IT has been a turbulent few weeks for the Scottish independence movement and the SNP.
A post-Truss bounce for Scottish Labour in the polls indicated that while the SNP would gain seats from the Tories, they would also lose several in the Central Belt and Fife. The UK Supreme Court ruled that the Scottish Government cannot hold an independence referendum without Westminster’s consent, putting indyref2 on ice. And after weeks of speculation, Ian Blackford resigned as the SNP’s Westminster group leader, replaced on Tuesday by Stephen Flynn.
If Flynn, the SNP, and the Scottish independence movement were looking for a source of optimism and renewed momentum, today’s Ipsos Scotland poll certainly delivered.
Breaking down the key numbers
Support for independence now sits at 53%, up eight points since Ipsos’s last such poll in May 2022. The No vote is down four points to 42%, and the proportion of "don’t knows" is also down five points to 3%.
In other words, there has been a large swing in favour of independence since May, and support for Scotland leaving the UK is now at its joint highest-ever level (last recorded by Ipsos back in August 2015).
And not only do most Scots currently support a Yes vote, but a majority also (52%) now support holding a referendum before the end of the current Holyrood Parliamentary term.
The SNP have similarly seen their support increase. More than half (51%) of Scots would vote SNP in a Westminster election, up seven points since May. If they ran on an independence-only, de facto referendum platform, 53% of Scots polled said they would vote SNP. Total pro-independence support in the de facto referendum scenario sits at 55%.
What about Scottish Labour?
There are also indications that Scottish Labour’s post-Truss bounce in the polls may be dissipating. Some 25% of those polled by Ipsos said that they would vote Labour in a Westminster election, up two points since Ipsos’s poll in May, but five-and-a-half points below their average in Scottish polls since Liz Truss succeeded Boris Johnson.
Scottish Labour would still make significant gains in vote share from the Tories but would be unlikely to seriously threaten any SNP seats – indeed, with these numbers the SNP would certainly make substantial gains in terms of seats.
The big question that this poll prompts us to ask is: why such a shift?
What's changed?
There was no directly comparable Ipsos poll conducted before the UK-Supreme Court ruling, but after Liz Truss became Prime Minister and the disastrous fiscal fiasco of the Truss-Kwarteng "mini budget".
So, we can’t directly point to a single source for the big, eight-point bounce in support for independence, nor for the similar, seven-point increase in SNP voting intention at Westminster.
Pro-independence figures will, of course, argue that this is a direct result of the UK Government’s intransigence over a second referendum and the UK Supreme Court’s decision, with a side of Westminster incompetence over the cost-of-living crisis.
But a word of warning: Ipsos recorded a similar level of support for independence in November 2021 (52%), when other polling agencies were showing No in the lead. We will need to wait and see confirmation of this growth in support for independence before we can reach solid conclusions. It may turn out that Ipsos’s May poll was an outlier for them, and that this lead is the result of "house effects".
As ever, a single poll is only ever a single poll. This poll could be an outlier or the first indication of a real shift in favour of Scottish independence and a settling of Scottish Labour’s post-Truss bounce.
Either way, it will provide a source of optimism and momentum for a movement, and a party, that has been seeking some after the events of the past few weeks.
