ICM too show Scots disagreeing with Megrahi release
And another - ICM have also carried out a poll on al-Megrahi, a specific Scottish poll, this time for the BBC.
32% of Scots told ICM they thought the decision was right, with 60% saying it was wrong. This is slightly less supportive than in the YouGov poll, but still shows a majority of Scots disapproved of the descision, but with a large minority in support (the difference is likely to be the question wording, which with a question like this that needs some introductory blurb is inevitably different. YouGov, for example, included the fact that al-Megrahi had advanced prostate cancer in their question, ICM didn't. YouGov asked whether it was the right decision, ICM asked if the Scottish government was right to do it).
Other questions in the poll included whether people thought Kenny MacAskill was right to visit al-Megrahi in gaol before making his decision (52% thought it was wrong), whether the decision was taken on legal grounds alone or was influenced by other factors (68% thought there were other factors). As with YouGov's poll, despite disagreeing with his decision only around a third (36%) thought MacAskill should resign.
52% of people thought it was right that the UK government did not get involved in the decision, nevertheless 68% thought that Gordon Brown's reputation had been damaged (though I expect we've reached the point that a lot of people just give a negative answer to any question about Gordon Brown).
(A side note about methodology - I've already seen some criticism of this poll on the basis that it probably wasn't past vote weighted. I'm a supporter of past vote weighting, but it really doesn't make a huge difference in questions like this. In a poll about voting intention it really matters if Conservatives are on 38% or 40% and how a pollster weights it politically is critical. If a question is strongly correlated to voting intention, like which party is best on the economy then it makes a difference and it matters, since the Conservatives being 2 points ahead gives a different story to Labour being 2 points head.
In the context of this poll however, answers aren't that strongly correlated to voting intention, so past vote weighting would probably only have shifted answers by a couple of points at most...and whether 31% or 35% of people supported the decision doesn't really matter a huge amount in terms of what it tells us about public reaction. Either way around about a third of Scots supported the decision. In a perfect world I'd still say it's always better to have a politically weighted sample for any political questions, but it would be wrong to obsess about it on questions where it wouldn't really change the conclusions we draw from it.)
Full tables are here
