We’ve just taken delivery of some REALLY interesting polling results, readers, but it’s going to take a while to fully analyse and write them up, so in the meantime let’s look at some slightly less interesting ones which came from the same poll – the Norstat one commissioned by the Sunday Times and published today, which we hitched a lift on.
The headline figures show an eight-point Yes lead, which is nice, although it’s also entirely abstract since the SNP has no current policy for translating independence support into actual independence (or even another referendum about it).
All the same, it seemed a good time to assess the wider picture.
So we compiled the Yes and No leads of the last 50 polls (the highest number our graphing app allows) into a bar chart, and also totalled up the “lead points”.
While the chart suggests a recently improving trend – Yes has led in seven of the last 14 polls, with six No leads and one tie – the overall tale of the 50 polls makes for grim reading. Of the remaining 36, Yes has been ahead in just five, with 30 No leads and another single tie.
And since we’re now just under a year out from a Holyrood election, we thought it’d be interesting to compare a similar period before the previous Holyrood election – a time when COVID was driving support for both independence and the SNP.
So we crunched the numbers for those 50 polls, and the new (old) graph was startling.
The numbers had almost exactly flipped. Over the course of the current Scottish Parliament, the accumulated 50-poll score has swapped from a 202-56 win for Yes to a 202-62 win for No.
The rise of Reform may or may not be about to herald another period of Yes leads – while Norstat found that Nigel Farage becoming PM might increase indy support by another four points, it also found that support for his party in Scotland continues to grow, and his personal unpopularity appears to be fading too. Indeed, he was the third most popular (or more accurately, the third least UNpopular) of all the leaders the poll named, and will surely soon overtake Anas Sarwar for second place.
LEADERS’ NET POPULARITY
John Swinney -7
Anas Sarwar -25
Nigel Farage -26
Russell Findlay -32
Keir Starmer -39
Kemi Badenoch -44
Donald Trump -51
But even if it does, the two graphs are still a shocking indictment of the performance of the SNP in government over the last four years. To have completely reversed what looked for a while like a settled Yes lead, in extremely favourable conditions as the UK imploded from all directions at once, will inevitably be recorded by history as the most catastrophic (and crucial) fumbling of the ball in the entire nine-decade history of the parliamentary Scottish independence movement.
(One reflected by the collapse in the SNP’s own support, from 56% to 33%.)
On those numbers and trends, as public disillusionment and anger continues to grow, another five years of the SNP in power is a luxury we simply cannot afford.
