Why I won’t be betting against the pollsters next time
August 1st, 2006
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Are we now in an era of more accurate polling?
At the 2005 General Election I made several thousand pounds on a number of spread bets “selling” the projected Labour share. The spreads were very much in line with what the pollsters were reporting and I believed that they were over-stating the party. Thus one bet was at 38.5% against the actual 36.3% - meaning my winnings were the difference between the two numbers multiplied by the four figure sum I had bet per unit.
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For Labour supporters present two great problems for pollsters. For whatever reason they are much more likely than supporters of other parties to answer the phone when the polling firm calls; and they are more likely to say they will turnout vote when they don’t.
The result if measures are not taken is that you get inflated Labour shares and distorted poll findings. The 1992 General Election was one of the worst for this when the final polls had Labour and the Tories neck and neck but John Major romped (if that’s the right word) home with an 8% margin.
Even in 1997, 2001 and to a much lesser extent 2005 there was some Labour over-statement and last year one pollster, NOP, got the actual vote shares spot on. These are some of the measures that are used:-
Past vote weighting. You ask how interviewees voted last time and compare the numbers with the actual result. ICM and Populus generally find that about 45% say they supported Labour against the actual of 36.2%. So in each poll they adjust the numbers they have downwards but not quite in line with what actually happened to deal with the misremembering factor. The ICM past vote weighting formula currently has a 6% Labour margin while the Populus one is closer to 9%. It was actually 3%.
Adjusting for turnout. Currently all the regular pollsters apart from YouGov adjust their final figures to take into account the way interviewees rate the likelihood of voting on a scale of, usually, 0-10. Mori, which does not use a past vote weighting calculation, only includes those “certain to vote” in its final figures. A key element is that the turnout adjustment is only used for the voting intention question - not the other elements in a poll such as rating the different leaders. One of the reason that I attach much less importance to these figures is that they include the opinions of a lot of non-voters.
Adjusting for differential turnout. In an interesting development for its 2005 final poll Mori made an adjustment to correct for differential exaggeration of propensity to vote (using a turnout adjustment which reduced by a third the extent to which the turnout gap between supporters of different parties had been narrowed since the start of the campaign. I assume that this cut their projected Labour share. I have not seen that on a Mori poll since.
Weighting by party identifier. YouGov’s political polls are restricted to members of its polling panel on whom the firm has a mass of data. This includes responses to question on how people voted at the General Election that were asked within a few days of May 5th 2005. The firm also records the party that people “identify” with and correlates those to how they actually voted.
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We will know that the pollsters have finally cracked the problems when one of them understates the Labour share when tested against real results.
One consquence of all these measures is that we are now seeing much less variation in the different surveys and, I believe, more confidence in what is being reported.
Mike Smithson
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Still no substitute for decent info from the ground! I believe the opinion polls will continue to allow the informed - ie most people who contribute on this site - to win money from the average punter who will place an over reliance on the polling.
Did anyone see Arnie Schwarzenegger lashing praise on Tony Blair for being greener than him. He’s also taller than him too. Perhaps Arnie’s comments means that rather than Terminator (clause)4 Blair should be re-cast as ‘the TOTALLY incredible hulk’?
Meanwhile, in reference to the middle east, the great leader told the assembled press: “We must Act!”. Does he ever do anything else? The BBC’s Nick Robinson seemed totally taken in. Could someone arrange for him to be ‘taken in’ on a more permanent basis. His two-out-of-ten Rory Bremner monologues are grating more than a wee bit. How much ozone layer has disappered sending the spectacled one to San Fransico, and to what purpose? Could we roll John Sergeant out of retirement?
Variability, however, with survey results, is to be expected. Unless your sampling method somehow manages to reduce the sampling variability - and I can’t imagine any form of say stratification that could do this to a great extent - it raises the question, are the results too stable? If the post-hoc weighting/filtering etc. is reducing the natural variability that we should see, this surely also raises questions.
It will also be interesting to see if weighting by past vote continues to have the positive effect that many people assume that it has. It is against all received wisedom in survey research, except in political polling, to weight by a factor that we do not have good population estimates for. If the relationship between recall of past vote and current voting intentions changes over time, this can only lead to problems.
Only time will tell!
One other technical issue. Polling firms always report their sample size in order that people can nominally calculate confidence levels (+/-3%, 95 times out of 100 etc.) While most of us realise that confidence intervals really shouldn’t be used with quota sampling (but generally are) there are a lot of other, more hidden, factors that will have an effect on variability. Response rates, clustering, stratification, and weighting all have a design effect (with only stratification having a positive effect on the ‘effective sample size’. While companies are unlikely to spend the time calculating the design effect of their samples (or the quasi-design effect if they use quota sampling) the effect of weighting on the net effective sample size would be relatively easy to calculate. The bigger the effect of weighting, the larger the real confidence intervals are.
I suppose pollsters can justify their results in two ways: In how close they get to the result on their eve of election polls; or in their choice of methodology vis a vis sampling theory, and the rigour in which this is applied. Personally, I’d trust methodological rigour over all else.
3 - true except that eve of election polls seem to have some other voodoo added to them that then suddenly brings them into line with the final actual result. Thus at the last election eve of election polls converged onto the correct result even though their previous polls (for each company) displayed some considerable divergence.
That is why I prefer to look at a company’s record over a period of time rather than a single poll.
4. Indeed. It would be interesting to hear, before the eve of election poll was carried out, any changes in the way the companies process the raw data. I’m slightly cynical that there is a degree of, err, flexibility here.
“one pollster, NOP, got the actual vote shares spot on. These are some of the measures that are used:-”
What happened to NOP? Apart from the Blaenau Gwent byelection poll, have they recently done any other poll?
Btw, from The Times piece about Nick Boles standing in London Mayoral nomination race:
now how just being gay and sharing a flat with Gove make someone a moderniser? I suppose someone can be gay and at the same time wanting death penalty back, send all immigrants home …which I’m not that sure would make you a moderniser.
And sharing a flat with Gove…well, John McDonnell once employed David Miliband, but he doesn’t make him a Blairite.
3. & 5. Nice to see some informed comment on the site after some of the hysterical ranting of recent days.
Interesting article Mike - but I’m not sure that it is just a problem of overstating Labour’s share. Yougov consistently overestimate Tory share too.
