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July 19th, 2014

Five minutes with John Curtice on Scottish independence: “We’ve had over 65 opinion polls now, and of all of those only one has ever put the Yes side ahead”

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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Blog Team

July 19th, 2014

Five minutes with John Curtice on Scottish independence: “We’ve had over 65 opinion polls now, and of all of those only one has ever put the Yes side ahead”

6 comments

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Polling and public opinion expert John Curtice recently spoke at an LSE event on the upcoming Scottish independence referendum. In an interview with Democratic Audit’s Sean Kippin, he discusses the prospect of a ‘Yes’ vote, the demographics at play in the election, and an independent Scotland’s political party make-up. 

Looking at the upcoming Scottish independence referendum, do you feel the Yes camp can win?

The first obvious thing to say is that we’ve had over 65 opinion polls now, and of all of those only one has ever put the Yes side ahead, and that was back in August of last year. No is ahead and to the extent that every single opinion poll continues to show that is the case the more any Yes vote would come as a shock.

There are two caveats, however. Caveat number one is that the No side’s lead did narrow during the winter, probably to the order of four percentage points or so and to that extent at least the No vote lead doesn’t look as solid now as it did six months ago. The second caveat is that throughout this campaign there has always been a consistent difference between the opinion polls in terms of their estimate of the level of Yes support.

We have now a trio of pollsters; Panelbase, ICM and Survation that tend to put Yes support at somewhere around the 45-48 per cent mark, suggesting it’s a pretty close contest. On the other side, YouGov, TNS-BRMB, and Ipsos MORI have been putting it from around 39/40 per cent to around the 42 per cent mark. Clearly, if they are right the No side still has a very comfortable lead and it’s hard to see how the Yes side could possibly narrow it. Certainly, they would appear to need a pretty remarkable ‘game-changer’ to do so.

Clearly, the expectation is that Scotland is going to vote No, but by how much we have to wait and see. And so, the No side has been put under enough pressure over the last few months that it has felt the impetus to at least come some of the way towards some kind of joint statement about the offer of more devolution in order to shore up the softer end of its support.

There is no doubt that without the support of those people whose first preference is more devolution, the No side will be sunk. It is a crucial part of its coalition so they have felt compelled to at least shore up their support. Certainly I think that what is now true is that the prospect of the No side getting an overwhelming victory, which is what some of them maybe hoped for originally, is now probably remote.

We are talking about a referendum in which there has been a debate for 40 years, for many people it touches on their fundamental sense of identity, and the arguments are being endlessly recycled. In that context, it is very difficult to move the numbers very far, and they’ve only ever moved gradually, even during the winter of this year.

I was wondering about demographics, particularly age demographics. Are the young likely to vote Yes in greater numbers? If so, does that make a future tilt towards independence?

Those people aged 60-65 or so are less keen on independence than those who are younger than that. To that group, you are talking about people who first cast a vote in a time before the SNP were serious players in Scottish politics, in the 1970s, and for whom at least the British Empire is not just something that they read about in the history books but actually saw the sun begin to set on some of the colonies as they were given freedom in the 1960s. So you are looking at a group of people who are somewhat more likely to have a sense of British identity and who are less likely to be in favour of a Yes vote.

Thereafter, the age differences are there, but they’re very gradual and they’re sufficiently gradual that they don’t always show up in every poll given the vagaries of sampling error. And we are also faced with a rather curious finding from a couple of academic surveys which have been done on those that were 14-18 years old a year ago, most of whom will be 16 or older at the time of the referendum.

We have reached this rather curious position where the very youngest age group are not particularly keen on the idea. So, I would therefore then say two things: first, that there probably is a bit of a generational phenomenon to play out and indeed when those who are currently aged 65 or over are no longer in the electorate, the electorate may become a little more favourably disposed towards independence, but the effect is not going to be major.

The second question you have to ask yourself about whether this is going to come back again is if the SNP – or at least those parties in favour of independence – win another majority in the Scottish Parliament. Although it has happened once, given the proportional voting system used in elections in Scotland it is unlikely to happen again. It only happened in 2011 because the Labour Party made an enormous mistake with its election campaign.

It’s perfectly conceivable that the SNP will be the largest party again, and in fact they will be favourites, even following a No vote, to be the largest party in 2016. But, winning a majority – that’s tough, and unless they’ve got a majority you don’t have the pressure from the Scottish Parliament to hold the referendum in the first place, and therefore the Westminster Government is not under pressure to accede to one. The crucial problem for the nationalists is that if they don’t win now, when will they win?

In the event of a Yes vote, what do you think of the party make-up of an independent Scotland? There isn’t a shortage of centre-right voters there, yet the Conservatives are unpopular. Would the SNP take on that mantle?

If Scotland becomes an independent country, it will have to create a set of political parties that are wholly independent of those that currently exist south of the border, although there may well be fraternal relations, as there are between parties with similar ideological hues across the world. Scotland is, in some way or another, going to have to develop its own party system. In some senses, it already has, as it’s very distinctive from England’s.

But you do have to ask yourself two questions: and they do in a sense present something of a paradox. The first is: if Scotland votes yes, why do we need the SNP? The raisond’être of the SNP is to deliver independence for Scotland. Once that’s achieved, what is the point of the party? As a party with a preponderance of people who at least call themselves social democrats – and you can argue about whether some of the policies they pursued in office justify that description, though some of them like Nicola Sturgeon undoubtedly are – it also contains people who are not social democrats who are indeed on the centre-right.

One classic example, who is no longer in Parliament but was a Minister in the 2007-2011 administration, is Jim Mather. I’ve called Jim Mather a Thatcherite on air and he still talks to me! He agrees and says “you’re absolutely right!” Fergus Ewing is another. I suspect what would happen is that there would be a battle in Scotland for which organisation becomes the genus of a centre-left party in Scotland. Once the current animosities which are undoubtedly there die down, it isn’t obvious why there should be both a Scottish Labour Party and the SNP, both of them supposedly social democratic.

Conversely on the other side, although Scotland’s public social attitudes are somewhat to the left of England’s, it’s a matter of degree. It’s certainly nothing like to the same degree as is true of the differences in the levels of Conservative support. The problem that the Conservatives have north of the border is that people on the centre-right do not vote for them. And the fact they don’t vote for them goes back to them being anti-devolution, being seen as rather English, and the party having all these millstones around its neck.

It would be forced to re-invent itself as a centre-right, smallish nationalist party which people like Murdo Fraser in the party have long intended. Paradoxically, a consequence of a ‘Yes’ vote for independence could be the demise of the SNP and the resurrection of a new centre-right party in Scotland. People don’t always get what they wish for when they vote for constitutional change.

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Note: This article originally appeared at our sister site, Democratic Audit, and gives the views of the author, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics. Feature image credit:  das_sabrinchen (CC-BY-SA-3.0)

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About the author

John Curtice – University of Strathclyde
John Curtice is Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University, and Chief Commentator at whatscotlandthinks.org, an ESRC funded website that offers a comprehensive collection of easily searchable data on attitudes towards Scotland’s constitutional future. For more information via Twitter see @whatscotsthink

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Posted In: Independence | John Curtice | scotlandref

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