OK, so the headline is a tribute to the hysterical treatment the Express website gave to the statistically insignificant 1% decrease for Yes in the Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll on Friday night. (They published no fewer than two articles on the same subject, and Unionist Twitter went nuts over it.) But there’s a serious lesson here about the way mainstream media journalists treat their readers with utter contempt on polling matters. Having cynically misrepresented the significance of the margin of error noise that flattered No in the Scot Goes Pop poll, will they do the same thing today now that a fresh Panelbase poll, this time for the Sunday Times, is showing what may well just be margin of error noise that flatters Yes, but that on the face of it amounts to a rather impressive 2% increase in support for independence? Especially as it takes Yes to 49% – a statistical tie with No, and the best result for Yes in any Panelbase poll since April? I suspect they won’t.
Boris Johnson’s pipe dream of British unity has been CRUSHED this morning by a stunning new Sunday Times poll showing support for Scottish independence has SOARED by 2% over the space of just TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
Should Scotland be an independent country? (Sunday Times / Panelbase poll, 9th-12th November 2021)
Yes 49% (+2)
No 51% (-2)
(Note: The Sunday Times are reporting it as a 1% increase for Yes, and a 1% decrease for No, but that’s because they’re pretending that the only Panelbase polls that exist are the ones they commissioned themselves – which in fairness has been standard practice for all newspapers since the dawn of time. However, even on the basis of the claimed 1% increase, I can’t help but raise a smile at the mundane reference to the Yes vote merely “holding up”, given the rather more excitable treatment the Express, Blair McDougall, “HappyBritScot”, Pamela Nash, Murdo Fraser et al gave to a similarly trivial 1% decrease on Friday night.)
As I’ve mentioned before, the two Panelbase polls before Friday both had Yes on 48%. So an entirely plausible interpretation is that Yes has been steady at around 48% for many months now, and that normal sampling variation caused a meaningless dip to 47% on Friday night, and an equally meaningless bump up to 49% this morning. But there is also an alternative explanation. Whatever you may think of Nicola Sturgeon, no-one can doubt the excellence of her public relations skills, and she’s had a particularly good couple of weeks at COP26. So it’s just conceivable there may have been a genuine Yes bounce off the back of the climate summit in Glasgow.
More details from the poll and analysis to follow shortly…
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