The other issue is that predicting vote share this far away from a General Election is a mug’s game - the polls may well be right today but by polling day things change significantly. Polls lagging behind shifts in public opinion was one of the key reasons for pollsters caling the 1992 election ‘wrong’.
6. Agreed Andrea - some of the most reactionary people I know are gay. Boles does usually avoid wearing a tie though.
9. Fred, I see you get the right clue about being a Tory moderniser (the tie)
Dan 8 When did YouGov overstate the Tories? I do not think that there’s been an election where this has happened.
10. Sharp eyes dear boy, sharp eyes!
Re 2) I’ve just seen that and wouldn’t be suprised if in the next series of Dead Ringers, we have a trailer for Terminator 4 : New Terminator, New Rules (including a policy to deport illegal time travelling aslymn seekers within 18 months of their inital arrival)
Back to the point in hand, Mike does have a point about Major “romping home”, look at the results of Elections since 1992 and the majority:
1992: Con lead of 8% = Con maj 21
1997: Lab lead of 13% = Lab maj 179
2001: Lab lead of 9% = Lab maj 167
2005: Lab lead of 3% = Lab maj 66
The 1992 election is always one quoted, particularly Major romping home. There was a late swing to the Conservatives, due in no small part to Kinnock’s appalling behaviour at the Sheffield ‘Victory Rally’. If one single thing lost Labour that election that was it. However in retrospect what a good election to lose. If Labour had won it would have been saddled with the ERM disaster, losing 1992 led to the 1997 landslide and every subsequent Labour victory since then. Politics is bedevilled by events, which often have unforseen consequences. Mr Cameron’s EPP promise, and Roger Helmer’s response and accusations of betrayal, featured on this mornings Conservativehome, could be the start of a difficult time for Mr Cameron.
11. Mike - pretty consistently in the last Parliament. Someone (Mark Senior?) posted the averages (like you did for ICM) for Yougov polls in one of the recent ICM threads which showed they on average over estimated the Tory share by around 1.5%.
I’ve had a quick look back, but can’t find it, but I remember finding it interesting at the time.
The GE2005 the tracker polls were the wildest ( and that puts a question mark next to the YouGov tracker).
Over the last couple of weeks of the campaign the non-trackers were not bad and within the MoE. Yougov and BPIX were very close in the third week of April. But overall there was still a Labour bias, with the Tories understated.
ICM on 1 May were overstating Labour by 2% and understating the Tories by 2% and on 3rd May Mori overstated Labour by 2% and understated the Tories by 4%. A little further back and NOP were lifting Labour 3% and understating the Tories by 3%.
But smoothing this out from 15th April to the end of April Labour were overstated by 1.1 and the Tories also overstated by 0.02 and LibDems understated by 0.49. The same figures for the last 5 days of the campaign were +0.4 -0.73 and +0.53 .
I suppose all this comes to the unsurprising conclusion that the polls are more accurate as they got closer to the election but that still left them misplacing just shy of half a million votes and the general election was decided by far fewer than that.
Labour NEC election deadline closed. Some left-wingers are already ready to fill complaints against some regional officials for allegedly breaching party rules
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1207633.ece
16 Blue2Win. You cannot assess the effectiveness of any of the polls save the last day and exit polls. What are you comparing the earlier polls against for accuracy ??
11 - It was my post 41 on the Mori thread yesterday where I was giving the comparative figures for the 2 years running up to the last GE and not just during the election campaign .
18 True Jack but I think Mike’s argument on the ICM thread last week was that following Iraq voting intention was pretty stable up to the GE at least in so far as Conservative support . On that measurement ICM and Mori got the Conservative GE figure pretty spot on and Yougov were 1% higher .
17. Rule breach? Shome Mishtake Shurely!?!
The apparachiks of the Labour Party in all regions are all in possession of fully-authenticated Boris Yeltsin Moscow City Government Independence and Impartiality Certificates.
Good article Mike, but as has been discussed, the polsters fidled their figures as the election came around to get closer to the result, adopting methods they did not use before and have not used since. So we here still have the edge over the ordinary punter becuase we know roughly how far out they are going to be at a point in time before the election.
I missed the UKIP thread. Was there agreement on who woul dbe best for the Conservatives?
More interesting stuff from Andrew Green of MigrationWatch in the Torygraph today -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/08/01/do0102.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/08/01/ixopinion.html
22 Benedict W That might be a tad unfair. As the election approached they got better as minds were made up, perhaps. Even 20 days out they were, overall, not too bad.
A possible interpretation is that Labour did not gain votes during the campaign and the Tories might have lost some. And that might mean their contemporary baseline is 35%, something the current polls seem to bear out.
The real lesson that we can learn that ordinary punters may not have the opportunity to, is that some pollsters are better than others, but none of them can give any accurate forecast more than a few weeks before an election.
Trends yes, levels of trends, no.
23. Talking about migration Fred, is DC taking up permanent residence in Kabul, thus removing a potential serious (I don’t mean his policies) burden on the British taxpayers?
23 - there is nothing interesting about Andrew Green and his racist poison.
[23] Easy to see that Andrew Green is not an economist. These bigoted right wing rants really get in the way of a sensible debate about what kind of immigration we should be promoting.
“Migration Watch” is basically a bunch of Daily Mail Readers who can’t count.
If we are going to worry about migration tell all those who have gone to Cyprus and Spain to come home pronto!
I still believe that the flow outwards is massively underestimated.
Can somebody please moderate the extremely distasteful and immature remark at number 26? Sir Andrew Green is a sincere and intelligent man, who has bravely battled the prevailing liberal-left orthodoxies on immigration - and has been proved right time and again. By contrast the government has either ignored the facts on immigration, or simply lied - cf Nick Palmer’s embarrassing obfuscations on the subject, on this very website.
The other tactic used by liberal-lefties, when confronted with their own mendacity and incompetence on immigration, is to smear their opponents as ‘racist’. Comment number 26 is a particularly juvenile example of this. Enough.
nice one reading liberal
“Migration Watch” ( Andrew Green) is interesting if you want to stop immigration under all circumstances. I have yet to hear him talk about immigration without referring to “half a million people equating to the population of Birmingham every five years” which makes him seem like a racist even if those who know him say differently.
