THE headline independence numbers from the new Scot Goes Pop/Panelbase poll bring considerable relief for Yes supporters, because they’re bang in line with recent Ashcroft and Survation polls which showed public opinion essentially split down the middle on indy, and therefore contradict a new Savanta ComRes poll which suggests that Yes support has slipped to an unusually low 46%.

It’s possible, then, that the ComRes finding could be nothing more than an outlier caused by random sampling variation, although as ever we’ll have to await more polls to know for sure.

Remarkably, it would have taken just two respondents in the Panelbase poll to swing the balance and bring the reported results to exactly 50-50. As it is, the rounded numbers are Yes 49%, No 51%, but if don’t knows are left in, the No lead is a trivial one percentage point.

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That’s a pretty decent starting point for any referendum, given that Yes were well below 40% at the early stages of the last campaign.

The UK Government recently walked into a trap by launching a legal challenge, on the eve of the current election, to the Scottish Parliament’s decision to enshrine the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in domestic legislation.

That’s a dreadful look in two respects – it reinforces the impression that the Boris Johnson administration is hostile to the devolution settlement and may seek to dismantle it if Scotland doesn’t choose independence, and on a more straightforward level it also suggests that Westminster is not prioritising the welfare of children.

I decided to use a supplementary question in the Panelbase poll to discover whether voters think the legal challenge is appropriate or not.

After don’t knows are excluded, a healthy 56% of respondents think that the UK Government has made the wrong call.

Women are the backbone of that majority, breaking 64-36 against the legal challenge, while men are almost exactly evenly split.

That’s a startling gender gap by any standards.

Some of the 44% of voters who support the legal action may have given that answer for anti-SNP reasons – a big majority of Tory voters, and a substantial plurality of No voters from 2014, think the UK Government’s actions are justified, while SNP voters take the contrary view by an overwhelming margin.

One of the most brazen aspects of the Tories’ Holyrood campaign so far has been their claim that the Scottish Government is somehow irresponsible to be simply planning for an independence referendum to take place after the pandemic is over.

READ MORE: Poll: Majority of Scots say Tory challenge to Scottish children’s bill is wrong

Historians will surely marvel that any political party had the brass neck to attempt that line of attack just months after actually taking Britain out of the EU single market and customs union as the pandemic was still raging – when any sensible government would have accepted the wisdom of a delay.

In another of the poll’s supplementary questions, I asked respondents which government they think has acted more irresponsibly.

A slightly greater number (39%) say the UK Government has been more irresponsible than the Scottish Government by completing Brexit in the middle of the pandemic.

In combination, 62% of respondents either don’t think planning for a referendum is irresponsible, or think the timing of Brexit was more irresponsible.

Intriguingly there’s no gender gap on this question, and around one-quarter of both Yes voters and No voters from 2014 give the opposite answer from the one you’d expect.

But Labour voters are somewhat more evenly divided than on the main independence question, with 42% (excluding don’t knows) feeling that Brexit is more irresponsible than indyref planning.