"Yes" and "No" voters protest on Rutherglen main street in Glasgow, Scotland, on Sept. 10, 2014.
The survey for the Times and Sun newspapers put support for breaking away from the U.K. at 48 percent versus 52 percent backing for the status quo when excluding undecided voters, YouGov said on its website. That shows a three percentage-point increase for
the No side and the same decline for the Yes side compared with the company’s last poll, for the Sunday Times.
Scottish residents vote in a referendum in less than a week on Sept. 18. The nationalists are seeking to regain momentum after a series of blows since Sept. 10, coinciding with campaign trips to Scotland by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and other major U.K. party leaders in a bid to avert a Yes vote.
“One can look at this two ways,” YouGov analyst Anthony Wells said on his blog. “Perhaps the Scottish people recoiled a bit from the risk when it began looking like it would really happen. An alternative is that it’s just margin of error.”
Counting all respondents in the YouGov poll published yesterday and comparing with a poll five weeks ago, Yes is up 10 points to 45 percent, No is down five points to 50 percent and the undecided category is down five points to 6 percent. The percentages don’t add up to 100 because of rounding, YouGov said.
Survation Poll
A poll by Survation for the Daily Record published a day earlier put the No lead at six percentage points when excluding undecided voters, with 47 percent support for the Yes campaign and 53 percent opposed to independence. The results were the first since a previous poll put the Yes side ahead, a swing that sent the pound tumbling.Sterling was little changed at $1.6250 at 11:47 a.m. in London after strengthening 0.3 percent yesterday.
Nationalist leader Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister, and his deputy Nicola Sturgeon were touring seven Scottish cities today as campaigning approached its climax. Salmond said he planned to highlight seven key gains the Yes campaign sees from independence, including job-creating powers and a pledge to maintain the National Health Service.
“A Yes vote is a golden opportunity for people in Scotland –- to use that wealth and control policy so that many more people benefit,” he said in an e-mailed statement. “With Yes we’ll always get governments we vote for, we can protect our NHS from Tory cuts and privatization and we can tailor economic and jobs policy to our needs.”
Contraction Forecast
An independent Scotland would probably suffer an economic contraction of between 4 percent and 5 percent and have an initial budget deficit of about 6.3 percent of gross domestic product, economists at UBS AG wrote in a note to clients dated yesterday.Salmond sought fresh impetus yesterday by accusing his opponents of colluding with executives on scaremongering over the risks of breaking from the U.K.
At an event in Edinburgh yesterday, Salmond suggested negative comments by oil company BP Plc (BP/) and life insurer Standard Life Plc (SL/) were a “recycling” of older statements with a political timing. He also called for an inquiry into how news of Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc’s plan to move some operations to England, should there be a Yes vote, had been leaked.
U.K. Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood rejected Salmond’s allegation of a leak in a letter to the Scottish first minister, the BBC reported today, saying the Treasury had simply “confirmed its understanding of RBS’s contingency planning.”
Express Views
Asked today whether Cameron had encouraged business leaders to speak against independence, the prime minister’s spokesman, Jean-Christophe Gray, told reporters in London that “it’s about saying to people in the U.K., across the U.K., if you have views that could inform the debate, people should express them.”Still, one business leader, Tim Martin, the chairman of pub chain JD Wetherspoon Plc (JDW), was dismissive of warnings from businesses about the costs of independence. “Most of what has been said has been utter nonsense,” he told BBC Radio.
‘Tremendously Well’
“New Zealand has got a similar population to Scotland, its own currency and it does tremendously well; Singapore -- fantastic economy, only 2 or 3 million people; Switzerland does very well,” he said. “There’s obviously no reason why Scotland can’t have its own government if that’s what the Scots want.”YouGov questioned 1,268 voters via the Internet Sept. 9-11. It was the first time the anti-independence campaign had gained ground since August, the company said.
Blair McDougall, campaign head at the pro-U.K. Better Together camp led by former Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, said via Twitter that it was time to “redouble efforts to win undecided.”
Yes Scotland Chief Executive Officer Blair Jenkins said in a statement that it “confirms the referendum is neck and neck.”
UKIP Intervention
The leader of the anti-European Union U.K. Independence Party, Nigel Farage, will be the latest English politician to campaign against independence when he makes a speech in Glasgow today.“It’s about time the No campaign told the truth and that is that Mr. Salmond’s plan is not for independence,” Farage, whose party topped the polls in European Parliament elections in May, told the BBC.
“I’m sure people think it’s a noble bold plan to have a self-governing Scotland, but it’s nothing of the kind,” he said. “If the Scottish people want to split from Westminster, want to be part of the EU state, want to be part of the euro currency, that’s up to them. My job today is to say to them they’re voting on a false prospectus.”
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