27. I suppose Bob Rowthorn isn’t an economist either. He is presumably a right wing bigot, too.
Cicero - “These bigoted right wing rants really get in the way of a sensible debate”
did you know sean t was about to post
31. Roger, he may seem like a racist to you - and you are entitled to your opinion, I guess
- but the operative word here is ’seem’.
He ’seems’ racist. That’s all. He just ’seems’ racist, because you don’t like what he says, and because he talks about migration in simple and clear language.
If you can point me to a remark of his that is actually provably racist, then your prejudices may have weight. Until that moment, calling him racist looks like yet another attempt to close down the debate. Not good.
Here’s Mark’s posts showing how Yougov overestimate the Tory vote…
Yougov 55 polls
40-2
39-4
38-3
37-3
36-5
35-3
34-12
33-11
32-10
31-1
29-1
Average 34.5 %
by Mark Senior July 31st, 2006 at 9:35 am
Andrea at 6. NOP are typically comissioned by the Independent, who, for whatever reason, have not chosen to run any poll since the election. Hence no other recent NOP poll.
Emotive language is traditionally the refuge of racists which is why I mention his oft repeated “If immigration is allowed to continue we will in effect create a population the size of Birmingham every five years”
Nick Griffin refers to “Flooding the country with…….” Same effect. Interestingly if you look at the Daily Mail during their anti-Semitic period in the 30’s when they tried to stop boats arriving with Jews from Europe they used very similar analogies. I can’t be bothered to look just now but it’s an excercise I did a while ago. Maybe later if I get time.
What is the mechanism for finding out how a vote is overestimated? You would have to compare it with actual votes at the same period of time surely and those figures don’t exist. That a pollster may be giving different results from another in a period where there is no general election wouldn’t appear to mean anything as nobody knows what the reality would actually be.
On the tory campaign last time I thought it was useless, you could see the votes seeping away on every mention of the ridiculous ‘core vote’ issues. I would imagine that they lost votes during the campaign and lib dems also lost out due to not hitting back hard against the labour lies about a lib dem vote being a tory vote.
For detailed look at the various economic arguments re. immigration, try this link -
http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/Rowthorn_Immigration.pdf
36 True but Mori will conduct a monthly poll anyway and hope someone pays to publish it . I guess that they value the publicity anyway in the months that it is not commisioned .
All immigration controls do is line the pockets of the people smugglers. Why have any restrictions?
38 Yes and no Paul . As stated earlier Mike assumed/presumed that ib the 2 years post Iraq to the GE , the Conservative vote intention was basically stable . If that was true then you can compare all the polls in that period and measure the standard deviation . The figures Mike gave for ICM were remarkably constant over that period , Mori figures more volatile but confirming the assumption to be reasonable and Yougov as given in post 35 a little more volatile with a slightly higher average % .
It would be interesting to do the same exercise for Labour and LibDem figures which I may do . I suspect that these will be more variable than the Conservative figure .
36. Thanks
37. So just because he uses what you regard as ‘emotive’ language then you feel entitled to call him racist? What chance does he have?
Pointing out to people that 500,000 migrants (or whatever) is equivalent to Birmingham is just a statement of fact, that clearly makes a point for people who might not grasp the significance of the figure. That’s all. How else is he meant to illustrate and clarify the statistic? Maybe he should say “seventy five Sloughs”? “Eight thousand minibuses full of plumbers?” “A quarter of a million tango pairs”?
In your world any language on migration is emotive, apart from the sentence: ‘let’s not talk about this and instead just pretend that mass immigration isn’t happening’.
41 - We got onto this on the UKIP thread and, taking a pure position, I would agree. The difficulty arises though in that we have a social welfare system which would attract immigrants. If you were to abolish that, or deny its benefits to immigrants, then unfettered immigration would work. As someone who believes that an element of social welfare is necessary to create social cohesion and prevent social unrest I have to concede, therefore, that some form of immigration control is necessary.
Mike at 41 - well said, at last someone’s talking sense. We ought to abolish all immigration controls. If right wingers really believe in market mechanisms, why not remove immigration barriers and let the market decide?
41. In some ways I’ve got more respect for that clearly-held libertarian position on immigration - compared to the cant, confusion and deceit that characterises the attitude of New Labour to the same.
Trouble is, as UKPaul says, a free-for-all immigration policy (as existed in Victorian times) might give us a dynamic economy but it would also mean enormous racial stress, welfare state collapse, and outright impoverishment for poor indigenes of all colours.
Not exactly a vote winner.
Immigrants aren’t entitled to welfare when they arrive. I think they have to work for two years first.
http://www.ciac.org.uk/immigration1.html
Sorry 1 year……
38 - I agree ukpaul - changes in voting intention during the campaign (particularly late ones) are almost impossible to pick up. But if we’re going to conclude that polls appear to overestimate Labour (compared with the result) we should also do the same for other parties.
It may be the case that the polls are accurate, but that voters simply turn out differentially on the day.
37. he has been joined in his overall approach to this subject by Frank Field MP, who is a pretty queer fish by all accounts.
Tony D
[33] SeanT of course may not always be entirely serious
But Green is totally wrong about the numbers- he always takes the gross number, and never makes any account of the fact that it is two way traffic- thus the “City the size of Birmingham” coming here is just simple nonsense. When he talks about the collapse of the welfare state, he fails to note the very large number of Doctors and Nurses who are… immigrants. When he talks about housing shortages, he does not seem to notice a single Polish construction worker. So Migration Watch are a self appointed bunch of nobodies who spread totally misleading and inaccurate information about immigration.
Incidently at least 4.5 million British citizens live overseas- one of the highest proportions in the world- Migration watch don’t ever mention this- funny that.
29 People like that should not be honoured by the state. His cosy Oxfordshire village turns out of course to be largely kept running by economic migrants who do all the jobs that locals used to do before they were priced out by… er… migrants like Green!
The other feature they ignore are students who are necessarily here temporarily. Perhaps the answer to the emotive language should be ” we take in immigrants a town like Cheltenham and we lose in emigrants a town like Scunthorpe!”
52. ‘A self appointed bunch of nobodies who spread misleading and innacurate information about immigration?’ Are you referring to the government?
I mean, it’s the government that gave us the estimate of 13,000 EU accession immigrants every year. Instead we’ve had..er… 200,000 every year. How misleading is that?
