The lesson for unionists is be careful what you gloat about. It’s no time at all since they were rejoicing that the run of Yes-majority polls had come to an end, and just yesterday Ruth Davidson was boasting (on highly dubious grounds, incidentally) that the unionists now had their own unbroken sequence of six polls showing opposition to independence. But the wheels of fate don’t stop turning for anyone – that little run is now over, courtesy of a new Opinium poll for Sky News.
Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes 51%
No 49%
To the best of my recollection this is the first Opinium poll on independence since the 2014 referendum, so it’s not possible to give percentage changes, or to draw any conclusions from Opinium’s track record as either a Yes-friendly or No-friendly pollster. However, the hope must be that these numbers mean that the drop in support for independence has now stabilised, or even that there has been a little bounceback. Certainly the unionist parties were keen to give the impression that the last year was just a weird aberration and that once No was back in the lead it would stay there permanently. It appears that won’t be the case, and it really is anyone’s guess whether the next poll will show a Yes lead, a No lead, or an even split.
I have to raise at least one eyebrow at the reporting priorities of Sky News in all this. There are two main stories in their poll – one is a Yes majority breaking the sequence of No leads, and the other is that the SNP are projected to fall slightly short of an overall majority. Sky have chosen to headline the latter, and to treat the former as a minor detail. I can’t help feeling that if the poll had shown a No majority and had broken a sequence of Yes leads, they would have magically decided that the independence numbers were the newsworthy part.
More details and analysis to follow shortly…
