A year away from the Scottish referendum, we have
opinion polls almost weekly, as the media tries to discern the rise and fall in
the standings of the rival teams. Yet the most striking fact is the stability
in public opinion. For the past 20 years, support for independence has been
around 30% and all the argument over the past two years appears to have made
little difference.
Such fluctuations as the media find are mostly due
to the precise wording of the question (although we now have the actual
question, which is usually used); random error; and the context in which the question
is posed.
As John Curtice has
noted, a recent poll
showing the Yes side almost level came out of a poll in which respondents had
previously been asked their opinion of the Scottish government, which remains
remarkably popular. Some recent
pollshave suggested a
decline in Don’t Knows, to the benefit of the No camp, but even this is not
consistent.
The past six months have seen a barrage from the No
campaign (Better Together), with a series of papers on a
range of policy issues and almost daily statements. These range from the
serious through the banal and trivial to the misleading and the irrelevant. It
scored some points on the question of the currency and the SNP’sproposal to continue to use Sterling
after independence....To
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