It’s also the government which told us it doesn’t know how many illegal migrants there are, then said ‘well maybe there are 250,000′, then it told is there could be 500,000, or even a million. Talk about inaccuracy.
It’s also the government which has stifled debate on the subject, not mentioned their policy in their manifestoes, cocked up the asylum system completely, let loose migrant rapists who should have been deported, failed to establish proper border controls, quietly handed over migration powers to the EU, and so on, and so forth. Yawn.
Yep, you’re quite right. The govermment is certainly ‘A self appointed bunch of nobodies who spread misleading and innacurate information about immigration.’
With the first past the post system and so many “safe” seat for Labour & Conservatives any change in these opinion polls could have little effect on who is the largest party after the GE. Using Baxter it is forseeable that if all three main parties had almost equal votes Labour could still have a majority. This is all rather depressing for the Lib Dems who still poll about 10% even in their worst constituencies unlike Con & Lab who have some real no go areas. But a redistribution of the LD vote into targeted areas will see the MPs rise and confound the polls. As time goes on the polls may more accurately show opinion but their accuaracy in predicting the GE result will be more and more dodgy unless they take large samples from the “marginal” constituencies based on local knowledge.
46-Non-market mechanisms include ALL forms of social security. Perhaps some “right wingers” would then take you at your word?
57 - so they would be allowed to come here and work tax free?
I believe that this definition of “racism” from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary is accurrate.
Function: noun
1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2 : racial prejudice or discrimination
I am in favour of free movement of people within the EU. Andrew Green is obviously not. However, can someone please explain how someone like Mr Green is being racist, if the people that he is objecting to are the same race as himself? Misguided, uncharitable, counter-productive, illogical - Yes. Bit racist?
Isn’t this the knee-jerk reaction of people who just use it to shout down people like Mr Green? Why resort to this when you have far better arguments to use to counter his views?
So, why not retain the 2 year rule re benefits, tax people and let them work immediately, versus what we have at the moment with asylum seekers, which is the opposite: they live on hand-outs, are not *allowed* to work and hence pay no tax.
System at the moment is completely arse-about-tit
60. The reason we don’t let many illegal immigrants/asylum seekers immediately take work is because they would work for very low wages, thus pricing local unskilled people out of the market, and leading to racial tension and worse.
The irony of this argument is that, on the grounds of anti-racism, the UK Left suddenly seems to have become a cheerleader for an American-style immigration system, where we let in almost everyone with skills - or no skills - and let the uneducated locals go hang. Survival of the Fittest, etc.
There is certainly an argument for this kind of immigration - America is a dynamic place - it’s just bizarre to see it coming from the Left. Moreover, it would be nice if Labour had told us they wanted an American-style immigration policy in their manifesto, and that this meant hundreds of thousands of extra immigrants. They didn’t.
One of the arguments against American-style immigration in the UK is that America forces its new citizens to swear allegiance etc - it inculcates American-ness. We just let people into Britain and tell them they can then go off and do their own thing, owe no allegiance to Britain, campaign to close down movie sets etc.
I’m not sure you can forever combine liberal-left European multiculturalism with the large scale of US-style immigration.
[59] Racist may also include xenophobic: A person unduly fearful or contemptuous of that which is foreign, especially of strangers or foreign peoples.
Yep- sounds pretty much on the money
41 and 46- on the money. I believe that immigration controls are by definition prejudiced. Those advocating greater controls are almost universally right wing (or right leaning sympathies- al la Field, Blunkett and Straw), and at the broader end of the control debate undoubtedly racist.
Migration and freedom of movement is a human right. People have the fundamental right to live and work where they choose. Immigration policy is a construct aimed at protecting the rights of the few. Human development will only benefit in the longer term from a wider integration of communities, societies and races. History will judge immigration policy (any kind) as a failure, and mock all those promoting greater control as racists. I only hope that I live to see it.
Also, did you know that Iran, that great axis of evil, accepted more immigrants than any other country last year. Shame on western countries.
[61] Err… in which case someone is breaking the law, as we have a minimum wage in the UK.
35, 38 et al. Surely the only mechanism by which people talk about “overstating” is about the last one or two polls by each organisation before the actual election? It is by this method that Labour are in fact always overstated by MORI, i.e.
1992 election:
MORI: 41%
ICM: 38%
Actual: 35%
1997 election:
MORI: 51%
ICM: 43%
Actual: 44%
2001 election:
MORI: 45%
ICM: 43%
Actual: 42%
2005 election:
MORI: 41%
ICM: 38%
Populus: 38%
YouGov: 36% / 37%
Actual: 36%
62 Cicero “Racist may also include xenophobic”.
By all means call him a Xenophobe. In fact, I think that is a pretty good description of Mr Green.
But the reason that there are two words (”racist” and “xenophobic”) is that they describle different states of mind. Related, certainly, but different.
Using one word which is “close, but not exact”, instead of the correct word displays sloppy thinking. You of all people should recognise that, Consul!
63 Sorry meant that Iran accepted more asylum seekers before I get howled down, and in keeping very much with the Muslim tradition to host strangers.
63. “Also, did you know that Iran, that great axis of evil, accepted more immigrants than any other country last year. Shame on western countries.”
Did that include tens of thousands of non-Muslims, I wonder?
I would hardly hold up Iran as an example of multicultural tolerance!
55 “let loose migrant rapists who should have been deported”
Goebbels understood the power of language. As soon as you start associating words like migrant, terrorist, rapist, criminal together it creates a distorted image which is deliberate.
SeanT this is racist, hateful, inflamatory rhetoric that is very revealing of your own core beliefs I think.
67. The Muslim tradition to host strangers??? Would that be extended to homosexuals? Jews? Women who don’t want to wear veils and be thought worth half a man? Does that extend to allowing churches in Saudi Arabia?
I’ve travelled a lot in Muslim countries; I lived in Egypt. Muslims in the Dar al Islam can be very gracious, polite and hospitable people. But I wouldn’t say that Islam itself is very accommodating and tolerant.
To Tyson of the loony left, so migration and freedom of movement are a universal human right, eh? So presumably it would be OK if ten millions Dutchmen went to live in South Africa in the 19th century? Presumably it would be just dandy if a hundred million white Americans decided they wanted to live in Brazil? Those Brazilians who complained would be racist and xenophobic, correct? Hey, how about all of us in Britain just moving to Barbados, and the locals will just have to put up with it? If the Barbadans object - heck, they must be racist, too.
