As we’re a polling web site now, a quick publish on polls.
In a column for right this moment’s Herald on Sunday, Iain Macwhirter repeats the frequently-made assertion that “Boris Johnson is loathed in Scotland and is the very best recruiting sergeant for independence since Margaret Thatcher”.
The primary half is actually true, because it has been of just about each Tory Prime Minister of the final 40 years. However the second half merely isn’t borne out by the details.
Above (click on to enlarge) is the graph of Sure polling since Johnson grew to become PM. It exhibits help for independence FALLING from 52% to 49% throughout his time period in workplace.
If you happen to low cost the Lord Ashcroft ballot from a couple of days after he entered Downing Avenue (as a result of Ashcroft isn’t a British Polling Council member), the graph turns into Nicola Sturgeon’s political speciality – a flat line, from 49% to 49%.
Johnson has “recruited” no one. These are the chilly laborious details.
Macwhirter additionally asserts (sensibly discounting any risk of an indyref in 2023) that “[Sturgeon] will flip the 2024 Common Election right into a referendum on independence.”
Will she? She may have accomplished that with the 2021 election. She had a clear mandate from 2016, she was driving a polling tsunami for nearly a 12 months main as much as it, she may have used COVID because the justification fairly than permitting it to be the impediment – “That is an emergency, now we have to get out now whereas the home is on fireplace” – and a correct marketing campaign would have energised the motion and maximised the impact. Momentum is all the pieces in politics.
However she bottled it (generously assuming for a second, for the sake of argument, that she really has any intention of securing independence) and the possibility is gone. Since that election, Sure has led in simply 3 out of 24 polls.
If she couldn’t make hay out of Brexit and COVID and the mindboggling corruption and incompetence of Johnson’s administration within the final 12 months – culminating, astoundingly, in a serving Prime Minister of the UK being fined by the police for breaking a legislation he himself handed and nonetheless not resigning – what on Earth goes to return alongside that’s a extra persuasive argument in opposition to the Union? What’s going to convey us to the 60% that SNP folks hold telling us is the requirement for a referendum we’ll win?
In two and a half years there’s a truthful probability the UK may have handed laws principally outlawing independence, fairly probably backed up by a Supreme Court docket judgement. It would really be ILLEGAL to make the 2024 election a plebiscite, by no means thoughts to carry a referendum.
(What we all know for sure in any occasion is that the Electoral Fee can be totally managed by the UK authorities by then, beneath the Elections Invoice handed simply days in the past, and can resolve the timing, the query, the franchise and far else in any referendum that did by some means occur.)
The SNP’s purpose over the previous two years has been to destroy the independence motion (in order that it will possibly’t intervene with Nicola Sturgeon’s rule), not the Union. The open objective has been missed and the ball is gone. If you happen to’re not a part of the reality, you’re a part of the lie.
