This poll from Opinium came out a few days ago, but didn’t get as much attention as people might normally have expected, possibly because it was presented in a very difficult-to-follow graphical form. So we’ve sorted it out, and also added in the missing Lib Dem voters.
The takeaway is that a clear majority of voters both in Scotland and the UK now believe that the UK government should accept the Scottish Government’s request for a second independence referendum.
It’s not even especially close. Discounting the don’t-knows, the results are 56-44 in the UK, and 58-42 in Scotland, which alert readers will note are both bigger margins than the No side secured in the actual referendum and must therefore by Unionist law be described as “overwhelming”.
Remain voters, Labour voters and Lib Dem voters all back a second indyref by more than 2:1 (and by 3:1 in the case of the Lib Dems), which may be why John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn have both been seen in recent days saying they wouldn’t block one if Labour was in power.
It’s not an isolated poll, either. It followed on from a Lord Ashcroft one the same week also finding majority support in Scotland for another referendum (and indeed backing independence), and of course polls have consistently found for years that a large majority of Scots – regardless of their views on an indyref specifically – believe that the power to decide on holding referendums should reside at Holyrood, not Westminster.
So let’s be clear on what the implacable refusal of the Scottish opposition parties to countenance another referendum is: an affront not only to democracy as a concept, nor even just to the Scottish Parliament (which has already passed a vote for a second indyref), but to all of the people of Scotland, all of the people of the UK, and to most of their parties’ own voters.
The Scottish Tories, alone, can at least claim to be acting in accordance with the view of their party and their own members and voters. But we also know from numerous polls – most recently a YouGov one for Hope Not Hate just a few days ago – that most Tory voters are more than willing to sacrifice Scotland (and Northern Ireland, and even Wales if need be) to carry out Brexit.
So to recap: Tory voters couldn’t care less if the Scots sod off so long as England can leave the EU, they just don’t want Scots to take the decision. Labour and Lib Dem voters, and Scots as a whole, and UK citizens as a whole, all want to let Scots decide for themselves whether to stay hitched to the UK as it hurtles off the Brexit cliff.
The people preventing it from happening are a tiny minority comprising politicians in the Scottish branch offices of UK political parties – in essence a few dozen individuals, most of them expressly rejected by voters, frustrating the wishes of both a nation of 5 million and a nation of 65 million, for reasons we doubt even the few dozen themselves could coherently explain to you beyond a blind, kneejerk tribal hatred of the SNP, the Scottish Government and the independence movement.
Collectively, in fact, the tiny rump of Unionist MSPs elected via the Holyrood list system are to all intents and purposes the Scottish equivalent of the DUP – at odds with public opinion and reflexively screaming “NO!” regardless of anything that actually happens, because they’ve been doing it for so long they don’t know how to do anything else.
The refusal of a second indyref is a remarkable illustration of the dysfunctional nature of democracy in the UK, though admittedly those aren’t in short supply at the moment. It’s intriguing to speculate about how long it can be sustained.
