Wings Over Scotland

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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The crowdfunded opinion poll this site commissioned from Panelbase last week was a wide-ranging one which covered numerous aspects of the independence debate in some depth. We had to break up our reporting into several pieces to keep it a manageable read. Here, however, is a quick summary of the top ten major findings.

The full data tables can be downloaded directly from Panelbase via this link.

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A series of super-short snippets from our splendid survey.

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VOTERS WHO EXPRESS ANY OPINION ON MEDIA BIAS

Men: 60%
Women: 37%

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A series of super-short snippets from our splendid survey.

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VOTERS WHO HAVE HEARD OF THE WEBSITE “LABOUR HAME”

SNP: 6%
Conservative: 4%
Labour: 4%
Lib Dem: 2%

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HAVE HEARD OF THE WEBSITE “LABOUR FOR INDEPENDENCE”

Labour: 12%
SNP: 12%
Conservative: 10%
Lib Dem: 6%

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A series of super-short snippets from our splendid survey.

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VOTERS WHO THINK ALISTAIR DARLING ALWAYS TELLS THE TRUTH

Lib Dems: 9%
Conservatives: 6%
Labour: 4%
SNP: <1%

Age 45-54: <1%
Age 55-64: 1%
Age 65+: 8%

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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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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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