Support for independence boomerangs back in brilliant BMG poll: Yes in the lead for second consecutive survey

Just in case the unionist parties were labouring under the misapprehension that the Yes lead in the Opinium poll the other day was a mere blip within a new normal of No majorities, today’s edition of the Herald brings word of a second consecutive poll with a Yes lead – and this time there’s a little bit of a cushion.

There’s no real point in giving percentage changes, because as far as I can see the last BMG poll on independence was way back in 2017.  For what it’s worth that poll showed a slim No lead – but it wouldn’t have been directly comparable with the new poll anyway, because presumably BMG have now updated their methodology to bring in weighting by recalled 2019 vote and so forth.  So here’s the slight problem – both of the two new polls are from firms who haven’t polled in Scotland for many years.  As a result there aren’t any baseline figures to measure the trend from, and we can’t strictly speaking say that the Yes vote has increased.  It’s theoretically possible, albeit unlikely, that the methodology of both Opinium and BMG is more favourable to Yes than other firms.  So to be more confident that there has been a genuine bounceback in Yes support, we’ll want to see these figures replicated by a firm that polls more regularly.

The Herald article quotes a BMG spokesman as saying that 66 seats would give the SNP “the slimmest majority” of just one seat.  As you can see above, that’s inaccurate – 66 seats is a majority of three.  I presume he was thinking that, because the target for a majority is 65 seats, 66 must be a majority of one, but that’s not how it works.

The mainstream media are trying to weave a narrative that current Holyrood polling is bad for the SNP and bad for the indy camp, but that’s going to stretch credibility for as long as the seats projection has the pro-indy parties up on the 2016 result, and the anti-indy parties down.  Paul Hutcheon of the Record displayed some electoral illiteracy yesterday by claiming that, although the projection from the latest Survation poll pointed to a pro-indy majority, there would have been a unionist majority if the voting system was “PR”.  Er, newsflash, Paul, the voting system is indeed PR!  If what he means is that it isn’t perfectly proportional, that’s true of every other PR system around the world too.  Even Israel, which traditionally has the purest proportional system, has a minimum threshold for representation, meaning that parties that win seats will often be slightly over-represented.

As far as I can see, the Survation numbers that Mr Hutcheon was talking about came from the Scotland in Union propaganda poll and are therefore slightly out of date.  That also means that there are unlikely to be independence numbers from that poll, because Scotland in Union have to maintain the fiction that their ‘Remain/Leave’ question is an independence question (it categorically is not).

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