Poll shows why SNP’s plan for the next General Election is a bad idea

Even if the poll showed support at, say, 60%, it is frankly irrelevant. The only poll that matters is the actual result of a real election or a referendum. Ballot papers in ballot boxes are the only result that matters. The recent Supreme Court decision has predictably influenced a small number of voters, but sadly not a huge number. It has taken eight long years to get from the 45% referendum result to this point.

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The real problem lies in the question “who would you back at the next Westminster vote?” Some 41% of Scots said the SNP, 31% said Labour, 16% said the Tories, and 8% said the LibDems. Just 2% said they would vote Green, putting votes for pro-independence parties at 43%. The gap between 52% and 43% is the difference between winning and losing.

I hope the leadership of the SNP are listening to this fact. Using the next UK General Election as a substitute for a referendum is a really bad idea which could set the Yes campaign back for at least a generation.

Iain Evans
Edinburgh

SO Scotland’s "de facto" Governor General, Alister Jack, disingenuously reckons that Scotland can have a referendum when there is a “sustained majority” in favour of a vote, a situation that did not exist in the period 2012-2013 prior to the first independence referendum (when support averaged around 25%).

Apart from a deliberately vague comment that the people would “know when they’ve reached that point”, unsurprisingly no rational mechanism was presented to determine when this "status" will have been officially achieved. According to some polling there has already been a sustained majority in favour of self-determination for a number of years and it is suspected that the UK Government’s tax-payer-funded polling from 2018 to 2019, which it still refuses to publish, would confirm this.

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The Redfield & Wilton poll published on Wednesday (also unsurprisingly not prominently covered in the UK mainstream media) not only found support for independence at 52% (consistent with the previous British Social Attitudes Survey result when “undecideds” removed), but found – contrary to the information spread by anti-independence politicians, and others wishing to sustain unrepresentative and chaotic UK governance – that there is the same majority level of support for a referendum to be held in 2023.

Except for those who are unashamedly content to remain wedded to a broken “Vow” and a series of misleading claims, such as the need for Scotland to vote No in order to remain in the European Union, most Scottish citizens now consider that the people of Scotland should be allowed to determine their own constitutional destiny.

There is today no legitimate democratic argument for the Prime Minister to refuse granting a Section 30 Order for a proportionately-elected Scottish Parliament to conduct a second referendum next year, especially given the allowable seven-year referendum frequency afforded the people of Northern Ireland, unless future generations are to be condemned to living in a subjugated “colony” of an imperialistic state.

Stan Grodynski
Longniddry, East Lothian

NEXT year is going to be a tough year for the UK economy: sleepwalking into recession and delivering the worst economic performance of all G7 countries, with Brexit a fundamental cause of this.

Further evidence, if any were needed, of the damaging impact of Brexit is the recent research by the Centre for Business Prosperity at Aston University. This has found that withdrawal from the European Union and the introduction of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement has resulted in a 22.9% slump in UK exports.

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According to this research, the UK has also experienced a significant contraction in the variety of goods being exported to the EU, with an estimated loss of 42% of product varieties.

This considerable contraction of the UK trade capacity, combined with an increased concentration of export values to fewer products, signifies some serious long-term concerns about the UK’s future exporting and productivity.

It is yet another example, to add to the growing list, of Brexit being one of the greatest acts of economic self-harm by a nation and a perfect case of where turkeys have indeed voted for Christmas.

Alex Orr
Edinburgh

DELIBERATE misuse of statistics amounts to lying. The Scottish electorate needs to become wary of this kind of dishonesty.

Once again the Anglo-British nationalist parties are attacking the Scottish Government over the low percentage of A&E patients being treated within the four-hour target. This figure is meaningless on its own without reference to the mean and standard deviation.

The mean will show us the average waiting time and the standard deviation will let us see how far patients are spread before or after the average waiting time. So, for example, if the average waiting time is 4.5 hours and a high percentage of patients are treated before that time, it would not be a serious issue.

I suspect that the reliance of the Anglo-British nationalists on a basic head count of numbers on either side of a single point in time is an indication that the mean and standard deviation are not too bad. More detailed analysis is needed to counter the flimsy data on health services that is presented to us all time and time again in efforts to discredit the Scottish Government.

Ni Holmes
St Andrews