Your attitude is so illiterate, incoherent and dimwitted I suspect you say it merely to provoke.
65 Unfortunately Anatole your analysis is false the figure for Mori for 2005 is not their last poll before the GE which was the Evening Standard poll with Labour at 38 % . Yes I can see your figures on the Mori Historical data but they are not from a published poll .
69. Aw shucks, you’re just soft soaping me now.
Migrant rapists is quite a good way of terming people who have immigrated and committed rape. But maybe you have an alternative. Perhaps we should call them ‘differently provenanced people with sexual consensuality issues’.
There. You can calm down now.
“People have the fundamental right to live and work where they choose”.
Says who?
RE 70, SeanT Iran has a Jewish minority, churches in Saudi Arabia, or rather their lack, is a rarity in the Muslim world.
65/71 The figure you quote is the from the All Naming a Party question which as we discussed yesterday does overstate Labour support but their published figures are on the Absolutely Certain To Vote Question .
I have done a lot of number crunching on opinion poll figures post Iraq , sorry have not time to give them all on here at the moment but it is easy to draw the conclusion that their was little change in public opinion from 2003 to the GE . A brief summary of the stats are :-
Conservatives ICM 26 polls average 32.6%
Mori 33 polls average 33.3%
Yougov 55 polls average 34.5%
Labour …… ICM 26 polls average 37.6%
Mori 33 polls average 36.9%
Yougov 55 polls average 35.9%
LibDem …… ICM 26 polls average 21.8%
Mori 33 polls average 21.6%
Yougov 55 polls average 21.0%
70- “To Tyson of the loony left, so migration and freedom of movement are a universal human right, eh? So presumably it would be OK if ten millions Dutchmen went to live in South Africa in the 19th century? Presumably it would be just dandy if a hundred million white Americans decided they wanted to live in Brazil? Those Brazilians who complained would be racist and xenophobic, correct? Hey, how about all of us in Britain just moving to Barbados, and the locals will just have to put up with it? If the Barbadans object - heck, they must be racist, too”.
SeanT-Please try and engage in a measured way. This kind of exaggeration serves no purpose other than making yourself appearing stupid.
The history of human kind is one dominated by mass movement, migration and inter racial breeding. People move to better themselves, to improve their family or just to explore new things and natural inquisitiveness.
All these are fundamental rights. To put controls around this is unworkable. It is similar to attempting to control other natural evolutionary processes, i.e reproduction. Globalisation is simply hastening this process- it is empowering peoples and countries to take these kind of risks.
The two most useless policy frameworks today- immigration and drugs prohibition. Countless waste of money, unworkable, counter intuitve, bureaucratic, inefficient, and full of unintended consequences. Full liberalisation is the only practical policy position to deal with these areas.
Well yes but isn’t the point that you can take no “average” over a period of time because every poll is a snapshot reflecting the reality (or at least the polling reality) at that moment? Figures change because people change their minds. YouGov probably accurately reflected high Tory support at certain points in the cycle but reflected that support dropping again at the election, &c. Therefore only the last poll using a given methodology is actually relevant? I can’t imagine there is any value at all in “averaging” polling figures over a period of time.
“All these are fundamental rights.”
Fundamental rights are things like the right to life and to own property. The right to move to any country I choose is not in that category.
Re migrationwatch statistics.
My wife is an immigrant. She is an American citizen and she is entitled to live in the UK on a spousal visa. As I am working in the Netherlands at the moment we are spending most of our time in Amsterdam. We return to the UK at least once a month, maybe more. Everytime she enters the country her passport is stamped.
My question for Migrationwatch is do they count each time my wife enters the country as a separate person, or do they allow for multiple entries?
I am loathe to give Sir Andrew Green any credit. Migration watch is independent think tank independent of party politics, it is true, but it is certainly agenda driven.
A trawl of the internet will reveal a plethora of other XXXX-watch groupings:- UKIPwatch, the sadly defunct Lib Dem watch, and vile groups such as JewWatch.
It is difficult to say how nasty Migration watch is. Sir Andrew is very articulate, and is a learned man - being ex-ambassador to Syria. But I think that even if he is no racist, and that is debatable, he appeals to racists (generally older ones) and needs their support to further his cause. Similarly Ian Paisley, who I find loathsome, is an honourable man, but he appeals to base human instincts.
I personally am delighted that we now live in a country full of “new Europeans”. Polish will soon be our second language. (And aren’t Polish girls good-looking!) It must be remembered that these people came here to work, not scrounge. It was a brave lead of the UK, Ireland and Sweden to allow new Europeans to work here.
Other countries are now following our liberal free-market lead (which is driving down the cost of plumbers for example). One such country is Finland, which I am sure will have its fair share of Estonian plumbers and bar staff very soon.
74. Fair point - but Iran is also the country, is it not, whose president has called Israel an ‘infectious tumour’, and whose elite has publicly questioned the truth of the Holocaust; it is also the country which celebrates Al Quds, a holiday named for the future eradication of the Jewish state. Iran is also the country which supports Hezbollah, a militia which seeks to kill Jews anywhere and everywhere. Likewise it is the country whose Jewish population has halved in twentyfive years, as a result of oppression and Islamization…
Etc etc.
Not exactly Manhattan, in terms of philoSemitism, is it?
76. Tyson, I now realise you actually mean what you say. I likewise realise that you are quite certainly an 18 year old politics students at Salford University who is enamoured of the purity of the libertarian position. Whilst I envy you your self-righteousness, born of extreme immaturity mixed with some intelligence, I also pity you the bitter truths you will have to swallow as you belatedly grow up.
Sean - you have the right to move to any EU country and I am not sure why you shouldn’t be able to move to any country you want to.
74 several Muslim countries have a death penalty for conversion to Christianity. It is currently preferable to be a Muslim in a Christian country than a Christian in a Muslim one.
82 - I’d say it’s up to the locals, through their elected representatives, to decide whether or not my presence is one they would welcome.
72 SeanT
As I said before it is the power of language (as Goebbels). The police understand this, and when they report a crime they are very careful to present ethnic issues- ie won’t just say we are looking for 2 black men.
