Westminster & independence: that Fabian poll...

Just a snapshot or two from YouGov's latest Scottish poll, sampled on behalf of the Fabian Society.  While the survey instrument was clearly much more wide-ranging than the single page of findings which has been published thus far (to whit, see Labour "Out of touch, incompetent and boring" in the Scotsman), yesterday, the pollster released a sheet on Westminster voting intentions and on attitudes to independence.

For comparison's sake, I've pulled up the actual voting figures from the latest general election.  It is easy to forget, but nationally, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish Nationalists similar levels of popular support in 2010, winning 11 and 6 constituencies respectively.  If the YouGov poll is to be believed, that's all gone to hell now, with Liberal support down by 11.9%, and the SNP upswinging by 9.1%. Westminster voting intention (July 2012):

Contrast this with the general election of May 2010...

The YouGov poll also asked its 1,029 respondents: "Do you support or oppose Scotland becoming independent from the rest of the United Kingdom?" It is a mildly curious question to ask.  It isn't in the Scottish Government's preferred or secondary wording - but don't let's cavil.  YouGov found, across all of its respondents:

The polling also repeats now familiar gendered differences in polling on independence.  YouGov found a 17% gender gap in support between men and women.  However the number of undecided women remains far higher.  While just 8% of YouGov's gentlemen respondents identified themselves as undecided, almost a quarter of its women were still swithering.

On social class, YouGov employ just two groupings, classifying respondents into ABC1 and C2DE categories.  These classifications are based on the occupation of the "head of household", and are broadly bunched into "middle class" and "working class" respectively.  In previous polls, we've seen that support for independence has been weakest amongst the most affluent Scots, and strongest amongst the poorest.  While the YouGov data gives us less detail, this broad trend is reflected in this poll too.  Amongst respondents which the pollster classified as upper middle and lower middle class, support for independence is 9% lower than those C2DEs.

Finally, much has been made of generational differences in support for independence, with younger cohorts tending to be more supportive than older generations.  As anyone who has kept an eye on the polls over the past months will have noticed, the findings on levels of support by age have been very volatile, shooting up and down, inconstant as a drunken pooka.  An obvious explanation for this is the smallness of the samples.  

While the whole poll questioned over a thousand people, only a little over a hundred of these were aged 18 - 24.  If you had the inclination, and the money to throw at it, it'd be extremely interesting to see more detailed polling done on how one or two demographic features impact on attitudes to independence. For example, we know that female support for independence lags behind men's - but the polling data in the public domain doesn't break down that gendered headline at all. 

For example, do levels of support amongst working class and middle class Scottish women differ significantly? What about rural women and urban women? With kids or without, in work or out of it? And for all that, why? As it stands, the only folk likely to have access to this data are the political parties, who for understandable reasons, are likely to keep schtum about their findings. This seems more than a vice - it's a missed opportunity.  You could bring the same critical, inquisitive focus to bear on issues of age, social class and so on.  To my mind, it'd form a grand basis for a multi-part, multi-stranded (and hopefully nuanced) series of programmes in the lead up to the referendum. Here's looking at you, BBC Scotland. 

In any case, yesterday's YouGov findings levels of support for independence amongst the youngest cohort was down, but determined opposition remained the lowest amongst eighteen to twenty four year olds.  Over sixties remain the most determinedly opposed. 

 

The poll also correlated attitudes to independence with Westminster voting intention.  This may be of interest, in a week which has seen the press pounce on the Labour for Independence grouping which is currently trying to knit itself together.  Labour sorts on twitter eyed the press splash skeptically. A red herring, some of them wondered, just nationalists puffing a small, disorganised group to generate some damaging headlines for Johann Lamont about party discord? The media can certainly be relied upon to report disagreement as disarray and disaster, and obligingly did so in its usual over-heated terms of rebellions and splits. 

But what can this YouGov poll tell us? We need to be careful not to conflate the attitudes of Labour voters with those of Labour's membership.  We also encounter a second methodological difficulty.  As we've seen, the SNP do not generally prosper well in Westminster elections.  By contrast, Labour (who gained just 31.7% of Scottish constituency votes in 2011) has been able to rely on doughty support for sending its representatives down to London, attracting 1,035,528 nationwide in 2010.

As a consequence, correlating attitudes to independence with Westminster voting intentions is likely to give us a wider sense of the attitudes of Labour-inclined towards independence than undertaking the same exercise with Holyrood figures. That being the case, nationalists might have hoped for a better showing amongst this broader Labour electorate than the 20% currently minded to support independence.