Humiliation for BBC Scotland as its own poll shows a Yes majority
Speymouth
BBC Scotland has done one of its pre-election polls to tell us what Scotland “really thinks” as we go into the Scottish election in nine weeks time. On Tuesday, BBC Scotland unveiled its findings on the crucial question of independence. Despite the BBC’s very own poll finding that support for independence is in the majority, the figures were reported with don’t knows included as Yes 47%, No 44% Don’t knows 8% (99% total due to rounding). At no point did BBC Scotland tell us that Yes is in the lead in the BBC’s own poll or that with don’t knows removed that produces a result of 52% Yes, 48% No with the same degree of rounding used by the BBC. Of course there’s no don’t know box to put your cross in in a binary Yes/No referendum. The figures were briefly flashed up on the screen without comment. It was as though BBC Scotland was admitting to a dirty little secret that it didn’t want to draw too much attention to, because that indeed is exactly what was happening.
The poll was carried out by Savanta, which has hitherto been a no-friendly pollster, although it appears that the company has now abandoned the discredited practice of weighting its results by the outcome of a referendum almost twelve years ago. That just leaves YouGov as the sole comfort blanket for British nationalists.
After briefly flashing the figures on screen without comment, the editorialising began. Ever since support for independence started to lead consistently in opinion polling, the line from BBC Scotland has been – Scotland is divided on independence, and that is exactly what we were treated to on BBC Scotland’s lunchtime news on Tuesday. Of course, when the results of the 2014 independence referendum were announced, BBC Scotland told us that 55% No was “decisive” even though it’s a figure not far removed from the 52% Yes in the BBC’s own poll which is apparently not decisive at all. “Divided” means nothing when applied to democratic votes. An electorate is still divided when 90% vote one way and 10% vote the other. In democratic elections it is not the existence of a minority which disagrees which is the salient point, it’s what the majority choose.
Even BBC Scotland is now being forced to admit, grudgingly and reluctantly, that more people in Scotland support independence than oppose it, even though the Corporation is doing its level best not to draw attention to the fact and is choosing to spin it in such a way that plays into the divisiveness narrative so beloved of the anti-independence parties. This is of course nothing more than an attempt to frame the independence debate itself as a bad thing.
The BBC can scarcely bring itself to mention the i-word. In two articles posted on the BBC Scotland news site this week, they said: “Scotland’s Main Issues in Six Charts; “only one in eight voters included the question of whether the country is in or out of the UK in their top three issues”. The choice of top three issues is telling. This is after all a Scottish Parliament election not an independence referendum, naturally people will be taking a range of issues into account when they consider how to vote. Why not top five or top ten issues? It’s highly significant that as many as one in eight report that independence is one of their top three issues in an election which is not actually about independence.
Note that the BBC speaks of “being in or out of the UK” a nice way of avoiding mention of independence and framing the issue in the Leave or Remain terms favoured by hardline anti-independence organisations such as Scotland in Union.
The BBC does its level best to minimise the significance of its own findings, reminding readers of is online article that the BBC’s own poll result is “of course a snapshot of opinion – the views of a particular group of people at a particular moment in time”.
In another online piece commenting on the same polling findings, a very bizarre comment is made.“Our poll is a reminder to all parties that winning the election in May is only the beginning of the job of securing public support for the policies they wish to implement.”
That’s a very loaded statement indeed. BBC Scotland appears to be telling us that when a party wins an election after standing on a manifesto platform of support for independence or another independence referendum, its election victory does not necessarily give it a mandate to implement the policies which it was elected to carry out. It is quite remarkable that BBC Scotland apparently seeks to undermine the very basis of a democratic mandate.
The way in which the BBC is seeking to minimise, downplay, and discredit the findings of its own poll is quite remarkable, even by the standards of Brit-splaining which we have come to expect from Pacific Quay. BBC Scotland could have framed this story very differently, as a warning to the anti-independence parties it so relentlessly promotes that they are failing to persuade Scots of the supposed benefits of this so-called Union. It could have said that its own poll illustrates the importance of agreeing a binding mechanism for triggering another independence referendum and mentioned that the Westminster government refuses even to acknowledge that this is an issue.
But of course we did not get any of that. What we got was full on damage limitation as a humiliated BBC Scotland desperately sought to minimise the significance of its own polling findings. You could almost hear the screaming from Pacific Quay’s management as they realised that they were going to have to spin like washing machine on a spin cycle to downplay and distract from the results of a poll which they themselves had commissioned and paid for from a polling company which has hitherto had a reputation as a no-friendly pollster.
Now YouGov is the only polling company left which publishes a claimed majority opposed to independence and it is only able to do so by employing methodological practices which suppress the Yes result and boost that of No.
However there can now be little doubt that when Scotland revisits the question of independence as it most assuredly will sooner rather than later, the country will vote for independence.
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