We apologise if the results of our twin social-attitudes polls of both Scotland and the rUK have been a little depressing so far, readers.
Depending on how you choose to look at things (and where you live), this next tranche of data is going to either cheer you up a little bit or make you feel even worse.
Having found to our dismay that both Scots and the rest of the UK want to see people prosecuted for offensive but non-threatening comments on Twitter and Facebook, it seems a good time to reveal the rest of our findings on matters of law and justice.
Freedom of speech has been a very hot topic across the world in the wake of the brutal murder of 12 editorial staff at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and other related killings. So in our latest poll we thought we’d find out how committed people were to the principle, even in much less deadly situations.
The results were sobering.
Keen students of politics can’t have failed to notice a fascinating situation coalescing in the last few months. On current polling, it looks very much like no two of the UK’s four constituent nations will vote for the same party at the forthcoming general election. The Tories are miles ahead in England, in Scotland the SNP lead by even more, Wales is still a Labour stronghold and Northern Ireland continues to do its own thing, split roughly half-and-half along, well, let’s call them “cultural” lines.
So when we decided to conduct another poll with our left-over fundraiser money (start saving now for 2015’s annual grand appeal next month, readers!), we thought it might be interesting to do something that we’re not sure has ever been done before.
We commissioned TWO full-sample polls, one of 1000 people in Scotland and one of 1000 people in the rest of the UK, and we asked them the same questions.
The results we got were fascinating – sometimes predictable, sometimes surprising, sometimes pleasing and sometimes dismaying. But we’re going to start off with one we really didn’t see coming at all.
As the Smith Commission continues its fundamentally pointless and impossible deliberations, in which it’s expected to digest and consider many thousands of submissions (including hundreds of detailed ones from political organisations and “civic Scotland”) in around three weeks, the Scottish and UK press is still casually and inaccurately tossing around the term “devo-max”.
There seem to be essentially two competing interpretations of the term – the previously-understood meaning (also known as “Full Fiscal Autonomy”) in which all powers are devolved to Holyrood except foreign affairs and defence, and a new one which simply refers to whatever devolution Westminster is prepared to grant. (Justified semantically by the claim that it’s the maximum devolution Scotland’s going to get.)
So when we commissioned our latest Panelbase poll, we decided that rather than the usual checklist of “which powers should be devolved”, to which the answers have remained the same for years, we’d ask some slightly different questions about the relationship between Holyrood and Westminster, and the process of devolution itself, to see if we could determine what it is that the people of Scotland really want from their Parliament.
When we commissioned our latest poll, the candidates for the Scottish Labour sort-of leadership hadn’t yet been finalised. In fact, we’re not even sure whether the post of deputy “leader” was up for grabs at that point, with Anas Sarwar having said that he had no intention of stepping down, shortly before stepping down.
But in any event we thought it’d be much more interesting to see who people actually thought should be the leader, rather than just who they regarded as the least-worst option out of whoever put their head above the parapet and took on the least attractive job prospect in Scottish politics.
As part of our latest Panelbase poll, we wanted to explore the so-called “2017 Scenario” hinted at by new SNP leader and First Minister-elect Nicola Sturgeon, whereby the Tories control the UK parliament, the SNP have another majority at Holyrood, and the UK holds a referendum on the EU where England/the rUK votes to leave and Scotland votes to stay in.
To that end, we asked two key questions. Our findings are below.
We try to deploy the money that generous readers send us during our fundraisers very carefully, so we were annoyed last week when we commissioned a new opinion poll from Panelbase with a few thousand quid left over from the Wee Blue Book campaign, only to have every other pollster and his dog release the results of their own surveys the very next day.
So sadly (for us) the following figures won’t have quite the dramatic impact that they might have commanded otherwise, but they’re still pretty interesting, particularly in the context of how they relate to the findings from Ipsos MORI, YouGov and others.
(Our poll also covered some ground that nobody else has done, but to add excitement and build a little suspense we’ll save that for a wee bit later on today.)
Let’s get to it, then.
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.
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.
The last batch of data from our Panelbase poll concerns social attitudes, away from directly party-political issues. We did a whole bunch of these last time, with a mixture of predictable and unexpected results, and Scots had a surprise or two for us again.
We had a couple of questions in our poll that were quite complex and involved, so to give people a wee bit of respite we threw in a little light-hearted one as well.
Q: If this was the referendum ballot paper, how would you vote?
That made some quite odd stuff happen.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
