Different question, different answer? Yes, but...

It's all pretty simple really. The SNP won the last election. It, then, gets to choose what question it wants to ask in any referendum it wants to hold. It is neither unfair nor biased to frame the question other than their political opponents would have asked had they been holding a referendum. I can't see what grounds I would have had to complain if Johann Lamont (or Wendy Alexander for that matter) proposed to ask the country "Do you want Scotland to leave the United Kingdom and be a separate state?" That would be up to her and she'd not owe me, as an opponent, any duty at all in the framing of the question.



I could, however, point out the leading use of certain trigger words and use those to make political capital for myself by casting doubt on the result if it went against me. It would, then, be politically foolish for the Scottish government to ask a question which was unclear in meaning or could otherwise be claimed by political opponents to have been framed in a way that skewed the result. That's nothing to do with any obligation owed to the Unionists (who lost). It is, rather, in the government's own interests (and of course those of the electorate generally) to ensure that the answer, if affirmative, gives a clear moral mandate for political action. The result of any referendum, whatever it is, is of no binding, legal effect. Morality, justice, fairness will be all. It is therefore critically important for the Scottish government that the terms of the question are beyond reproach. Its own self-interest will tend to produce a clear, neutral question, which is what they proposed in the first place.

However, of course, faced with the howls of righteous indignation from their opponents about the allegedly leading nature of the words suggested, they agreed to what seemed to me to be a meaningless tweak, at the instigation of the Electoral Commission. So who's right? Was the original formulation the cynical exercise in gerrymandering that the Unionists insisted it clearly was?

Last month, Angus Reid asked 503 respondents: ""Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country? The results were as follows:

Yes: 32%
No: 50%
Don't know: 16%
Will not vote: 3%

This month, they asked 1,003 respondents "Should Scotland be an independent country?" The results were as follows:

Yes: 32%
No: 47%
Don't know: 20%
Will not vote: 1%

So, dropping the egregiously leading original formulation makes no difference at all to the "yes" vote. The number voting "no" is 6% fewer. The "don't knows" are correspondingly up by a quarter and two thirds of those who said they wouldn't vote have changed their minds.

I look forward to the mea maxima culpas which must surely now follow from any who made the "bias" accusation in any kind of good faith. The rest, I expect, will just keep schtum, seeing their job as simply to sow rancour and cynicism and move quietly on.