Scotland is on the threshold of real change when Yes has a double digit lead
Speymouth
It’s definitely happening, as anyone who’s been paying attention knew it would. The experience of a Labour government which was elected on a promise of change but which has proven to be in office all but indistinguishable from the Tories Labour ousted, has very predictably driven Scots to the realisation that the only way in which Scotland will ever get real and meaningful change and see the interests of ordinary people being put first is with independence. A new opinion poll commissioned by The National and carried out by polling company Find Out Now has for the first time given Yes a double digit lead over No. The field work for the poll was carried out between the 7th and 11th of April, after Labour’s shocking betrayal of disabled people but before Starmer spared no effort to save the Scunthorpe steel works while throwing Grangemouth and its workers under the bus.
The poll reported that 52% of respondents would vote Yes to independence, 11% clear of the 41% who said they’d vote No. 7% answered don’t know. With the don’t knows removed, as don’t know isn’t an option on an independence referendum ballot paper, the result is 56% Yes and 44% No, a clear and decisive result in anyone’s book. The question used was: “If another Scottish independence referendum was held tomorrow, with the question ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’, how would you vote?”
The poll found that every region of Scotland except the south returned a majority for independence, with the highest pro-independence support being found in Glasgow and the Highlands and Islands.
As has become a familiar pattern from other opinion polling, the youngest age groups overwhelmingly support independence whereas the oldest generation returns a large majority against. Among those aged 16-29, 67% backed Yes against 22% for No. For the oldest group polled, those aged 75 and older, 65% supported No as opposed to 33% who backed Yes.
Support for independence is clearly not going away, in fact it is growing as the reality of Westminster’s inability and unwillingness to change becomes apparent and we have the looming threat of a Westminster government led by Nigel Farage hovering on the horizon. The choice facing Scotland is coming into focus, independence, or going backwards under a far right English nationalist government in to pocket of Elon Musk which would introduce turbo-charged austerity.
To paraphrase Frankie Boyle, independence is a leap into the unknown, but the known is food banks, austerity, impoverishment for the many while the rich get ever richer, English nationalist exceptionalism, and subordination as a vassal state of Trump and his allies.
Find Out Now is one of the polling companies which does not use the increasingly indefensible practice of weighting by the outcome of the 2014 referendum. This methodology made good sense in the months after the 2014 vote, but almost 11 years on it has the effect of producing an ever less accurate result like a clock which loses 30 seconds a day, you don’t notice at first but after a year the clock is three hours out. There’s no conspiracy to reduce apparent support for independence, just inertia, reluctance to change a methodology which worked well in the past, and a lack of incentive to change given that most polls on Scottish independence are commissioned by publications and organisations which oppose independence and are happy to receive polling results which agree with their own preferences. It’s not like the editor of, say, The Scotsman, or the Daily Mail is going to complain to a polling company that its methodology is over-stating the likely No vote.
I’ve explained this before but it’s worth repeating how it is that weighting a poll by the result of the 2014 referendum skews a poll towards No. Approximately 550,000 people have died in Scotland since the 2014 referendum, 14% of the entire 2014 electorate.
Poll weighting is a perfectly acceptable and standard procedure which helps a polling company ensure that its sample is properly representative of the population at large. So for example if 51% of the population is female but the pollster’s sample is 55% male and 45% female then the poll can give greater weight to the 45% female portion of its sample in order to adjust for the under-representation of female members of the sample. In the months after the 2014 independence referendum, pollsters used weighting to ensure that they had approximately 55% No and 45% Yes respondents. Yet Scotland has changed since 2014 and this practice no longer makes sense.
Human mortality being what it is, these are largely members of the oldest age group which as is well known disproportionately opposes independence. They have been replaced in the electorate by younger voters who are more likely to be sympathetic to independence. Weighting a poll by the outcome of an eleven year old vote has the effect of undoing the demographic changes which have taken place in Scotland over the past eleven years. I would go so far as to say that any poll on Scottish independence in 2025 which weights its results by the outcome of the 2014 referendum should be automatically ignored.
What this poll does tell us is that support for independence is considerably higher than support for the SNP, even higher than support for the two main pro-independence parties, the SNP and the Scottish Greens, combined. It’s even higher than the figure would be if Alba’s support were included. Whether Alba will still remain a cohesive political party by the time of the next Holyrood election is currently a moot point as there are rumours that its sole MSP Ash Regan may be about to jump ship, meaning she’d be the first MSP to change party affiliation not once but twice during the course of a Parliament.
This level of support strongly suggests that the next Holyrood election must be focused on independence, not on obtaining a mandate to ask Keir Starmer for a referendum he’s never going to agree to, but on campaigning to get a majority of voters to back the idea that Scotland should be an independent country. This poll tells us that such a campaign would be pushing against an open door. 60% support for independence is within our grasp, and an even higher level of support for independence is a real possibility. When majority support for independence in Scotland becomes unarguable, the political game changes. We are at the threshold of that change.
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