Well, well, well. Just 24 hours since Humza Yousaf sold the jersey to some extent by telling the BBC (under no pressure at all from the interviewer, incidentally) that it was “obvious” that independence is “not the settled will of the Scottish people”, along comes a poll to prove him totally wrong.
Should Scotland be an independent country? (Find Out Now / Alba Party, 7th-12th June 2023)
Yes 52% (-)
No 48% (-)
The significant point here is that Find Out Now have conducted five polls on Scottish independence since they first entered the fray. The five have been well spaced out, and each one has been commissioned by a different client. There was one in March 2021 commissioned by the Daily Express, one in December 2022 which if I recall was commissioned by an independence supporter acting as an individual (although he crowdfunded for it retrospectively), one in January 2023 commissioned by The National, one in March 2023 commissioned by myself for Scot Goes Pop, and now one in June 2023 commissioned by the Alba Party. All five have shown a majority in favour of independence, which suggests strongly that there has been a consistent Yes majority throughout the period Find Out Now have been polling – in other words, the polar opposite of the claim Yousaf made yesterday to justify indefinitely dropping all plans to win independence.
Now, of course, there have been many polls from other firms during the same period which have shown Yes below 50%. But here’s the thing: the consistency of Find Out Now’s results suggests that the differences between polls have not been caused by Yes support on the ground bobbing up and down (as Yousaf misleadingly suggested yesterday) but instead by methodological differences between polling companies. The two firms that have consistently shown Yes majorities in recent times are Find Out Now and Ipsos, and they differ from other firms in that they do not weight their results by recalled referendum vote from 2014. The head of Ipsos explained a few months ago that they take that approach for a very sound reason, namely that there is a high probability of some respondents falsely recalling how they voted in 2014, especially after almost a decade.
It’s about time Yousaf started speaking up for the cause he’s supposed to believe in by forcibly pointing out the evidence that there already is a settled will in favour of independence, and challenging the questionable methodology of pollsters who show No leads, rather than eagerly buying into a unionist narrative to try to get himself off the hook of having to do anything to actually deliver independence.
A couple of technical notes about the poll – Alba in their press release have taken a leaf out of the Express / IPSO book by rounding the results to one decimal place, and not to a whole number, so they can say Yes are on 52.5% rather than 52%. But at least, unlike the Express and IPSO, they’ve made an arithmetically accurate claim. I’ve already received the datasets by email, and I can tell you that Yes are on 52.49%, so that number has been accurately rounded to 52.5%.
And Alba have also pointed out that the fieldwork covers the period of Nicola Sturgeon’s arrest. That’s technically true, but I know from my own experience of commissioning a Find Out Now poll that the vast majority of responses will probably have come through on the first day of fieldwork, meaning last Wednesday.
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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2023 a few weeks ago, and the running total has now passed £1500. The target figure is £8500, however, so there’s still quite some distance to travel. If you’d like to help Scot Goes Pop continue by making a donation, please click HERE. Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.
