Survation’s propaganda polling for “Scotland in Dungeon” is BACK – and it shows support for Scotland “leaving the United Kingdom” has held up since September, with the SNP on course for another landslide win at the UK general election

This question always, absolutely always, produces lower support for the so-called “Leave” option than the “Yes” option receives in genuine independence polls.  There are a number of plausible explanations for this phenomenon, and in my view the most likely is that the reference to “the United Kingdom” leads a significant minority of respondents to wrongly think they’re being asked a question about the monarchy.  Other possibilities are that respondents are getting mixed up with the Brexit issue due to the “Remain/Leave” formulation, or that they can see that they’re not actually being asked about independence at all.  “Leaving the UK” does not automatically result in outright independence (Jersey, for example, is not independent but it’s not in the UK either), and there’s no particular reason for anyone to infer that independence is the subject of the poll unless the question spells that out.

I’ve said this before, but I remain baffled as to why Survation have allowed themselves to get embroiled in this type of disreputable propaganda polling.  My impression of them is that they take a particular pride in avoiding loaded, biased or misleading question wordings, and yet that seems to go completely out of the window every few months when Scotland in Dungeon come calling.  Perhaps SiD pay some sort of “push-poll premium”, or maybe there’s some other explanation, although I can’t imagine what it would be.

If anyone feels that the latest blatant lie from the Express warrants a complaint to the press regulator under the accuracy clause of the Editors’ Code, here is the form you’ll need.  The only conceivable excuse I can see for the Express is that there were fewer Don’t Knows in this poll than in the September poll, meaning that in the figures including Don’t Knows, both the ‘Remain’ and ‘Leave’ vote has risen.  However, the Editors’ Code specifies that headlines should be supported by the text of the article, and that isn’t the case here – the only version of the figures the Express give in the article is the one with Don’t Knows stripped out, which show no increase at all in the ‘Remain’ vote.

Believe it or not, the poll isn’t completely useless, because it did ask for Westminster and Holyrood voting intentions using standard questions (although there’s the traditional problem with Survation polls that the SNP always seem to be understated on the Holyrood list vote).

Although pro-indy parties are falling a little short of an outright majority of the popular vote – which of course will matter hugely in a de facto referendum – I think the SNP will be pretty happy with these numbers.  In the context of a massive GB-wide Labour lead, it’s pretty creditable for the SNP to maintain a double-digit lead in Scotland.  Labour have made some progress north of the border, but they seem to have been more or less stuck for several weeks, and are perhaps even going backwards very slightly.  There’s no sign yet of a really telling Labour breakthrough.

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