Scottish independence

How do you kill an idea? That is the Unionist quandary this weekend. For a long time now the Better Together campaign has based its hostility to Scottish independence on the risks and uncertainties that, unavoidably, come with independence. This, they say, is what tests well with their focus groups. No-one gives a stuff about all that identity crap, they say, so there’s no need to talk about it. Instead, hype the unknowns – of both the known and unknown variety – and bang on and on about all that risk and all that uncertainty. Which, like, is fine. Until the point it ceases to be fine. Until the point

Tomorrow’s Sunday Times poll by YouGov puts the Yes campaign ahead at 51 per cent, with No on 49 per cent when undecided voters are excluded (even when they’re included, ‘yes’ are still ahead by two points: 47-45). In the space of four weeks, ‘No’ has blown a 22-point lead. It was only recently that the No campaign started to wonder whether this could happen: previously there was an acceptance that the polls could narrow in the last few weeks, but the narrative was that the SNP were behind and were simply trying to engineer a close enough defeat for them to argue for a significant new settlement for Scotland. Now

I don’t want to appear too immodest but, you know, I told you so. Back in February I wrote an article for this paper warning that Scotland’s independence referendum would be a damn close run thing. That was true then and it remains true now. Today’s YouGov poll reports that, once undecided voters have been removed from consideration, 47 percent of Scots intend to vote for independence while 53 percent will back the Unionist cause. If the odds remain against Alex Salmond it’s also the case that the price on independence is shortening. Paddy Power’s over/under calculation of a Yes vote now stands at 46.5 percent. A few weeks ago it was

Tonight brings a reminder that the Union is in real danger. A new YouGov poll has the No camp’s lead in the Scottish referendum down to just six points. Just a month ago, No had a 22 point lead with You Gov. This poll is particularly striking as YouGov’s polling has not been as favourable to Yes as that of other pollsters; this is Yes’s highest ever score with YouGov. Particularly worrying is that undecided voters are going Yes by a margin of two to one. If this poll is right about how much the gap has narrowed and the undecideds continue to break in the same way, then this

I have had to suspend my ‘No Thanks’ independence referendum tour of Scotland. It was back in June that I announced my plan to tour the country.  A hundred events.  All outdoors in Scotland’s summer.  Me, my makeshift stage of two upturned Irn-bru crates, a microphone, one of those small speaker-amps, a one or two-strong road crew, take it to the streets. ‘From Barrhead to Barra’ was my catchline.   Barrhead is in my constituency and is synonymous with an industrial Scotland, a half hour’s drive from Glasgow.  Barra is another Scotland, twelve hundred largely Gaelic-speaking fishers and crofters at the southern end of the Western Isles archipelago.  The tour is old

Way back in the olden days, Scottish Labour won the 1999 elections to the Scottish parliament, at least in part, on the back of the slogan Divorce is an Expensive Business. (The SNP’s promise to raise income tax – the naffly named ‘Penny for Scotland’ – helped too. The Nationalists have never since risked making an overt case for higher taxes.) Anyway, these costs run both ways. That’s made clear by new polling from England in which the extent of the oft-threatened, never-yet-delivered, English backlash to devolution is revealed. It makes depressing reading for Unionists. True, only 19% of those surveyed think the UK would be better off without the troublesome, whining, Jocks. Or,

The Yes camp is closing the gap. That is the clear message from two new opinion polls published this morning. Both polls – ICM for Scotland on Sunday and Panelbase for the Sunday Herald – show that the undecideds are, at last, starting to make up their minds. But in doing so, the undecideds are going to Yes in greater numbers than they are to No. [datawrapper chart=”http://static.spectator.co.uk/zNI3m/index.html”] That trend is clear, it is helping Yes to close the gap but it has not, as yet, given Yes anything like the support it needs to win the referendum in a month’s time. In the ICM poll, the undecideds are down from 21

If, like me, you missed Andrew Neil’s BBC programme exploring What the Hell Happens to the United Kingdom if Scotland Votes for Independence Next Month you might be interested to know that it remains available on the BBC iPlayer here. Prudently, dear reader, I liked it. It’s a film best viewed as a companion piece to James Forsyth’s Spectator cover story published last month. A call to arms to England – and Westminster in particular – to ponder the consequences and implications of Scottish independence. There is little sign that much thought has been devoted to these issues. Indeed, not only has the Ministry of Defence apparently failed to make contingency plans for the future,