renton

I'm guessing you try to eavesdrop on these debates from the other side of the room then?

Is that a universal trend across all comparable referendums?

He was pretty much useless once the yellow card was brandished (and just as an aside, if your are gonna take the boy out, do it further up the pitch next time, Foxy) The guy clearly has the situational awareness and the good range of passing, but I think he's maybe just dropped a bit too much in the pace department to cope anymore.

Labour's proposals are the ones that matter. The LDs are never going to be in a position to enact federalism and the Tory proposals are likely to be even more miserable than Labour's - that's the high water mark.

It becomes limiting in itself and only stores up trouble in the future. A couple of years of negative reinforcement will only lead to sullen conformance from some people, aplain anger from others. Ultimately it just leaves folk feeling even more peripheral. How hard is it though, for the sixth largest economy in the world, Mr Bairn's military superpower, to ariticulate some kind of collective vision and ambition, beyond securing the status of the City of London at all costs - "This is as good as it gets" is hardly an aspirational banner....

You might think that, right up until you see the Labour devolution proposals......

No, the implication there is that the status quo is some perennial constant. it isn't, thus it is an argument between two futures, not one future and a present case. Better Together chose not to articulate any kind of real vision for what the Union's purpose is, and where it is heading, and it will simply heamorrage votes between now and September. The mean and tawdry calculation they've undertaken is that they won't lose enough by Septmember to lose, and that's all they have to achieve.

Don't argue for the status quo then. Are you really saying that the Westminster establishment couldn't find it in itself to articulate a vision of what the Union was for, where it was going (regardless of political persuasion)..... there really is no status quo, just a general trend of direction, regardless of any further constitutional tweaking. If the vested interests couldn't even muster a simple positive idea of what Britain should look like, then that really is a damning indictment of them.

Not quite, obviously, using with caution as it is a sub sample - but it broke 39/25/34 Y/N/geniunely not a fucking clues So it's breaking marginally in favour of Yes, to the point where (and yes it's not great methodology) asigning the various groups and excluding the genuine not a fucking clue brigae, the gap is down to one point.

So the last three PB polls have gone 40/41/40 - with the last two in reasonably quick succession? Again it simply demonstrates that there has been no significant movement in the few weeks. It does make a slight mockery of BT's press release which desperately wants everyone to beleive that the gap is 'widening' and it's comforting to see that PB has stuck around the 40% mark but there has been no movement in the last few weeks, nada. A lot of the recent polls have indicated that the gender gap is killing Yes, I think the Wings PB poll showed Men at 52% in favour but only 35% of women in favour. Several other polls report similar findings.

To be fair, it doesn't need to. It cna quite happily lose point after point so long as it is ahead on polling day. better Together were never interested in winning any big philisophical arguments, or even proving that theirs is a better system for consitutional governance. It's a spoiling action, plain and simple. They don't care how much ground Yes makes up, so long as they fall short.

Were we? Did you? I didn't.

You ar ethrowing a general criticism out into the ether there, what's the point you are trying to make. Some people include DKs, others don't - there are sound reasons for considering both, on the one hand is the situation on the ground as it is, the other is that you are trying to see a picture of what will happen when DK is not an option for people (and effectively apportioning a 50/50 split to the DKs) I always look at the include figures because the situation on the ground is the more accurate portrayal. You won't see DKs start to fall off until the last few weeks. It's true though that people spin numbers, but that's the same on both sides. The amount of times Unionist politicians have derided polls as outliers becuase it didn't fit their agenda is incredible, or the times they will compare two different polling methodologies in order to twist the lead figures. Both sides are at it.

The problem being that poll to poll variances can swamp real movement. It's like a noisy, low amplitude signal - any single sampled point could show a large variance, it's only when looking at the whole signal that you see the pattern. In this case Survation went 37/39/37 ove rit's last three polls, suggesting that 37 rather than 39 is the right number and that yes has stagnated in those Survation polls over the last month or so. If survation's next poll shows a Yes number of 35 (for example) then this is evidence of a turning tide, but it won't be until the poll after that that you can confirm it. If you look at it from the other direction, every single poll has shown movement within the margin of error for such polls, so comparing each poll to it's immediate predecessor (N-1) makes it look like it's always in the margin of error (i.e. the noise) it's only when you compare it with the N-2 and N-3 samples that you can get a 2nd or 3rd order filter effect where the noise is reduced to show a consistent trend in the signal.

I didn't know 'we' had an agreed methodology. Personally I always include the DKs.

