Leaders: Sustenance for both camps in our ICM poll

Our poll shows the number of dont knows remains unchanged from last month. Picture: Getty

For the No camp, there is the simple satisfaction of being ahead – if these polling numbers are replicated in tomorrow’s actual vote, the push for independence will have been defeated and Scotland will remain in the UK.

For the Yes camp, however, there is the knowledge that it has the momentum – what political activists refer to as “The Big Mo” – as polling day looms large. Support for Yes has advanced from ICM’s last poll for our sister paper Scotland on Sunday last month.

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And yet the gap between the two sides – when you remove the don’t knows the split is Yes 48, No 52 – is exactly the same as ICM recorded back in April in the immediate aftermath of the SNP’s spring conference.

This is the high water mark for the Yes campaign in the ICM polls for these newspapers. The question now is whether the new momentum can carry the SNP and its independence-supporting allies into the lead, just in time to claim their prize on a day that will be written indelibly in the history books of the world.

Our poll today has a number of remarkable findings, but none more striking than the fact that the number of don’t knows remains unchanged from last month at 14 per cent. Looking at women alone, one in six has yet to make up her mind.

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We must be careful how we read such a finding. It would be wrong, for example, to suggest neither campaign has managed to make any inroads into the undecideds.

Instead, a more complex picture is probably true – that some Yes and No supporters have moved to don’t know, while some undecideds have made up their minds and hitched themselves to one or other of the campaigns. No doubt some Yes supporters have also moved directly to No, and vice versa.

Whatever the reason, with just hours to go until Scotland’s date with destiny, more than one in seven Scots intending to vote has still to make up their mind.

So much for the persuasive power of the campaign messages on such emotive subjects as currency, Nato, the NHS, poverty and EU membership.

The message seems to be that when Scots vote tomorrow, their pencils will be guided more by emotion and issues of identity than by intellectual assimilation of policy arguments.

Interestingly, it may be polls conducted in England that may have more to teach us on independence issues. One published last night showed that of English people with a view on whether the rUK should enter a currency union with Scotland, most were opposed.

In a campaign increasingly based on assertion rather than argument, it leaves a large question mark over the realisation of a key foundation stone of Alex Salmond’s independent Scotland.

Wright has lost all honour

THE resignation of South Yorkshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner Shaun Wright is a welcome development. But any respect that Mr Wright may have been due for stepping down was squandered weeks ago when he shamelessly ignored calls for him to relinquish his position of trust. Doing “the honourable thing” is only honourable if it is done in good time and with an appropriate degree of humility and regret.

Both of these have been conspicuously absent from Mr Wright’s behaviour and demeanour since the publication on 26 August of the devastating report into the Rotherham child sexual exploitation saga.

From 1997 to 2013, some 1,400 teens were sexually abused in the Yorkshire town. Mr Wright was the head of children’s services there between 2005 and 2010.

The effect of Mr Wright clinging on to power has been to reinforce one of the hard lessons of the Rotherham saga: that the fate of hundreds of young girls who were systematically used for under-age sex by gangs of men did not, and seemingly does not, rank as that serious a crime in the minds of some people in authority.

Even after the scale of the abuse – many more cases are suspected across Yorkshire and further afield – and the scale of the authorities’ failure to act was made public last month, Mr Wright clearly did not see it as reason enough to give up his position.

Rotherham was not an isolated or unique case. Police Scotland has conducted its own investigations into allegedly similar circumstances in Glasgow, and we await the outcome in the courts. Mr Wright has done all those fighting this scourge a disservice.