In the end there was very little point in fleshing out last night’s blogpost about the Survation mega-poll, because a lot of what had been reported about it on social media (and even in one or two newspaper articles) turned out to be fictional. There was no direct independence question in the poll at all – the reported numbers of Yes 51.4%, No 48.6% were a silly confection, justified with logic of the “two plus two equals twenty-two” variety. The irony is that we’ve seen in recent weeks that if you ask poll respondents how they would vote in an independence referendum if they assume that a hard Brexit is going ahead, you get a Yes vote in the low 50s anyway. So I’m not entirely sure what the point of inventing fantasy results was.
The Westminster voting intention numbers that were mentioned on Twitter also turn out not to be what they first appeared – according to Survation, they are from a Scottish subsample that was not separately weighted. So the apparent significant uptick in SNP support since the last full-scale Scottish poll from Survation cannot be regarded as meaningful. The next proper poll may well show a boost of that sort, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
The one and only piece of Scottish data in the poll that did turn out to be authentic is that 38% of respondents say that Brexit would make them more likely to support independence, and only 25% say that it would make them less likely to support independence. And that, I would suggest, is plenty enough to be getting on with for now.
As far as the UK-wide figures from the poll are concerned, I have to say the People’s Vote brigade are getting a bit carried away. They’ve been pointing to maps showing there has been a swing to Remain almost everywhere, and saying it’s “astonishing” and “extraordinary”. Hmmm. Up to a point, Lord Copper. If Survation are right, there has been a 6% swing from Leave to Remain since the 2016 referendum, which is not insignificant, but the Leave vote has scarcely fallen through the floor. A mere 4% swing back in the opposite direction would see Leave draw level – and that sort of shift can happen in the blink of an eye in the heat of a referendum campaign. And it’s scarcely unprecedented in British politics for a national swing to be replicated to varying degrees in most localities (even assuming that localised figures from the poll based on very small subsamples can be regarded as remotely reliable).
