The new full-scale Scottish poll from Panelbase, which is being released bit by bit over on Wings Over Scotland, has failed to provide any comfort for the small minority of SNP parliamentarians who take the view that the party needs to water down or reverse its pro-Europeanism to win back Yes voters from 2014 who want to leave the EU. The poll shows that, when the independence question is asked on the assumption that an indy Scotland would definitely stay in the EU, Yes support is in fact several points higher than in recent Panelbase polls that asked the standard independence question.
The UK is currently scheduled to leave the EU in March 2019. If a referendum on Scottish independence was held around this time, and if a Yes vote meant that Scotland would stay in the EU, which way do you think you would vote?
I would vote for an independent Scotland in the EU: 49.4%
I would vote for Scotland to stay in the UK and leave the EU: 50.6%
That’s about as close to a 50/50 split as you can get, and compares to figures of Yes 44%, No 56% in the last Panelbase poll that asked the standard independence question. (I gather from my informant that Stuart Campbell didn’t get Panelbase to ask the standard question, so there’s no direct comparison available within this poll itself.) So it looks as if simply convincing people that independence more or less guarantees EU membership would be enough to add around 5 or 6 points to Yes support at a stroke.
Of course, this doesn’t prove that Yes haven’t lost a minority of supporters because of Brexit (in fact they almost certainly have), but what matters going forward is whether a particular pitch would increase or decrease support from where it currently stands. It looks from this poll as if putting a doubt in people’s minds as to whether the SNP want Scotland to remain a full part of the EU could potentially be a major strategic blunder.
As you probably saw a couple of days ago, the poll also found that a slim majority (50.6%) want a second independence referendum to take place within the next eight years, and a much more comfortable majority of 66.5% want it to take place at some point in the future. Of course these results are always very susceptible to the way the question and possible answers are framed by the polling company, but nevertheless there is no real doubt that when the Tories say “the people of Scotland don’t want another independence referendum”, they are quite simply not telling the truth.
