Wings Over Scotland

When we commission polls we don’t like to just ask people easy questions like who their favourite member of One Direction is. We like to put them on the spot and make them actually think about stuff, and this time was no different:

“The UK government is imposing severe cuts to tax credits and benefits in order to save £12 billion from its budget. Scotland’s per-capita share of the cuts would be around £1 billion.

The Scottish Government will in future have the power to compensate those who lose out, by creating new payments it’ll have to fund itself.

Which of the following is closest to your view?”

Because we thought it was unlikely any Scottish Labour MSPs would be taking our poll, we decided to discount the “magic lots of extra money out of thin air” option and only allow respondents to pick from intellectually-coherent choices.

Their answers were enlightening.

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The task facing the Scottish independence movement is to change the minds of just 6% of Scots. That’s all it would take to turn September 2014’s defeat into a victory if and when another referendum comes around, and when you put it like that it doesn’t sound like an impossible job.

The question for Yes supporters is where to focus their energies. A proportion of people who live in Scotland will never vote for independence no matter what, for a variety of reasons we don’t need to go into here. But we’ve always wondered exactly how big that proportion was, so in our latest Panelbase poll we just asked straight out.

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The House of Lords has been in the news quite a bit recently, one way and another. So in our latest poll we thought it might be fun to ask a few questions about it.

We decided to have something for everyone.

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A few weeks ago, we were told by a source that BBC Scotland’s flagship weeknight current-affairs show Scotland 2015 was recording some truly shocking viewing figures, in the region of 5,000 people a night. When we sent the BBC an FOI request for the stats, it was rejected, like almost all FOIs to the Corporation are.

We also looked into trying to get the data from BARB, but they weren’t very helpful either. So the only option we had left to get any sort of idea at all was to ask in our latest Panelbase poll.

When the results came in, we understood why the BBC wanted it kept quiet.

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This one rather speaks for itself.

(Data below from our latest Panelbase poll.)

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As alert readers will know, we’ve just done another Panelbase opinion poll. You’ll be hearing more about the results over the next couple of days, but we thought we’d give you the headline finding first.

The most interesting thing about those numbers is that as far as we can make out that’s the highest Yes figure Panelbase has ever returned for that question. (The last two times, for the Sunday Times in September and July, both came out 47-53.)

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There’s been something of a resurgence recently in pundits bemoaning online abuse and saying “Yes, there are bad apples on both sides but the overwhelming majority of offenders are Yes supporters”.

The authors of such articles oddly choose to ignore the only statistical data so far in existence, which shows the opposite:

“In a worrying development for the Better Together campaign, 21 per cent of those planning to vote Yes have received abuse or threats compared to just eight per cent of those planning to vote No.”

It also seems not to occur to them that their own experience of abuse may be a result of their particular – real or perceived – partisan position. (Ours, for example, is that 98% comes from No voters, but then that WOULD be our experience because on the whole you tend to get abused by people who disagree with you, not your own side.)

So we expect they’ll ignore this inconvenient statistical data from our latest Panelbase poll too, but we’ll put it out there anyway, alongside the Express poll, for reference. It’s pretty much all you can do.

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On last night’s surprisingly feisty Scottish Labour leadership debate, one thing the two candidates firmly agreed on was that Scottish Labour should NOT become a fully autonomous party able to form its own policies. So it probably won’t come as any great shock to find that they’re both out of step with public opinion.

In fairness, it should be noted that a narrow majority (40% to 28%) of Labour’s own voters still want the Scottish branch office to be ultimately controlled by the UK party, as do Tory and Lib Dem supporters. More disturbing is probably the 29% of all Scots (including 13% of Labour voters) who think it doesn’t matter either way.

Whoever wins, we suspect they shouldn’t get their hopes up.

With David Mundell and Ian Murray both having appeared on today’s “Good Morning Scotland” singing the praises of the wonderful Scotland Bill and how it would deliver all a nation could ever dream of, it seems a good time to publish the results of our recent Panelbase poll on the subject.

The nation, it seems, has rather more ambitious dreams.

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The Sunday Times has today released some more of the data from the joint poll it conducted with this site a couple of weeks ago. As well as giving the SNP a 31% lead over Labour for Holyrood 2016, there’s a very interesting stat on Europe.

That lead in England for the UK leaving the EU is surprising – most recent polling has shown something like a 60-40 margin in favour of staying in. We’ll need to wait and see if the poll is an outlier or if there’s been another shift in English opinion.

It’s also interesting in that it blows a hole in the regular assertions of Unionist pundits that there are no real differences in social attitudes on either side of the border. At a time when England is split down the middle, Scotland’s resounding 2:1 majority for staying in Europe has never, to our recollection, been higher.

There’s one more thing of note about the poll, though.

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The Scottish Daily Mail today leads with a screaming banner headline announcing in its trademark style that, according to a poll it commissioned with Survation, Scots are massively opposed to any income tax rises when Holyrood eventually gets power over the rates under the new Scotland Bill.

And the reason that’s weird is that we commissioned a poll on the very same thing just days before, and got a dramatically different answer.

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Our latest Panelbase poll was conducted from 26 June-3 July, before this weekend’s astonishing events involving Greece, which are currently being documented on Twitter under the hashtag #ThisIsACoup.

We’re going to ask the exact same question again in our next one, so we can see if the EU’s actions have caused any significant change in public opinion. It should be pretty interesting either way.