My old…well, how can I put this, acquaintance from my days at StormfrontLite, the self-styled international thriller writer Sean Thomas, alerted me earlier to a Sun article about a new YouGov survey of voters in Scotland. Straight away I was sceptical about the numbers, because Labour’s 27% share of the vote for Westminster is not remotely high enough to explain the SNP being as low as 29% (which would constitute a 16-point drop since the 2019 general election) or the Tories being as low as 12%. Having now looked up the data tables, it turns out there’s a very straightforward explanation – Don’t Knows haven’t been excluded from the numbers, which is almost unheard of in party political voting intention polls.
If anyone knows the definitive numbers with Don’t Knows excluded, drop me a line, but a rough recalculation suggests they must be in the following ballpark –
SNP 38%
Labour 36%
Conservatives 16%
Liberal Democrats 5%
Greens 3%
Now, obviously those numbers are still a cause for concern, because Westminster is a first-past-the-post election and what matters most is the gap between the first-placed and second-placed parties. But the percentage drop in the SNP’s vote since 2019 is just seven points – not even close to the sixteen point drop falsely claimed by The Sun.
There are also independence numbers…
Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes 45% (-2)
No 55% (+2)
Again, the numbers with Don’t Knows excluded are missing from the data tables, although in this case The Sun have published them, so hopefully they’re coming from a reliable source. The numbers actually in the data tables suggest the Yes vote could be either 45% or 46% and the No vote could be either 54% or 55% – the rounding to the nearest whole number could have gone either way.
This adds to the weight of evidence suggesting independence support has dipped recently, perhaps due to the SNP’s strategic folly in pursuing gender self-ID against the public’s wishes. But nevertheless, there’s no sign of the ‘drop off a cliff’ that propagandists were talking up after the Ashcroft poll. Remember that YouGov are firmly on the No-friendly end of the polling spectrum, and you’ll find plenty of results like this from YouGov (or even slightly worse) over recent years.
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