The Indy adopts Sir Humphrey's polling tactics
One of the funniest scenes in the Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister series was when Whitehall Mandarin Sir Humphrey demonstrates to Bernard, the minister's private secretary, how to make opinion polls give the result you want.
First he asks Bernard a series of questions to which most people would reply in the affirmative and which lead as a logical conclusion to support for the reintroduction of National Service. Then Sir Humphrey asks a contrasting series of questions, again to which most people would give positive replies, but this time logically leading towards the rejection of the same policy.
At the end of the first series of questions, Sir Humphrey asks Bernard "Would you support the re-introduction of compulsory National Service" and gets the reply "Yes."
At the end of the second series of questions he asks "Would you oppose the re-introduction of compulsory National Service" and a visibly astonished Bernard finds himself replying "Yes."
(A superb bit of scriptwriting and magnificent acting, BTW.)
Both Political Betting and Anthony Wells make justified criticisms this morning of the opinion poll question the Independent commissioned from ComRes and used to justify the front page subheading "Vote of No Confidence in Tory Economic Policies."
This conclusion seems to have been based on the reply to a question about whether respondents agreed that “Mr Cameron should be clearer over what he would do about the economy”
As Anthony Wells put it,
'The Indy have put this as a subheading on their front page, but frankly it’s a fairly pointless question. A good sign of a decent question is whether anyone can really agree with the opposite – and how many normal people would say “I think David Cameron should be much vaguer and less clear about his plans for the economy”?'
And as Mike Smithson says
'To anybody but the Indy’s headline writer “Being clearer” is a million miles away from “Vote of No Confidence.”'
Quite.
First he asks Bernard a series of questions to which most people would reply in the affirmative and which lead as a logical conclusion to support for the reintroduction of National Service. Then Sir Humphrey asks a contrasting series of questions, again to which most people would give positive replies, but this time logically leading towards the rejection of the same policy.
At the end of the first series of questions, Sir Humphrey asks Bernard "Would you support the re-introduction of compulsory National Service" and gets the reply "Yes."
At the end of the second series of questions he asks "Would you oppose the re-introduction of compulsory National Service" and a visibly astonished Bernard finds himself replying "Yes."
(A superb bit of scriptwriting and magnificent acting, BTW.)
Both Political Betting and Anthony Wells make justified criticisms this morning of the opinion poll question the Independent commissioned from ComRes and used to justify the front page subheading "Vote of No Confidence in Tory Economic Policies."
This conclusion seems to have been based on the reply to a question about whether respondents agreed that “Mr Cameron should be clearer over what he would do about the economy”
As Anthony Wells put it,
'The Indy have put this as a subheading on their front page, but frankly it’s a fairly pointless question. A good sign of a decent question is whether anyone can really agree with the opposite – and how many normal people would say “I think David Cameron should be much vaguer and less clear about his plans for the economy”?'
And as Mike Smithson says
'To anybody but the Indy’s headline writer “Being clearer” is a million miles away from “Vote of No Confidence.”'
Quite.
Comments
On the subject of opinion polls the Independent should be ashamed of itself, it can hardly call itself a "quality" news paper, publishing blatant bias like this. It has clearly printed what it perceives to be right rather than reflecting reality.
'Yes Minister' got it right. It is how you phrase the question, but what deception, the questions were totally unrelated. Asking if DC should come clearer on the economy is not a vote of confidence in him. Polls asking whether the respondent prefers or trusts Brown or Cameron with economy have put DC well ahead.
What I do find infuriating is that Conservative economic policy is branded as cutting. Those mean old Tories. Perhaps a few demonstrations of Government waste to be cut would be in order. Perhaps an electronic bill board showing the budget deficit increasing by £6,000 a minute, in a few prominent places would do the trick.
Maybe people wouldn't be contemplating voting Labour, if there were any sort of convincing alternative.
A biased newspaper ? Who'd have thought it ? Don't tell Murdoch !
If you can see any flaw in the argument which Mike Smithson - who is a Lib/Dem, by the way, but one whose judgement I respect - and Anthony Wells deployed against the Independent article, please feel free to post it here.
As you can imagine it doesn't just stop at the odd selected biased article in favour of the Labour Party (unlike some of the contributors to this blog)