Round Up - Scotland, Iraq and a new projection

A round up of various polling bits and bobs from the last few days, starting with a couple of Scottish polls. TNS released their latest figures yesterday, as usual there's quite a gap between fieldwork and release - it was conduced between 23rd July and the 7th August, so overlapping with the Commonwealth games and almost wholly before the Salmond-Darling debate. Topline figures were YES 32%(nc), 45%(+4), DK 23%(-4), or without don't knows YES 42%(-2), NO 58%(+2). It's a shift towards NO, but it may be largely a reversion to the mean - TNS's previous poll had NO dropping five points, so this is monstly just a reversal of that.

This week's we've also seen the latest data from the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey. This is an academic project, so by the standards of media polling the figures are very old - the fieldwork was between the 12th May and 17th July - but they are worth noting because of the quality of the fieldwork. This was a proper probability sample, something extremely expensive you only normally see for academic and government work. Standard face-to-face polls aren't really random, they use demographic quotas and cluster sampling (interviewers get sent to a place and door knock to five 3 male pensioners, 2 women under 30, etc); telephone polls are quasi-random - they ring randomised telephone numbers, but not every house has a phone and the overwhelming majority of calls don't result in an interview; internet polls normally draw a sample from a panel. The Scottish Social Attitudes survey draws a genuine random selection of Scottish addresses and then sends a face-to-face interviewer to call at that address until they make contact and can arrange an interview, the response rate is 57% (phone polls these days are under 10%). The SSA survey found referendum voting intentions in the May-July period were YES 25%, NO 43%, Don't know 32%, a squeeze question pushed those don't knows to YES 33%, NO 51%, DK 15%. Excluding don't knows that the equivalent of YES 39%, NO 61%.

Moving on, there have been a couple of polls on attitudes towards British participation in air srikes in Iraq. YouGov for the Times found 40% of people approved of the RAF taking part in airstrikes against ISIS, 36% were opposed (tabs here). ComRes for ITV found 45% of people supporting British fighter planes conducting airstrikes against Islamic State, 37% were opposed. Unsurprisingly there was strong opposition to British ground troops being sent back into Iraq - only 18% supported it in the ComRes poll. (tabs here)

Finally we have another academic election prediction site, joining Steve Fisher's projection here and Rob Ford, Will Jennings et al's projection here. The latest addition is from Nick Vivyan, Chris Hanretty & Ben Lauderdale at ElectionForecast.co.uk. As I write Steve is predicting a Conservative lead of 4 points at the next election, producing a hung Parliament with the Conservatives the largest party; Rob and colleagues are predicting a 0.7% Labour lead at the next election; Nick, Ben and Chris are predicting a 1.2% Conservative lead, producing a hung Parliament with Labour the largest party.