The Breaking of the Union:update

This is interesting. The UK polling report blog, the house blog of the YouGov research agency, have a piece about how the wording of questions can skew the results of a poll quite considerably. Of course one expects top industry polling companies such as ICM to know this, and factor it into their question authoring process. However it seems they might have dropped the ball a bit according to YouGov.

A recent Sunday Times and Ch4 YouGov poll found that when asked a straight question about their opinion on the matter,  40% of Scots supported independence, whereas unlike ICM, 44% of Scots actually opposed it. These conflicting reports surely require more investigation,  and greater scepticism. This is too important a topic to muck around with. The drip drip drip of anti-union sentiment is very alarming, and could cause great damage in the long term if it’s handled improperly by the media.

The BBC has a piece on it here.