The lesson for the SNP as new poll puts independence support at 54%

The National

3 days ago

It's strikingly similar to a string of polls a few years ago which claimed there would be a big boost in independence support, in some cases taking the Yes vote into the high 50s, if Britain voted to leave the EU, or if Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, or if the UK government negotiated a hard Brexit rather than a soft Brexit. All of those three events came to pass, and yet the predicted instant effect on Yes support didn't materialise.
The reason is that people are generally bad at answering hypothetical questions accurately, and sometimes think a possible future event will have more of an impact on their own political attitudes than actually proves to be the case. It's far more important, then, that the Norstat poll shows that real independence support in the here-and-now stands at a very handsome 54%, a gain of four percentage points since the previous poll in the series.
That may well imply that the increasing danger of Farage grabbing the keys to 10 Downing Street has already shifted some voters into the Yes camp. And it's worth remembering that it's perfectly possible for hypothetical questions in polls to underestimate the impact of future events, as well as to overestimate them.
It's unlikely that many people in early 1979 would have guessed the full extent of the transformative effect that Margaret Thatcher's premiership was about to have on support for both devolution and independence over the course of 11 years. If Nigel Farage takes office and starts acting in a way that is fundamentally at odds with Scottish values, as Mrs Thatcher did, or if he tries to abolish or neuter the Scottish Parliament, a sea-change in public opinion could be triggered that might take the Yes vote well beyond the predicted 58% mark.
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There's a much more immediate concern about the impact of Farage and Reform UK on Scottish politics, though. The word from the ground in the Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse by-election is that Reform are performing strongly, that they have a good chance of overtaking Labour to finish second, and that they may even have an outside chance of overtaking the SNP to win outright.
Because of that consideration, the SNP leadership will have been far more interested in what the Norstat poll shows about party political voting intentions than in what it shows about independence. The large 15-point gap between the SNP and Reform in Holyrood constituency voting intentions will settle the nerves that had been left jangling by a small series of Scottish subsamples from Britain-wide polls, which misleadingly implied that Reform had more or less drawn level.
Nevertheless, there's an ongoing frustration that the SNP hold their lead on only 33% of the vote, rather than something approaching the 54% vote for independence itself. It's well known that the biggest reason Labour were able to win a majority of Scottish seats at last year's Westminster General Election was that Yes support had become decoupled from SNP support, and that a great many people were voting Labour while still supporting independence.
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But Labour's support has collapsed since then, so if those "lost" independence supporters haven't returned to the SNP fold, where have they gone? The answer, according to the Norstat data tables, is that they are now dispersed between several different parties, mostly Unionist parties. Only 56% of those who would vote Yes in any independence referendum held now would also vote SNP on the Holyrood constituency ballot. Some 12% would vote Labour, 10% would vote Conservative, 9% would vote Green, 7% would vote Reform, and 5% would vote Liberal Democrat.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that voters are no longer casting their votes with independence at the forefront of their minds, and that there is consequently an opportunity for the SNP to win many of those people back if they can devise a strategy that stresses the urgency of independence and convincingly ties a vote for the SNP to the prospect of Scotland actually becoming an independent country in the relatively near future.