Sensation as first YouGov poll since the death of the Queen shows huge INCREASE in support for Scottish independence – which now stands at almost 50%

Although it’s possible that the replacement of a popular Queen by a somewhat less popular King has caused support for independence to rise due to the weakening of the soft power of “Brand UK”, a much more plausible interpretation is as follows: the death of the Queen had no impact on support for independence at all (in spite of the willful delusions of the “silent majority” brigade), and this sudden increase for Yes is instead caused by the extremist right-wing turn of the Conservative government under Liz Truss.  What the last few weeks have reminded me of more than anything are the opening scenes of the TV adaptation of Chris Mullin’s novel A Very British Coup, which see the markets descending into chaos due to the election of Britain’s most left-wing ever Prime Minister – and there’s some sort of morality tale to be discerned from the fact that when it actually happened in real life, it was the Rabid Right that were the culprits, not the Loony Left.  Mysteriously, the London media never warned us about this possibility.

Nevertheless, given that we’re probably heading for a plebiscite election rather than a conventional referendum, it’s not enough for the political and economic chaos to have turned people into potential Yes voters – we also need them to be voters for a pro-indy party.  In other words, the ‘Cat Boyd Paradox’ of people voting Labour even though they earnestly claim to be independence supporters could theoretically scupper us.  The YouGov poll is the first since the mini-budget to provide Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election (intended by the SNP to be a plebiscite election), and it shows the following…

Not that I want to blow my own trumpet here, but those numbers are almost identical to the average of Scottish subsamples that I calculated yesterday morning for Scot Goes Pop.  I said at the time that the average had the ‘ring of truth about it’, but I couldn’t possibly have guessed how uncannily close it would be.  So this is basically a good news story – although there’s been a substantial Labour surge, it’s almost entirely at the expense of the Tories, with the combined support for pro-independence parties dropping only by a statistically insignificant one percentage point.  That support now stands at 48%, which means it’s essentially identical to the 49% Yes vote on the main independence question.  Bear in mind also that 2% of the vote went to “other parties”, and some of those people will be supporters of other pro-indy parties such as Alba.  So, on the face of it, there’s no reason to assume that winning a mandate for independence at a plebiscite election will be significantly harder than winning a referendum.  It looks like the vast majority of people switching to Labour are unionists.

But the caveat is the same one I mentioned when giving my thoughts on the subsample average.  Labour closing the gap to fourteen percentage points is neither here nor there in terms of its impact on seats – but if they close the gap much further, the story would be very different, and a large number of SNP seats would then become potential targets for Labour.  That’s why it’s imperative that the pro-indy vote isn’t split, and that we keep the inbuilt advantage over unionists in first-post-the-post Westminster elections that we’ve enjoyed since 2015.  There needs to be just one pro-indy candidate in each constituency for us all to unite around, thus maximising the chances that we can contain any Labour surge.

YouGov also have Holyrood numbers, which are particularly fascinating, because even the subsample average couldn’t give us any clues as to whether the Labour surge is confined to Westminster voting intentions.  If the sort of people who are switching to Labour at Westminster are instead turning to the SNP or other pro-indy parties at Holyrood, the case for using a snap Scottish Parliament election – rather than the next UK general election – as a de facto plebiscite would become even stronger.

(There’ll probably be an Alba figure on the list but so far I haven’t been able to find it.)

So there you have it – there is a Labour surge for Holyrood too, but it’s markedly smaller, and the SNP grab some of the spoils themselves on the constituency ballot.  The SNP lead over Labour on the constituency ballot is a whopping twenty-three points, which is much higher than the fourteen-point lead in the Westminster voting intentions.  The case for it being much safer to use a snap Holyrood election as a de facto referendum would appear to be unanswerable.

On the London buses principle, it was of course always inevitable that after a drought in Scottish polling, we’d suddenly get two Scottish polls on the same night.  Savanta ComRes have also popped up with both Holyrood and Westminster numbers, and the former weirdly show essentially no drop for the Tories at all.  For Westminster there is a Tory slump, but not as big as the one YouGov are reporting. 

UPDATE: I’ve just noticed that ComRes have independence numbers too…

Inexplicably, Conor Matchett of The Scotsman is characterising this statistical tie, no change position as “the Yes vote continuing to stagnate”.  Er, with all due respect, Conor…are you on drugs?  The lad seems to have learned no lessons at all from the catastrophe of the #Matchettgate fake poll scandal last year.

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