So just a postscript to my piece earlier today about the YouGov poll suggesting that the prospect of full EU membership for an independent Scotland could be the key to building a Yes majority. It’s worth pointing out that the EU factor could similarly be the explanation (or part of the explanation) for why the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey published a few weeks ago was mysteriously more favourable for independence than most conventional polling has been.
Generally the results of the Social Attitudes Survey are presented as if respondents were asked to choose between three options – independence, devolution, or no Scottish Parliament at all. However, this is a simplification to make the results more digestible. In fact, there are five options – two of which specifically mention the EU. That in itself makes it radically different from conventional polling, which simply asks “Should Scotland be an independent country?” and leaves respondents to make their own inferences about the implications for EU membership.
The five options are as follows…
Independent, separate from the UK and EU
Independent, separate from the UK but in EU
Part of the UK, with elected Parliament with some taxation powers
Part of the UK, with elected Parliament with no taxation powers
Part of the UK without its own elected Parliament
This is obviously a pretty antiquated format, but the reason it’s used is to maintain consistency with the question that has been asked since the late 1990s. The assumption that seemed to be made back then was that separatism was an exclusively Jock lark and that departure from the EU could be seen as the extreme end of a Jock separatism scale. It never seemed to occur to the devisers of the survey that the UK itself might leave the EU and that people might then seek Scottish independence specifically because they wish to be less ‘separatist’, in other words to rejoin the EU. (Maybe the reason the word “Scexit” hasn’t really stuck is that “Scre-entry” would obviously be far more apt.)
Brexit has thus subverted the meaning of most of the survey’s options. In 1999 it would have been taken as implicit in the “part of the UK” options that this also meant “part of the EU”, but in fact now there is just one option out of five that offers membership of the EU. Looked at in that way, it’s little wonder that backing for “independent, separate from the UK but in EU” has shot into the stratosphere in recent years, way out of proportion to any increase for the Yes vote in standard polls. 62% of the Scottish public voted Remain, after all.
In the most recent Social Attitudes Survey, 45% of the entire sample selected “independent, out of UK but in EU” – a massive increase from 26% in the last survey prior to the 2016 Brexit referendum. This strongly suggests that explicitly tying independence to EU membership increases support radically, and that this factor is the main driver of the startlingly high overall 52% pro-independence figure in the latest survey.
The snag, of course, is that a small but significant percentage chose the “independent, separate from the UK and EU” option, and without those people there would be no pro-independence majority. Does that mean it’s impossible to square the circle? That we can’t get a majority by emphasising EU membership because we’d lose the “Brexiteer Yessers” along the way? That’s where the new YouGov polling is so encouraging. It suggests that more than four-fifths of Yes-supporting Leave voters would stick with Yes even if it meant rejoining the EU.
This, perhaps, shouldn’t be a major surprise. The Farage mob have long claimed that what the SNP are offering isn’t “real” independence because it would entail “Brussels rule”. But even the minority of independence supporters who view the issue through that prism are likely to realise that you certainly can’t have “real” independence without bringing an end to London rule, and that may well be their first priority.
