Opinion Polls, Jeremy Corbyn, Porn for Girlies and the lies of the Press

This morning I awoke to yet another article, this time by Matthew Parris in The Times, describing how Labour are in termoil, how they are unelectable, how the "moderates" need to mount a coup. As I read it, I got to thinking "hang on a minute, how come if Labour are doing so badly, I've not seen opinion polls on the front page saying this"? I've actually not seen a single poll in any of the papers I read since Corbyn was elected. How odd is this? As I lay in bed drinking my tea, I was wondering if the polling organisations have given up, since the May election debacle?

Courtesy UK Polling Report

I was planning to write a blog about music today, but this nagging feeling that we are all being seriously mislead by the press was tugging at me. In this day and age, it is simple enough to find information. I simply typed "latest opinion polls" into Google. What came back shocked me to the core. The first item was the UK POLLING REPORT website. Far from there being no polls, there have been dozens since the last election. If you had read the Times article, you'd expect the Corbyn effect to see Labour in single digits or even less. The general consensus of these polls is a srong trend towards Labour narrowing the gap on the Tories. In the aftermath of the election, the Tories were polling at 40%, with a double digit lead. This has dropped to the mid 30's and a 5% lead on average.

The UKPOLLING website also details that the Daily Mail commissioned a poll from Comres, which was released yesterday and showing Labour up 3%. So I went to the Daily Mail website to see what they had to say about it. Not a sausage on their front page. So I did a site search. Not a mention anywhere. There are plenty of stories of Labour in disarray and a meltdown, but not a sausage about the fact that the numbers don't support this. Interestingly, the same site has a little dig at the Mail for its use of voodoo polls. What do we make of this comment?


UPDATE: While I’m here in voodoo polling corner, I should also highlight this cracking example of a voodoo poll in the Daily Mail. It claims “One in three women admit they watch porn at least once a week”… but it seems to be an open access poll of Marie Claire readers, certainly it is in no way representative of all women in terms of things like age. It contains the delightful line that “Out of the more than 3,000 women surveyed, 91 per cent of the survey’s respondents identify as female, eight per cent identify as men and one per cent is transgender.” I don’t know how to break it to them, but you probably can’t include the 8% who are men in a survey of 3000 women.

 Another Poll which you won't see in any of the anti EU press is reported on the site. If you believe the Daily Express, there is a huge consensus for leaving the EU. Again the figures show this is a myth

ICM’s latest weekly tracker on the EU referendum has voting intentions of REMAIN 44%(-1), LEAVE 38%(+2). The gap has narrowed since last week, but doesn’t reflect any real trend: looking at ICM’s EU polls since the referendum wording was changed they’ve been very steady, REMAIN at 42%-45%, LEAVE at 36%-40%. These week’s figures are pretty much in the middle of that range. Tabs are here.
I’ve collected up the polling on the referendum so far here.

I was under the impression that the purpose of a free press in a democracy was to inform us and to tell us the truth. Can anyone possibly think that we are siing honest reporting of the facts. This week at Prime Ministers Question Time, Jeremy Corbyn probably had his best yet performance. The consensus was that he nailed Cameron. I have no doubt that the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party hate Corbyns guts and are secretly praying he falls under a bus. They are however waking up to the fact that he has the measure of Cameron at PMQ's. John Crace, sketchwriter for the Guardian summed it up pretty well.

For the first time, Corbyn stuck to the same topic for all six of his questions and Dave was left opening and closing his mouth like a demented goldfish that had only just realised it had no choice but to swim round and round in circles. The question was simple: could the prime minister please give a guarantee that no one on tax credits would be worse off next April? There’s only a certain numbers of ways a politician can say: “No, of course I can’t, because I had always assumed the legislation would go through on the nod and George and I haven’t begun to work out a back-of-an-envelope compromise,” and Dave had run out long before he got to six. Telling Corbyn that Karen would be better off because other people living near her would be better off was particularly unconvincing.

The "received wisdom" was that Corbyn would be marmalised by Cameron every week, Labour polling figures would go into meltdown and within a few months the logic for a Blairite coup would be irrefutable. The right wing press are still sticking to that mantra. The truth is that nothing of the sort is happening. The polls clearly indicate that Labour voters are in no way spooked by Corbyn. This is a rather inconvenient truth for many people. I suspect that rather like Thatcher, the public see Corbyn as someone who is an outsider who stands up for what he believes in. The idea that this would spook the British public is nonsense. Clearly there are sectors of the population who loathe and despise him. I would guess that apart from the Parliamentary Labour party, nearly all of these would never vote Labour anyway. To win an election, Corbyn needs to persuade swing voters that he's not a dangerous nutcase. Considering that he's had nearly six months of having the kitchen sink thrown at him by the right wing press and Labour is more popular than it was in May, it is clear that he is winning that battle.

For many people in the UK, the real threat to their households are the hard right ideology of David Cameron and George Osborne. There are many sensible voices in the Conservative Party who recognise the fact that if you attack hard working people on low wages, you will see your support base fall away. Many Tory MP's were delighted that the Lords pulled the rug from George Osbornes proposal to cut the incomes of millions through working tax credits. You never see these stories in the Mail, but the truth is that they are not stupid and they have realised that George Osborne may be skewering their chances of winning the next election. Whilst the Tories clearly have a working majority, they know that tehy were gifted the election by a completely inept campaign from Labour. The Tories scared the living daylights out of the electorate with stories of the SNP running the country. Labour never had an answer to these stories and buried their heads in the sand. Will they learn? This is the biggest challenge for Corbyn. I could probably write the Tories strategy plan for the 2020 election today, if Corbyn remains in power. As an engineer by trade, when I design a solution, the first thing I do is try and anticipate all of the scenarios that will break my design. I then design my solution to mitigate them. The one thing which I have a massive admiration for Tony Blair and his new Labour machine was that they understood this. They had a "rapid rebuttal unit". This team was on 24 hour standby to get a response out to any Tory scare story and turn it on its head. Ed Miliband replace it with "head in the sand" unit. Every scare the Tories put out was met with a vacant scare and a few mumbled words over a bacon sarnie.

Whatever Jeremy Corbyn does or doesn't do, if he is serious about winning the election, he will have to design a strategy to counter the lies and distortions of a press owned by billionaires with a huge financial interest in maintaining a tax cutting Tory government. To me the answer is simple, it is right here before your eyes. The likes of the Mail and Express cannot be taken on at their own game or oin their own terms. Social media is the way forward. Blogs such as this give people the chance to see the facts that the Press Barons don't want us to see. We can highlight the fact that The Daily Mail commissions polls and then suppresses the results when they don't suit the agenda.

There are many reasons I write blogs. Today the reason is sheer anger at the fact that organisations we are supposed to be able to trust are packed with lies. It makes me sick. But it also inspires me to get out of bed on a Saturday morning and try my damnedest to rectify the wrong that is beng perpetrated on us all.