frantically evade even making solid promises to think about them in the event of a No vote, we thought we’d cut straight to the chase and ask the Scottish people what they wanted.
Okay, so we know this is teasing, but the results of our poll are in.
They make for amazingly interesting reading, and we’re confident you’re going to feel you got value for your money if you were one of the people who contributed to our absurdly successful fundraiser, which achieved 400% of its target in 72 hours before we had to issue a series of panicked tweets telling people to STOP sending money.
We only got the tables half an hour ago – we’re still digesting it all ourselves and there’s a fair bit of technical admin to do before we can start publishing, and there’s so much info we’re going to have to put it out in instalments so as not to overwhelm you with data, but hold tight. We should have the first release for you tomorrow.
Ooh, we haven’t had one of these for a while. Browsing the newspapers on our iPad this morning before getting up, we noticed an interesting headline in the Scotsman.
Intrigued, we clicked on it to see if it was a standard-issue scare story in the paper’s “Scottish independence” section, and were pleasantly surprised to note that it wasn’t. In fact, the warned-of tax rises or cuts in services were those which would follow a No vote in the referendum, as they’re those planned by UK Chancellor George Osborne.
A reader posted this clip in a comment last night and we’ve already tweeted it earlier this morning, but it really deserves to be seen as widely as possible.
(If you’re in a hurry, you can skip straight to 1m 50s.)
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
