SINCE Find Out Now started conducting polls on independence in 2021, they have shown a Yes lead on almost every occasion. For some people, that might slightly devalue the news of their latest poll showing Yes on 56% after Don't Knows are stripped out. But it really shouldn't.
A sustained Yes majority over a long period of time is precisely what the independence movement has been crying out for since the 2014 referendum. It's true that most other polling firms haven't shown the same pattern – but one firm has, and that one just happens to be Ipsos, often regarded as the UK's gold-standard pollster.
Polling accuracy is not determined by majority vote, and the possibility cannot be excluded that Find Out Now and Ipsos have been getting it right and other firms have been getting it wrong, which would mean there has consistently been a pro-independence majority for several years.
In any case, the Yes leads shown by Find Out Now have previously tended to be relatively modest, and that is not true this time. The 56% is the highest Yes percentage ever reported by the firm, and is not far short of the all-time record high across all polling firms.
That raises the possibility that there has been a recent boost in support for independence that other firms will pick up, regardless of whether they normally show Yes leads or No leads. If so, the most likely explanation is Liz Kendall's announcement of sweeping welfare cuts harming the most vulnerable people in society.
GB-wide polls since then have shown Labour's popularity slumping to even lower levels than before, and intuitively it seems entirely possible that a similar effect is now showing up in independence polling.
It's true that the most recent YouGov poll on independence, which showed a substantial No lead, was in the field at the time of Kendall's speech. But it opened for responses around 24 hours before she got to her feet in the House of Commons, and it's thought that the vast majority of respondents in online polls generally submit their answers within the first day. So it may well be that the Find Out Now poll is the first meaningful opportunity to measure the impact of the benefit cuts on independence support.
It would be premature to conclude that the Kendall speech was definitely a turning point, though. The standard polling margin of error can have a significant distorting effect on the results of any individual poll, which means that caution is required whenever any single poll appears to show a sudden new trend.
If the next two or three polls from other firms report a static picture, we could yet look back on this one as exhibiting nothing more than the dreaded “margin of error noise”.
Indeed, it's been particularly hard in recent months to make sense of any underlying direction of travel. There was a string of three Norstat polls between October 2024 and January 2025 which all showed an unusually high Yes vote, and two of which showed an outright Yes lead. But, for the most part, other firms failed to corroborate that trend.
If pollsters are increasingly disagreeing with each other not only on whether Yes or No are in the lead, but also on the general trend, it's going to be murderously hard for the independence movement to know where it stands. That perhaps underscores how foolish it would be for politicians to rely too heavily on opinion poll data as the determining factor of whether to push ahead towards the endgame on independence at any particular time.
One thing that does remain constant is the age gap on independence support. There's a remarkably neat bookending to the Find Out Now poll, with under-30s backing Yes by a 3-1 margin and over-75s backing No by a 2-1 margin. It's important not to succumb to the temptation of waiting around passively for the myth of “demographic inevitability” to deliver independence, though.
The young folk of 2014 who were not susceptible to Better Together scare stories about pensions will gradually become older adults who are all too susceptible. In twenty years' time, this generation of independence leaders may look back and wonder why they didn't seize the day and take action to change the political weather, rather than engage in a futile and endless wait for the weather to change itself.
