The National:

You’ll see have seen, by now, the eye-catching Lord Ashcroft poll showing, for the first time in a while, that independence is now supported by a majority of Scots.

That’s great news for Yes campaigners of course – as shows that the tiding is turning against Brexit Britain with PM Boris Johnson heading for No Deal.

But many readers were quick to point out that 16- and 17-year-olds weren’t included in the latest poll.

READ MORE: POLL: Scots want independence and they want to vote now

With young people breaking more heavily for Yes, could it be that the Yes lead is in fact being underplayed? And by how much?

Well, The Jouker has taken a break from writing articles about James Kelly (is he on holiday?) to try to work this out.

We’re using very rough numbers here, and we’ve had to assume that the turnout and preferences of the youngest voters would be the same as the 18-24 range, but this at least should be able to give us some of sort of idea of the impact they might have.

Based on a population share of the UK total, we can guess there’s probably around 126,000 16- and 17-year-olds in Scotland.

And let’s assume that they would break, once undecideds and non-voters are stripped out, 72/28 for Yes in the same way as the 18-24ers.

The Scottish electoral roll which will be used for the next indyref is currently at around 4.1 million people. If we exclude the people who won’t vote or don’t know how they’d vote that gives us a little over 3.6m people. Without the 16/17yos, we’re left with 3.5m.

Ashcroft says that 52% of them would vote Yes (1.82m). 48% would vote No (1.68m).

Now let’s take the younger voters. Ashcroft suggests the turnout would be 88% - which is probably a bit high, but the second Quebec referendum had a huge turnout, so it’s not out of the question that indyref2 could attract that many voters, even among that age group.

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That means that out of our 126,000 possible voters – 110,800 would choose one way of the other. 72% (79833) would vote Yes, while 28% would vote No (31046).

Now it’s time to add those young Scots to our total of 18+ voters on each side, and then divide those new totals by our increased total electorate of roughly 3.62m.

And so we arrive at Yes 52.7%, No 47.3%. From where we started, there’s been a change in the headline figures of about 0.7%.

Former SNP minister and poll guru Marco Biagi also suggested earlier that: “The effect of including or excluding 16/17yos depends on how far off the average they are. Right now they'd add about half of one percentage point to the net Yes lead. Then again, that lead is only 3% right now so you'd probably rather have it than not.”

So there you go: 16 and 17-year-old are worth about 0.5-0.7% for Yes.

So it is a bit of mystery as to why they’re not included as standard in this poll and in others.