Yesterday the Manchester Evening News splashed on the results of a leaked opinion poll claiming to show that local residents in Manchester would vote in favour of the congestion charge. I’m sure I’m not the only one smelling a large rat at the moment, for a whole host of reasons:
- How full is the data leaked to the MEN? David Ottewell who wrote the story has admitted that he did not at the time of writing have the full dataset. Most political hacks will be familiar with the Yes Minister opinion poll sketch, and I’d want to see the full data before drawing any conclusions on the results. If the “yes/no” question was preceded by a barrage of questions and information about the TIF bid then it is entirely worthless.
- Why has this data been leaked to a newspaper? This is a taxpayer-funded survey, which to the layman observer has been selectively leaked in order to obtain positive press coverage. Given the information available it would be very difficult for David Ottewell and his colleagues to sit on it - but that doesn’t mean that his “source” wasn’t playing games.
- Local polls are notoriously unreliable. The national opinion polls we see in the newspapers are the product of years of refining. Sampling of regional and local areas is a much less refined art - have a look at some by-election polls to see how far out they can be. Pollsters had Labour retaining Glasgow East comfortably and they severely underestimated the scale of the Conservative victory in Crewe & Nantwich.
- The local sampling of Ipsos/MORI is even worse. They had predicted that Ken Livingstone would comfortably retain the London Mayoralty.
- Where is the turnout filter? In a local referendum, only votes in the ballot box count. Do these figures take account of propensity to vote? I suspect not. All we can extract from the figures provided is that people are more likely to be strongly against than strongly for - which suggests that “no” voters are more likely to turn out in a poll.
Perhaps the most interesting question though is “why is this poll happening at all?”. We are having a full poll of all local residents before Christmas. Professional opinion polling is an expensive business, so why is taxpayers’ money being spent on an opinion poll - as distinct from consultation - when we are going to have a proper poll anyway…?
Another Month To Conference
Although I’ve attended numerous Spring Forum events (especially when they were in Harrogate and I was at University in York) I’ve never actually managed to make it to Party Conference before, so I’m looking forward to heading to Birmingham at the end of September. I’ve started to get information through about fringe events and receptions so any suggestions or advice for events will be greatly appreciated.
As I think I’ve commented before, I’m a big fan of some of the work done to improve the centre of Birmingham, and especially the Gas Street Basin area from the Convention Centre and Symphony Hall (where the Conference will be held) around to the Mailbox. It’s hard not to be reminded of the work going on at Salford Quays - I can’t wait to see the finished developments at MediaCity:UK which will be even better and on a much bigger scale.