Right wing rhetoric is littered with the kind of associations you made above. Criminal, terrorists, rapists- combine this with ethnicity and you create an iflammatory timebomb. That is why your language is detestable, inciteful and racist.
Sean Fear 70- would you personally like constraints over where you lived or worked, especially if your family were living there?
Freedom of movement, like freedom of ideas, freedom of expression are fundamental human rights. The issues of benefits, healthcare migration, housing allocation only muddies the waters.
As I said before history will judge immigration policy as backward and reactionary, and future generations will be amazed at attempts to constrain human movement.
RE 81, You may well be correct that Iran is not quite as philo Semitic as Manhattan, however, thsi Holocaust denial bollocks seems only to have come to the fore since their intelectual equivilent of George Bush got elected. In terms of the Palestinian issue I can’t see that the question is relevent, and the people who intelectualy back up these claims seem scary to me.
As for Hezboulah, yes Iran does back it, what Hezboulah does after some sort of settlement is reached, who knows. One of the prisoners Hezboulah wants back is a Lebonease Jew who I understand is being held on spying charges.
85. No, you are incorrect. Article 13 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that, “Everyone has the right to freedom and residence WITHIN the borders of each State”. There is no reference in the UDHR to any such freedom BETWEEN states.
82. I can’t believe you guys are honestly positing this argument - i.e. the extreme libertarian position that all immigration controls should be lifted.
I grant you that, in its purity , it has an appeal to a certain kind of adolescent and generally male mind, but think it through…
What if five million Arabs decided to move to Ireland and then voted for sharia law? Should the Irish be expected to put up with that? What if all of Amsterdam moved to Qatar and decided to legalise gay cottaging? Methinks the Qataris might be a bit miffed.
Immigration controls are a natural result of globalisation and - ironically - global peace. People generally didn’t used to move abroad en masse, because it was too difficult and costly and they couldn’t stay in touch with home etc; if they did move abroad in big numbers it was often a result of conquest and war.
Now we have easyjet and less Viking pillaging, so we unfortunately need a few controls to maintain a sense of identity amongst likeminded people in various localities. These localities are called ‘nation states’.
End of BSc Politics module 1.
85. As I said before, Tyson, grow up. Go abroad and travel. Have sex, probably for the first time. Enlarge and enrich your mind! Then we can chat.
“Sean Fear 70- would you personally like constraints over where you lived or worked, especially if your family were living there?”
Any civilised person accepts such constraints. I don’t force my company on those who find it unwelcome. What do you do?
86 - You do really do your argument no credit by such a ludicrous comparison between Bush and Ahmadinejad (wait for two minutes and we’ll have Zebinastee commenting favourably on the latter).
88 A similar debate came up on Conservative Home yesterday. It’s possible that in a world of night-watchman states, like mid Victorian Britain, immigration would be entirely self-regulating.
But in a world of welfare states, and high levels of public spending, immigration is bound to impose costs on the host population. The host population is perfectly entitled IMO, to determine whether those costs outweigh the benefits from immigration.
83- Islamism is an extreme form of Islam. The Taleban are an example of this. Politics wise amounts to facist totalitarianism. Not sure of other Muslims states legislating against christian conversion with the death penalty though.
This is not to be confused with Islam itself- a tolerant, peaceful and hospitable religion. The Ottoman empire successfully integrated many faiths together, much more so than christian colonnisation.
85- I wasn’t trying to say that freedom of movement is enshrined in the Human Rights Act. It should be though.
Of topic I know but, has anyone used the UKelect software? Did you find it useful?
93 Pakistan and Egypt prescribe a death penalty for apostasy. I expect that several of the Gulf states do so also. But there certainly have been periods of tolerance in Islamic history.
77 Yes every poll is a snapshot at a particular time but if and it is an if poltical opinion was stable in the period post Iraq to the GE then an average of all the polls should give a result close to the GE result which they do in the case of these 3 pollsters . The sample of polls is large enough to provide meaningful results and the detailed figures I have show clearly the outlier/rogue polls .
It is a surprise to me to now think that Iraq was the defining moment in the last parliament and the 2 years after and the GE campaign itself had a negligible impact on where voters put their crosses in May last year .
94 - If you were refering to my post @87. The UDHR, which is recognised as the definitive expression of peoples’ fundamental human rights, is quite separate and distinct from the UK Human Rights Act.
“It is currently preferable to be a Muslim in a Christian country than a Christian in a Muslim one”.
These things vary from time to time. A few years ago it was a disaster to be Jewish in several protestant countries. Even now there is plenty of prejudice against Muslims in countries such as this. Witness SeanT and read his famous post if anyone doubts it.
94 to take an extreme case, suppose I proclaim my intention of assasinating a country’s Head of State. Should that country’s government be entitled to prevent me from settling there?
O/T Nick Ferrari is quoted by the BBC saying “I think they [The Conservatives] want a winner. If you look at some of the bookies’ odds I would appear to be a winner.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5224894.stm
Are any bookmakers offering odds on the London Mayor race?
97. Sorry am I missing something? Why would anyone presume that “poltical opinion was stable in the period post Iraq to the GE”? Opinion in the electorate swings to and fro from day to day - in many ways the General Election is simply a snapshot of how people feel on that particular day - hours afterwards they might (and often do) feel differently. The point about polls is simply to say that, right now in (say) July 2006, most people feel they would vote for x party. It has no connection or relevance to which party they felt they might vote for two months ago, let alone two years ago. Public opinion is an ongoing, organic thing with a life of its own which needs constant management, hence spinning. Each poll is mostly a clean sheet of opinion. So why average anything over a long period of time?
99. I’m famous? Hooray!
90- that is the debate- whether mass migration is unwelcome- for many, the individuals, the recipients of the skills, knowledge, work ethic they bring, the contribution to the economy, the taxes they pay towards our healthcare and pensions (by a massive margin net contributors) the cultural contribution to our arts, our cinema music and TV, genetic mix, the energy and vitalism they bring to our cities, the different foods, the broadening out of all human experiences and the development of the human state- mass migration is a real blessing.
The people who find it unwelcome- usually people in areas with little immigration find it unwelcome (leafy Oxfordshire villages), or the right- populist Tories who play to a fear of the unknown, and god forbid the BNP who play on the basist instincts of the white underclass, preaching hate and getting poor white people to blame their poverty on migrants. That is why I deplore SeanT’s word association (migrant rapists)- real lowest common denominator politics stuff.
