Not that you’d know it from reading any UK newspaper headline of late, but the polls that pop media has used to undermine UK Labour’s election prospects have a couple of glaring glitches.
As Zoe Williams reported in yesterday’s Guardian, none of the predictions flowing from any poll used in the UK incorporates the 4 million new registrations from this year. As she points out, most of those new registrations are from ‘young’ people who are far more likely to vote Labour.
That leaves four million, (registrations in 2019) the majority of whom are young. Even while various pollsters are happy to predict that they will break 2:1 Labour (which is actually quite a cautious estimate: if they’re young, they turn out and they vote tactically, the Labour share could be higher), they have so far been unwilling to build these voters into their predictions.
By my reckoning that’s about 10% of the total number of people who are eligible to vote that have been ‘blanked’ by polling companies.
Further to that, it would appear to be the case that most polls are conducted using ‘online panels‘. I’ll leave it to others to tease out the inherent shortfalls of relying solely on that polling method.
Then there’s the small detail that Northern Ireland is omitted by all of the polling companies bar one (Survation). 18 seats are contested in Northern Ireland and without the DUP, the Tory Party could not have formed the UK government last time around.
Given all of the above, I’m almost left scratching my head as to why publication after publication has been been making robust predictions of a Tory victory and a Labour loss based on polling. And here’s the rub. I’m persuaded the predictions are driven by ideology and the polls merely offer cover for that fact.
As Jonathan Cook has written, from an elite’s perspective, Brexit is all about whether to tighten the economic ties with a fading austerity riddled Europe, or to opt into the even less fettered capitalism of the USA. And pop media is in ideological lock step with society’s elites.
As such, the last thing they’d advocate for is a Corbyn led government that might end the days of self enrichment that billionaires like Sir Richard Branson and Sir Alan Sugar have enjoyed at the expense of society by giving British people the chance to vote for a Brexit that frees the British government from the tethers of European economic liberalism/austerity while staying socially/culturally in tune with the rest of Europe.
That’s not on. That prospect must be kept off the table. So vote Lib Dem and put a spanner in the works.
It’s true that some elites will not be happy breaking with Europe, but they’d rather salvage some opportunity to carry on with their ways by being aligned to the USA than see Corbyn ruin their ‘god given’ right to rip shit and bust at everyone elses expense.
So in conclusion (and on the basis election commentary simply isn’t aligned with reality)
Tomorrow Corbyn. Next year Sanders. And if that transpires and you think pop media has been complete arse during these days of Trump, then trust me, you haven’t seen anything yet.
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