A reader emailed me yesterday to ask whether I thought there was any truth in the following comment. I’m not sure what the source of it is – the use of the word “independentista” made me think it might be Jason McCann, but I can’t spot anything like this on his blog.
“None of the efforts of we independentistas, or unionists, to persuade others of the merits of our cause, makes any difference. The Brexit, COVID-19 incidents do not affect support for independence. The increase in those supporting independence since the first referendum in 2014, is entirely due to old people, who overwhelmingly support the Union, dying of old age, and young people, who overwhelmingly support independence joining the electoral role (sic)…”
This is just about the easiest question I’ve ever been asked – the answer is an emphatic “no”, the comment is not true. You only need to look at the datasets of all recent polls to see that some people who voted Yes in 2014 are now in the No column, that some people who voted No in 2014 are now in the Yes column, and that significantly more people have moved from No to Yes than vice versa – hence the Yes majority. Last weekend’s Panelbase poll suggested that 19% of 2014 No voters are now Yes, and that only 6% of 2014 Yes voters are now No.
There may have been some ‘passive demographic drift’ towards Yes over and above the direct swing, but people who think the answer to all our problems is just to wait a couple of decades are barking up the wrong tree. Even leaving aside the distasteful nature of the suggestion that we should wait for elderly No voters to die, the fundamental problem is that the passage of time also turns younger voters into older voters, a process that often changes their political views. There’s a grain of truth in the suggestion that people become more conservative as they get older – it doesn’t happen to everyone by any means, but it does happen to some.
Look at it this way – in 1992, there was a famous opinion poll that put support for independence at exactly 50%. You might remember it was the top headline on News at Ten (those were the days when News at Ten was actually a news programme). The “demographic destiny” brigade would have looked at that number and declared that all we needed to do is wait twenty years and we’d have a Yes vote of 70% – which makes it somewhat mysterious that 55% of people voted No in 2014. Probably some of the young-ish people who were pro-independence in that 1992 poll ended up voting No in 2014 because the Better Together campaign scared them witless about their pensions or whatever.
