List of things that are perhaps slightly odd about the alleged “Scottish poll from YouGov” that was published a few days ago

I increasingly feel that there’s something not quite as it seems about the YouGov poll that unionists got so excited about a few days ago (even though it appeared to only show a statistically insignificant one-point drop in independence support once Don’t Knows were excluded). Here’s a list of things that are unusual about it –

1) There was quite a significant gap between fieldwork and publication, to such an extent that the fieldwork was less recent than a Redfield & Wilton independence poll (showing Yes support increasing to 48%) that had been published earlier.

2) The data tables have still not been published, nor does there appear to be a write-up of the results on the YouGov website. YouGov tend to be a lot quicker than that, especially with their own self-funded polls.

3) There was no sign of Westminster or Holyrood voting intentions results in the reporting of the poll, even though it’s almost inconceivable those questions wouldn’t have been asked in a poll which had independence numbers and approval ratings for both Humza Yousaf and Rishi Sunak.

4) Everything above points to YouGov having been commissioned by a client who made a deliberate choice to delay publication and then withhold (or further delay) certain results. And yet no client appears to be mentioned in the reporting of the poll – the Independent instead uses the peculiar formulation “a YouGov study, shared exclusively with the PA News Agency”. But shared by who? The person or organisation behind this poll is apparently being a bit bashful. Why?

5) Potentially most significant of all is that the poll is still not listed on John Curtice’s What Scotland Thinks site. OK, it’s the middle of July, so maybe the person who normally does it is not around at the moment – but remember Professor Curtice heads the British Polling Council, so he usually knows pretty much everything straight away. Has this poll not made his way to him yet, or does he still have doubts about its provenance?

I’m not quite sure where all of this leads, but one possibility is that this was not strictly speaking a YouGov poll at all – sometimes YouGov are commissioned to collect the raw data, and another firm takes it from there and makes decisions about (for example) how to weight the numbers. If so, we may have been a bit misled, because the results shouldn’t be regarded as comparable with previous YouGov polls.

Incidentally, there’s a new GB-wide poll from YouGov today, which is interesting on a couple of points –

Labour 43% (-4)

Conservatives 25% (+3)
Liberal Democrats 11% (+2)
Reform UK 8% (-1)
Greens 7% (-)
SNP 4% (+1)

Scottish subsample: SNP 39%, Labour 32%, Conservatives 12%, Greens 6%, Liberal Democrats 6%, Reform UK 2%

That breaks a sequence of three consecutive Scottish subsamples from YouGov that had Labour ahead of the SNP, and thus makes it seem a bit less inevitable that the SNP will be slipping to second place in any full-scale Scottish poll from YouGov. And at Britain-wide level, there’s a sharp swing back from Labour to Tory, which implies that the recent increase in the Labour lead (caused by the Partygate fallout among other things) may have been very short-lived.

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