Well, actually though the SecGen is head of the allied civilian oversight of NATO, in practice SACEUR takes his orders from his own chain of command up to the joint chiefs (and hence to the US president, advised as he is by the joint chiefs), just as other officers of other nationalities do as well - that's why you got the situation in Kosovo in 99 where a British 3 star general refused to obey an order from a 4 star US general, despite being under his explicit command. In practice the Sec gen is a facilitator, he's not 'head of NATO' in any meaningful capacity. All of which is besides the point - appeals to authority are not an adequate substitute for real data. If Scottish independence is so bad for western security, then show us the data, the numbers that make the case. "it's coz I say so" is not an arugment anyone wil ltkae seriously, regardless of background and experience.

It's a 1% net increase in No, with No also having lost 1% of their previous number and Yes 2% - more or less what it shows is that the polls haven't really shifted in the last month. Yes is in the range of 37-41%, No in the region of 45 - 48% with then online pollsters, on it's own it looks like sample to sample variation, just as the last two panelbase polls varied by 1% - it's not so much real movement as it is stagnation.

Indubitably.

same with Andrew Rawnsley and his 'sources' in parliament which informs his Observer political analysis column, or indeed any one, particularly in politics who uses anonymous sources in print, ultimately they'll be wrong as often, or more than they are right. Any information that cannot be verified and quantified is ultimately open to being erroneous, it's up to the reader to make that jusdgement call on what they think is plausible in that case. As for this? FWIW I find it to be a complete non story. There may not even be a poll in the first place, let alone one that is surpressed for "reasons" - so the end result is the same. No new polling information, how we get to that point is irrelevent - I don't particularly care if polls are being surpressed - by either side. Ultimately it is to their own detriment to do so as polling data where accurate is a good critque and should be treated as an opportunity to hone a message, not to get angry when it tells you things you don't like.

When treated as a series of opinion columns it's fine, and in that respect is no different from any editorial, or a site like CiF on the Guardian site. It is largely opinion though, albeit sometimes with some analytical analysis attached, the veracity of which can be argued. I dn't think it's necessarily any less a credible source than the comment/editorial articles you get in every national/local paper. Ultimately it's the output of one person or one group's opinion. Having said that, the PB poll conducted for WoS cannot be claimed to be any less credible than the Times commisioned polls by the same company. Same pre-amble, same weighting.

Yeah, but I doubt East Fife, Dunfermline or Cowdenbeath FC have issues with tracts of their support fucking off to watch Ice Hockey. Like it or not, the locality of the club gives Flyers a kirkcaldy 'feel', and I'll bet the majority of their support are Kirkcaldy/Glenrothes based - basically a huge overlap with our support, less so with the other Fife football teams (worth noting that Dunfemline used to have an ice hockey team, which for me weakens the idea that Flyers are a Fife level team, they largely represent Kirkcaldy and always have). There is a novelty value with Flyers being an 'elite league' team now and they are drawing 3,000 crowds at time (with an average crowd bigger than ours), the 'wee team' jibe that Dunfemrline fans throw at us was never about the size of our club with respect to theirs, but rather our crowd size with repsect to the Flyers. When they were stranded in the SNL their crowds were a damn sight smaller, I'll bet that most folk who follow both teams are pretty casual about their knowledge of both sports, and mercenary about who they spend their money on. Far from the notion that we need to play a better style of football to attract crowds, as is often cited - folk just care about winning. Crowds go up when you win, even if they don't really understand what's going on, and I'm willing to bet you could correlate Rovers vs Flyers crowd numbers for how many games they win and how long they've been in one place. This is our fifth year in the 1st div and assuming we somehow survive in it into next year, it'll likely be between 7th and 8th again - stagnant. We got a crowd boost when we nearly went up, playing fucking atrocious football but winning every week through Gregory Tade. Contrast that to the Flyers, now in a shiny new league (relatively) and with relative success (f**k knows how finishing 8/10 in a league with no promotion or relegation, to get to play offs is success, fucking diddy league!) So yeah, you want them to come back to Starks, you've got to give them some kind of excitement, the novelty of the fresh (Rovers have been pretty much the same for decades now!) and success. Not hard at all....

Completely agree with that.

Kevin Moon, has to be

Correct.

The thing to remember about margin of error is that it should essentially be random, so that with the same methodology you should expect a distribution of +/- swings, what we are seeing are small but sustained + swings across the majority of polls, where each swing may be within the margin of error but the trend is a sustained decrease in poll lead. There is no way that Yougov and especially Ipsos will be showing a yes lead come the day, even if other pollsters were, hypothetically showing small yes leads by that point. It'll be interesting to see which one comes off best.