Historic breakthrough as Panelbase poll shows 50% support for independence

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Panelbase)

Yes 50% (+1)

No 50% (-1)

This is highly significant, in spite of what on the face of it are minor changes that are well within the margin of error.  In recent times, Panelbase (along with YouGov) have been very much on the No-friendly end of the polling spectrum.  For an eighteen month period between the spring of 2017 and the autumn of 2018, every Panelbase poll that was published put Yes somewhere between 43% and 45%, with 44% being the most common figure – in other words Panelbase were suggesting that independence support had gone backwards (albeit only slightly) since the 2014 referendum.  But from the end of last year onwards, the Yes figure has almost imperceptibly crept up and up and up, from 45% to 47%, then to 48%, then to 49%, and now to 50%.  There has been no single poll in which we could say with confidence that the increase from the previous poll was genuine – but over a period of time the swing to Yes has self-evidently been real and statistically significant.

This is the first Panelbase poll since June 2016 not to show a No lead.  Indeed it’s only the second poll from any firm since 2017 not to show a No lead, with the other one being the famous Lord Ashcroft poll during the summer that had Yes slightly ahead – and it was hard to know what to make of that one, because Ashcroft is not a regular independence pollster, and there were no baseline figures to measure from.  We’ve arguably been a bit unlucky that No-friendly pollsters have dominated the field of late – apart from that one Ashcroft poll, every independence poll that has been published this year has been conducted by either YouGov or Panelbase.  (Unless of course you count the Survation poll commissioned by Scotland in Union that purported to be about independence but in fact asked a completely different question.)  It’s entirely possible that if the likes of Survation and Ipsos-Mori had been polling regularly, we’d have seen a fair few Yes leads recently.

In case you’re wondering, the new figures are not part of the ongoing results from the Panelbase poll commissioned by Wings (which was confined to SNP voters only) – the Sunday Times were the client for this one, and they go out of their way to make the point that 50% is an all-time high for Yes in Panelbase polls for the Sunday Times.  Which is absolutely lovely, but bear in mind that the client doesn’t usually make any difference to how Panelbase conduct their independence polling, and the all-time high for Yes with Panelbase is the 52% recorded in the immediate aftermath of the EU referendum in June 2016.  So we’re almost back up to that kind of level of support but not quite.

(Since writing the above paragraph, I’ve doublechecked and it turns out that the June 2016 poll was actually commissioned by the Sunday Times anyway!  They’ve obviously forgotten about that one.)

I don’t pay the Murdoch Levy and can therefore only see the first few paragraphs of the Sunday Times piece, but it appears there was also a supplementary question that invited respondents to make a straight choice between Scotland staying as part of the UK after Brexit, and independence within the EU.  I haven’t found the exact figures yet, but on that question there is majority support for independence within the EU.  That’ll be food for thought for the minority within the SNP who believe that the road to a Yes win involves watering down the party’s outright Remain stance and embracing the EFTA option.

More details and analysis to follow…

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