longshanks wrote:
That's a misleading and fundamentally dishonest image.
1. Where they’ve said 3%, they actually mean 2%. They’re referring to a table on page 9 of this poll data which asked Scots what they thought the priority of the Scottish Government should be. The number who said “independence” was 15 people out of 727, or 2%.
2. The question had in fact asked people about the priorities of “the Scottish Government”, rather than “Alex Salmond”.
3. The option “The economy” was in reality chosen by 18% of respondents, less than half the 41% claimed. (If you bundle in the separate option of “Creating jobs”, which isn’t mentioned in the graph, you still only get to 40%.)
4. The actual figure given by respondents for “Welfare” was 7%, not 2%, and it’s actually listed in the answer options as “Welfare reform“ (our emphasis), which is a very different proposition indeed.
5. But the key lie here is that none of those figures actually come from the full poll sample. As first noticed by the eagle-eyed Gary Dunion over at Bright Green Scotland, they’re taken only from the people who thought the Scottish Government’s current priorities were wrong.
Almost 30% of those sampled – the people who’d said that the Scottish Government’s current priorities were correct – were
totally excluded from the statistics.
There appears to be no way of discerning what those people thought from the poll data. 49% of the full sample had said they thought independence was the current priority, but there appears to be no way of knowing how many of them thought that was a good thing and how many objected to it.
There is, therefore, no possible way of determining from the figures what the real percentage of people who think the Scottish Government’s priority should be independence is. It could, we think, be anywhere from 2% to 32% based on those numbers, and probably at the upper end of that scale. The only thing we can say with any reasonable degree of certainty is that it almost certainly isn’t 3%.
The figures, then, are not only multiply wrong, but based on an utterly meaningless premise. It’s a shambolically-constructed piece of polling, which “Better Together” has then mangled in whole new ways to render it complete gibberish.
Despite numerous people notifying them of the unholy mess, the No camp is blithely continuing to host the image on its website. The media is reporting its hideous car-crash of fabrications as gospel, and (as you’d expect) the Herald’s moderators are working overtime deleting the comments of anyone pointing out the truth.