[66] Quite right, which is why I tend not to spray “racist” around, unless I really beleive it is warranted.
[89] While I know SeanT is a New Dad- I would still think his hilarious, but frankly cringemakingly embarassing history of “toffeewombling” (and other exploits) might cause him to pause before suggesting to the more virginal posters to join his gang…
97: It doesn’t follow that because the average is similar to the election result that there wasn’t movement though - there could have been movement that just so happens to have ended up evening itself out and, in fact, that appears to be what happened. The Conservative party’s average polling figures were in the mid-30s for much of the second half of 2003 and first half of 2004. They then fell sharply in Summer 2004, losing support to the Liberal Democrats, and only recovered slightly during the “phony election campaign” of early 2005. The Liberal Democrats had two sharp boosts in support in Autumn 2003 and Autumn 2004. The first was a very short term boost from Brent East, Autumn 2004 was a more substantial increase in support. That declined, however, during the same “phony election campaign”.
The figures you’ve produced would only show outliers on the assumption that the “real” levels of support were constant. In fact they almost certainly moved about. To give an example, the polls in September 2003 showing Lib Dems up in the high 20s and low 30s were a long way from the average level of Lib Dem support shown in the polls from 2003-5, but they certainly do not appear to be outliers or rogue polls. If there had been just one of them, then yes, I’d have dismissed it as a rogue, but 6 polls put them at 27 or above. What are the chances that they Lib Dems were really at 23% all the time, and 6 polls in a row just happened to be rogue polls, all hugely overestimating the Lib Dem vote?
That said, I too think that Iraq was the defining moment of the last Parliament. While there were genuine ups and downs in the level of support for the parties in 2003-2005, it was Iraq that really made the difference.
Some interesting posts Benedict. In Beirut I had two brothers on my shoot called Hitler and Rommel! I asked the producer from what sort of a bizarre family did these two come from? He explained that in the Middle East these names don’t have the resonance they have in Europe. “But” he said “we do have an Aoun and that’s really weird”
104. Jejune.
00- do not think where you are born should matter one jot on criminal matters. All equal under the law. Take SeanT “deporting migrant rapists” from a purely human perspective. Is it right to deport a high risk rapist to the mercy of women back in the host nation, whilst accepting all the host country’s doctors, nurses, plumbers etc ??
102 I would have agreed with you if I had not looked at the detailed opinion poll data . There is no evidence of any change in public opinion in the 2 years prior to the GE . All the data fits sampling a stable database , variations in particular polls being explained by normal sampling error .
RE 91, John O, I regret I am not convinced either is going to win a Mensa award for brains. They are not the same in many ways, but I respect neithers apparent intelect. (That said I suspect that GWB may be brighter than he appears on TV).
109. I am lost for words. Tyson has actually written something I broadly agree with.
RE 107, LOL! Mind you Aoun is back. I remeber watching his Palace being constantly shelled by the Syrians. When were you last there?
I did look at the figures. Are you really saying that there wasn’t a temporary increase in the level of Lib Dem support after the Brent-East by-election?
104- thanks Cicero for this information. Maybe explains Sean’s irritability, either that or he is genuinely a rabid, right wing bigot who fails to engage in a sensible debate!!
109. Tyson, I think the point about ‘deporting migrant rapists’ is that, as I understand, these people in the deportation scandal were foreign nationals. They had not assumed the rights or responsibilities of British citizenship. Therefore, they were guests of this country.
In committing their rapes (or non-consensual sexual acts, if you prefer) they not only committed a crime, but they abused the hospitality of this country, and should therefore have been sent back to the state of their citizenship, at the end of their sentence.
Similarly, any British citizen who committed rape, murder, arson, robbery (etc etc) in a foreign country would surely, and rightly, expect to be sent back to Britain. What right would he have to stay in a country, as a foreign citizen, if he so foully disregarded their laws?
Merely being in a country does not give you the right to stay there, most especially if you are a convicted criminal.
OT. I wonder what Tory research has uncovered about Cameron’s dive in popularity since his “Hug a Hoodie” brainwave? The two possibilities are firstly that “Sun readers” were incensed by the liberalism of it or secondly that non-Sun readers stopped taking him seriously. I suspect the second. Since then jokes about his publicity seeking everywhere
109 - So, not even attempting to commit, or comitting, a very serious offence in a foreign country should prevent one from being allowed to live in that country? How bizarre.
I think you’ll just have to accept that the vast majority of your fellow citizens are simply marching out of step, and are unable to appreciate the wonders of uncontrolled immigration in the way that you do.
There is nothing factually incorrect about the statement that “prisons were releasing immigrant murderers and rapists on to our streets leaving them free to murder and rape again.”
However, it carries an implication that just about the only murderers and rapists being released are foreign. In fact the vast majority of murderers and rapists released on to our streets, free to murder and rape again, are British.
So statements like that in my first paragraph whip up hysteria as people believe the foreignness is the root cause of a crime problem. It may not be racist, but it feeds prejudice and racism.
117 - many Sun readers are hoodies and would rather be hugged by Shelley with the big tits on page 3 than by David Cameron.
104. “that is the debate- whether mass migration is unwelcome- for many, the individuals, the recipients of the skills, knowledge, work ethic they bring, the contribution to the economy, the taxes they pay towards our healthcare and pensions (by a massive margin net contributors) the cultural contribution to our arts, our cinema music and TV, genetic mix, the energy and vitalism they bring to our cities, the different foods, the broadening out of all human experiences and the development of the human state- mass migration is a real blessing.”
Small-to-medium scale immigration certainly brings all of the benefits that you list above. As I said in my earlier post, I support free movement of people throughout the EU.
As for the benefits to the host population of ‘mass migration’ I am not so sure. I don’t think that you would be quite so much in favour of it if you were an American Indian, an Australian aborigine, a Palestinian, or a Celt living in Britain at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, or many other examples.
This is NOT happening in Britain right now. The UK is NOT being overwhelmed by Poles or anyone else. I’m just trying to point out that there have been cases where immigration has not always been a wonderful experience for the existing inhabitants of a country. Just because we have been very lucky in the UK with our immigrants (at least since the Saxons!) doesn not mean that we can extract a general principle of ‘goodness’ from mass immigration.
