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A Welsh political animal once taught me a lesson in handling opinion polls with care.

They'd been conducting telephone polling in their own patch for weeks. It had given them an answer, one they quite liked hearing. When the question was put to voters at the ballot box, the answer they came up with was resoundingly different.

"Democracy?" said the text. "Rubbish!"

So granted, polls prove nothing. ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ guidelines will tell you that they show nothing. They can only suggest.

My take on what our annual St David's Day poll suggests this year is .

Bottom line?

The constitutional ball is moving resolutely towards an Assembly that can make laws without having first to get the go-ahead from Westminster.

Now we know only too well after Friday night that balls can be intercepted and end up the other end of the field in no time at all but look at our polls for the last three years and what you'll see is the gap between those who say they would vote 'Yes' and 'No' in a referendum opening from 7% in 2008 to 13% in 2009 and to 21% this year.

Have a look at another set of responses - the multiple choice option, the pick-what-sort-of-institution-you-want-to-see option. It backs up the blunt 'Yes' or 'No' option. Once again this year most people, 40%, say they want an Assembly with full law-making powers and some taxation powers. Another 13% wants full law-making but no taxation powers.

The number who say they think the Assembly should have more influence over Wales than Westminster is growing too - not a lot but it has grown to nearly two thirds: 62%.

You may not like some of the wording in the poll. The calls have been coming in alraedy. Why do you talk about "full law-making powers" when the Assembly wouldn't have anything like full law-making powers after a 'Yes' vote in a referendum?

I've dealt with this before but the answer is that this is the way the opinion poll question has been put for some years and tracking a thousand people's response to the same question is vital and valuable.

And Labour? Boy are they fans of opinion polls at the moment. our St David's Day poll today. Our poll points to voters having twice as much faith in Labour leaders on sorting out the Welsh economy as the Conservatives.

Plaid Cymru and Liberal Democrat supporters may well have decided that, since their leadership teams have no chance of making it to Number 10 where the levers of power on the economy lie, then they'd plump for one of the top two.

Who knows. I'm back where I started. We can know nothing from polls ... but emerging from this year's columns and percentages? A clear suggestion that the Tory story is not going smoothly just now.

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