Wings Over Scotland

We’ve just got the tables from a new Panelbase poll back, and they make grim reading for Labour (North British Branch Office) on the eve of their conference.

Holyrood voting intentions (constituency):

SNP 41% (nc)
Con 27% (+2)
Lab 19% (-4)
LD 8% (+2)
Grn 3% (nc)
UKIP 2% (+1)

(1002 Scottish voters, 2-6 March 2019)
Changes from December 2018

That’s getting perilously close to the all-time low of 14% achieved around the tail end of Kezia Dugdale’s disastrous leadership. And the list vote isn’t much better.

Holyrood voting intentions (region):

SNP 36% (-2)
Con 26% (nc)
Lab 19% (-3)
LD 9% (+2)
Grn 6% (nc)
UKIP 3% (+2)

But even with astonishing leads of 14% and 10% after 12 years in power, the SNP have nothing to be complacent about either – according to the Weber Shandwick seat projector, these numbers would give Nicola Sturgeon’s party 57 seats and the Greens just 4, meaning Holyrood’s pro-independence majority would be a goner and the Nats would need backing from at least one Unionist party to pass any bills, meaning no new mandate for an indyref.

Like everywhere else, Scotland is currently split down the middle and nobody knows which side of the tightrope it’ll fall off in the event of a push.

New polling out tonight from British Polling Council members Deltapoll.

Excluding don’t-knows, both of those sets of figures come out at 52-48 margins: for Yes if Brexit goes ahead, for No if it doesn’t. If Brexit isn’t mentioned in the question at all, the results are 49% Yes 51% No.

Excluding don’t knows, the figures for Northern Ireland are 57-43 in favour of a united Ireland in the event of Brexit, and 60-40 against if Brexit is averted.

Fair bit at stake in the next few months, then.

Scottish politics is still resolutely on holiday, but in response to an enquiry from Prof. Sir John Curtice today we noticed that we still hadn’t published a few snippets of data from our most recent Panelbase poll. So in the absence of anything else to talk about, we might as well have a wee look.

Our poll showed a strikingly large gulf in support for the EU between independence supporters and Unionists. Were there to be a second EU referendum tomorrow, Yes voters would choose remain by an enormous 36-point margin, and by well over two to one, whereas No voters were a much tighter eight points apart, with only barely over half plumping for Remain.

But even that overstates Unionists’ fondness for the European Union.

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The Daily Record’s politics lead story today is a slightly underwhelming poll that shows 41% of Scots believe the Tories are carrying out a power grab against the Scottish Parliament, against 34% who think they aren’t (and 25% who have no idea).

Which seems a good time to round up the last results of our own most recent poll, and some slightly disturbing revelations about the Scottish public’s grasp of devolution.

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In the light of David Davis’ resignation last night and the continuing shambolic chaos that is UK politics, it seemed a pertinent time for these findings from our latest poll.

Readers probably won’t be too shocked that it’s Scotland Vs The Tories again.

Alert readers may recall that a few weeks ago we revealed how an independent Scotland could reduce its budget deficit by billions of pounds a year – by renting out the Faslane naval base to the rest of the UK to keep their nuclear weapons in.

Voters in England, we learned, were more than happy to pay Scotland £5bn annually – and perhaps even more – for a Trident submarine park during the decades that it would take to build a replacement base south of the border.

Of course, that plan is only any good if the people of Scotland would accept it too.

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From time to time in our Panelbase polls we like to test Scotland’s opinion of its media, since that’s the main focus of our website, and our newest poll was one such time. It found that Scotland’s preferred broadcaster for political coverage was… Channel 4.

The station scored a net +23 rating with respondents, higher than STV (+19), with BBC Scotland trailing in last but still on +16 overall.

The BBC was the only one which had a notable difference in perception between Yes and No voters. C4 got +25 from Nos and a very similar +21 from Yessers, STV was closer still at +20 vs +19, but the BBC had a sizeable gap: just +6 from independence supporters (which is still startlingly high), but a thumping +23 from Unionists.

All broadcasters in Scotland are required by Ofcom rules to be neutral and balanced. We suppose that two out of three more or less managing it isn’t bad.

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We noticed a recurring theme in our latest Panelbase poll. In recent years Scottish politics has of course been defined mainly by the constitution, with all three major UK parties united in opposition to the SNP more or less reflexively. But if you strip out questions about the constitution, voters have largely reverted to the previous norm of a broadly centre-left consensus against the Conservatives.

For years now Lib Dem voters have shown up in polling as essentially Tories Lite, not because individual people’s opinions had changed but because most of the party’s traditional left-leaning voter base had abandoned it in disgust after the 2010 coalition which saw Lib Dem support plunge from 23% to 8% in a single Parliamentary term.

But now – although Lib Dem support has barely increased – things are changing.

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Much of central Cowdenbeath was closed down for several hours by the police yesterday to facilitate an Orange Order parade attended by DUP leader Arlene Foster. (Curiously, Ruth Davidson, who’d been vocal in her complaints about traffic disruption in Glasgow due to the recent Yes march, had no objections this time.)

Foster made an audaciously ironic plea for a nation “free from intolerance and hatred“, right before the next speaker stepped up to denounce large sections of the local population as “enemies of Christ”.

The rest of the parade took its usual form.

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In our latest Panelbase poll, we asked the same independence question we asked in the last one, and got much the same answer. (Technically the indy vote went up by about a sixth of one percent, but that’s statistically meaningless.)

That’s a bit disappointing after the events of recent weeks, but also not very surprising – after all, the way the question is framed pretty much guarantees at least 38% of the population will choose the second option straight off the bat.

Much more interesting is the question we asked next.

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As alert readers will know, we’ve heard little from the Unionist parties in Scotland over the last couple of years but “SCOTLAND SAID NO!”, “SCOTLAND DOESN’T WANT ANOTHER REFERENDUM!” and “WHAT PART OF NO DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?”

That clutch of blunt, angry slogans was (and remains) pretty much the entire Scottish Conservatives manifesto, for example, and it rests on the claim – based on some extremely misleading selective reading of opinion polls – that the nation is implacably opposed to a second vote. The reality, as we know, is somewhat more balanced. But it’s never been quite THIS balanced before.

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We’ve just got the results back from a new Panelbase poll of Scottish voters. As ever there’s some fascinating stuff in there, but we’ll start with the headline voting numbers:

HOLYROOD VOTING INTENTION (excl DK, chgs vs Dec 2017)

SNP 41 (+2)
Con 27 (-1)
Lab 22 (-3)
LD 6 (-)
Grn 2 (-)

(1018 Scottish voters, fieldwork 21-26 June 2018)

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