119. Well yes, but… There is a plausible if highly controversial connection between foreignness and crime. Some 10,000 of our prisoners, out of a total population of 70,000, are foreign nationals(I think - I haven’t Googled these stats). This 13% figure is disproportionate to the number of foreigners in the country.
From this, we can conclude one of two things. Either British police and courts are racist, or the sort of people who move swiftly between countries (often illegally) are perhaps more likely to break the law than those who are born here and stay here. The majority of immigrants are of course perfectly law-abiding! - but is it entirely impossible that, with our lax migration laws, we are letting in a criminal element, too?
I agree that these concepts and stats should be handled very carefully. But this is pb.com, not The Sun, and I don’t think anyone here is going to rush out and burn a cross because of comments made. Moreover the questions that arise from these stats can’t be ignored, either.
It’s notable that the government is itself worried about foreign criminality, with regard to Mafia-like criminal immigrants from the new EU accession countries Bulgaria and Romania.
Tyson
Like all religions Islam has faith groups that disagree. Shias and Sunnis are often in the news but there are many more: the Aga Khan, for example, leads a group that has very ‘modernist’ tendencies.
Sadly, the fundamentalists seem to be in the ascent at the moment in Islam. They always have been in Saudi Arabia where the Wahabis are dominant. The Iranian revolution against the Shah led to the rise of an extremist element there and they now have a President that belongs to a sect that is awaiting the coming of the new teacher and the end of the world.
Afghanistan has always had a fairly militarist and fundamental form of Islam.
The modern demand for certainties that can also be seen in Christianity too, has made fundamentalism attractive. This trend has been energised by the middle east instability and the repressive nature of the more secular regimes in some states, most notably Syria and indonesia.
The fundamentalists of all religions take the instructions in their holy book as ‘gospel’ and for muslims this means Sharia law that does require execution for apostasy, removal of limbs, stoning of homosexuals and so on. And in this it does follow the Old Testament in most respects.
The peninsular arab tradition in regard women is increasingly taken as the Koranic model. But it seems more cultural than Koranic.
I believe that most Jordanians, Egyptians, Tunisians, Eritreans, Malaysians and Libyans and Syrians ( as well as many Iraqis) would regard the full sharia of the fundamentalists with horror, but they all have to live with the fundamentalists and their politician’s appeasement of them and use of them for leverage has increased their power, as it does with all determined bullies.
21- point taken . There have obviously been examples of population movement and migration that have been catastrophic for individual countries.
I think that globalisation represents a new and exciting phase for mass migration. People are moving primarily for economic reasons, in much larger numbers, often transitory and supported by better access to communications, cheaper transport, and technology.
I do not know where it will finally take us, but I do know that immigration policy is not working- nothing to do with the government which through a calculated policy of misinformation gets itself into deeper trouble by pretending that it can manage an impossible situation- but I feel it (migration) is a force for good.
It remains to be seen how long Cameron stays clear from immigration as a big issue though. It is so fertile because the immigration card plays so well in Tory heartlands, and is such an easy oppositional policy to play. They are really scratching around for ideas.
For that matter though where is Cameron?? Haven’t heard from him for ages. Maybe he is taking a hint that public exposure isn’t too great, or maybe he has joined the Mujhaddin??
124. Hug a Haddin.
Sorry.
110: You need to look at the data as a time series, if you analyse it is a single lump of data then the patterns don’t show up. Look at the following two imaginary series of numbers.
42,40,39,40,39,39,38,37,37,38,37,36,36,35,36,35,34,34,33,32,33,31
39,34,40,37,32,39,38,38,37,36,35,42,33,40,33,31,37,35,34,36,39,36
The numbers are identical. If you totted either of them up, you’d get:
42: 1 time
40: 2 times
39: 3 times
38: 2 times
37: 3 time
36: 3 times
35: 2 times
34: 2 time
33: 2 times
32: 1 time
31: 1 time
And you would presumably assume that they were just random variation around a constant. But if you look at the two sets of figures as time series, I think it’s pretty obvious that one represents a clear downwards trend while the other one is just random noise. It is about more than just the figures themselves, it is how they relate to each other.
Looking at the 2003-2005 polls (http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/03to05.jpg) there is a very obvious drop in Conservative support in Summer 2004 - before then their figures are distributed around the mid-30s, after that period they are distributed around the low-30s and high-20s. Prior to Summer 2004 their highest figures are regularly pushing 40 and their lowest in the low thirties (aside from around Brent East); after Summer 2004 even their highest figures don’t break 35, and their lowest figures are in the 20s. Sample error explains many of the changes from month to month, but prior to that point the figures were distributed around 35% or so, after that point they were distributed around 32% or so.
Look at the Lib Dem figures, there are two very high figures in August 2004 and October 2004, but all their other very high figures are clustered around September 2003 - the Brent by-election, suggesting that the two isolated points are rogue polls, but the September 2003 ones were geninely picking up a change in support.
124. Weirdly enough, I agree with you here Tyson. I too think immigration is generally a force for good, certainly it is unavoidable in the long run. Without migration this country wouldn’t be the vivid and dynamic place it is, of course.
I also agree that one of the central problems is the government’s ‘misinformation’ on immigration - either due to sheer ineptitude, or because they are hamstrung by political correctness, HMG has not told the British people the facts about migration, and the ramifications of their open-door policies.
I think they should. The British people might respond more maturely than they expect.
Where I part company with you is your idea that all immigration is good, and inevitably beneficial. This is ludicrous - but to be fair you seem to be tempering this extreme viewpoint.
And now I have successfully spent an entire day not working on my novel. Job done!
Mark Senior (and earlier, Dan) I don’t quite understand, are you saying that frequent and whimsical ebb and flow of support for every paty actually *doesn’t* happen, or that the polls don’t tell us this story? Or is it just that you don’t think it is useful to look at the ebb and flow? But if so, what would you look at - averages seems a rather arbitrary measure to me.
128 Anatole, the only thing sensible to look at is ’sustainable momentum’. Electoral clcle trends are relevent but not always paramount. Even then, people will argue over what is a flash in the pan and even a long sustained position can be undermined by one of those weeks which is a long time in politics. Averages, especially in a nation of non-homogenous constituencies (in terms of voting patterns in socio-d