There are moments when I do wonder about those with whom I share the more proximate parts of our planet. The Times Red Box has reported this morning that:
According to a new YouGov poll for The Times, the proportion of people who think that Theresa May makes the best prime minister has gone up since last month.
Now, admittedly, it is only at 34 per cent, just ahead of Jeremy Corbyn and just behind Don't Know. Labour are narrowly ahead on voting intention on 43 per cent, up one point on October, with the Conservatives unchanged on 40 per cent and the Lib Dems drifting down to 6 per cent.
A third (31 per cent) of people think that May is doing well, while 55 per cent think that she is doing badly. For Corbyn its 44 per cent well, 39 per cent badly.
Maybe there are reasons why someone, somewhere can think Theresa May is doing well. I am quite sure she does not share that opinion. But for 34% of the country to think that suggests a staggering collective inability to appraise reality. Or massive ignorance. And I am not being rude: I am expressing concern and I am suggesting there are questions to ask.
Questions like, who informs this opinion?
And how can it be so wrong?
And how can it be corrected?
Democracy requires an informed electorate. It's not clear we have one and that is worrying.
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All good questions, Richard, but might I suggest one which would affect them?
‘What on earth makes you think that a YouGov poll published in a UK mainstream newspaper provides a solid basis for any consideration whatsoever?’
It also says….
“But how much more badly does May need to do before the country starts thinking that Corbyn would do a better job? Of those saying that they would vote Tory, one in five don’t think that they are governing particularly well or agree with what they are doing but prefer them in government to Corbyn’s Labour party. Among Labour voters, the largest group – 36 per cent – agree with the party but think that it would struggle to deliver its policies.”
and….
“Corbynistas can pat themselves on the back for their funny memes about May and their petitions about Johnson. But after the election disaster, Grenfell, the coughing fit, the collapsing set, Michael Fallon and his “falling short”, Priti Patel and Israel, Boris Johnson and Iran, Mark Garnier and sex toys, David Davis’ and the missing Brexit reports, rising inflation, interest rates and homelessness; if after all that, and much more besides, the best the Labour party can manage is neck and neck…”
The problem is (and always will be) that a Cobyn led government does not appeal to a sufficiently large enough group of people to be seen as a viable alternative to secure a majority in parliament. It wasn’t seen as one prior to the election, wasn’t see as one during the election despite May’s catastrophic campaign, still isn’t seen as one now despite the list of horrors above. If that list isn’t enough to tip the balance of public opinion, I struggle to see what will be.
I know that problem exists
But it does not alter the first point that may is doing badly quite independently of the second point
May is doing terribly, but surely any assessment of whether something is being done well or not is influenced by how highly you regard the alternative(s)?
The alternatives are at present within her own party, so Corbyn has no part in this
Next question?
The “who would be best prime minister” options in the survey are Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn or don’t know. I’m all for don’t know.
I’d suggest that the lack of support for Corbyn is the flip side of an ignorant , ill informed population and the major cause is a right wing media that long ago left facts behind.
“Of those saying that they would vote Tory, one in five don’t think that they are governing particularly well or agree with what they are doing”
This is quite remarkable if you think about it. 20% of Tory voters neither think the Tories are doing a good job nor support their aims. Yet they still propose to vote Tory, almost certainly because they believe the alternative of Corbyn would be worse.
Mike M,
First we are bludgeoned (or bored) to near death for 2 long years with the unsubstantiated, now discredited mantra about Corbyn being “unelectable”. Now that he has delivered the largest swing (increase in Labour vote share) since Clement Attlee we have you complaining that his current lead in the polls isn’t big enough.
There is something very British about that. If I could I would arrange for you a one-way ticket back to 2015 where I am sure you would be much more comfortable.
This claim is unchallenged
It was made on PM the other evening and no attempt was made to challenge it
An informed electorate? Well, it IS ‘informed’ but not by critically analysed information. The consuming public isn’t really that interested in day-to-day politics and picks up headline stories from the MSM – mostly the red tops and tv news, with all its systemic bias. ‘Identity politics’, ‘cognitive bias’, ‘motivated reasoning’, ‘popularist politics’, ‘polarised politics’ – these are phrases that increasingly describe how public opinion is (pre)determined. So I’m not at all surprised by the polls. It’ll take a lot more scandal to topple the incumbent incompetents, especially since Corbyn doesn’t attract the popular appeal of a Tony Blair or Bill Clinton. In hindsight one would add ‘thankfully’ but at the time of their election they appealed to a voting majority as agents of much needed change.
Corbyn doesn’t atttact the same public appeal as Blair/Clinton? Where have you been for the last 2 years?
@ Ann Courtney
I’m not a betting person but, if I was, I’ll bet you Corbyn will not win the 2020 election with an overall majority of 179 seats. That’s my pragmatic criterion for political popularity in our parliamentary democracy, without either endorsing the quality of the winners or the electoral system.
John D,
“Socialist achieves bigger swing than Tony Blair”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-election-result-vote-share-increased-1945-clement-attlee-a7781706.html
Where have you been for the last 5 months?
John D says:
November 10 2017 at 4:07 pm
“I’m not a betting person but, if I was, I’ll bet you Corbyn will not win the 2020 election with an overall majority of 179 seats….”
The result of the 2020 (if this crowd stagger on until then) will depend largely, as it usually does, on the current state of division and disintegration of the two main parties. If the Tories do themselves enough damage internally 179 Labour majority might be achievable. But there’s no telling if the Labour party can keep itself together either. The Corbyn dissidents are being pragmatically silent at present, but they are plentiful underlying tensions.
I just wish we could have a voting system that allowed electors to vote for what they want rather than not-vote for what it doesn’t fancy at the moment.
Who informs? Richard Desmond (Daily Express) Lord Rothermere and Paul Dacre (Daily Mail) , Barclay brothers (Daily Telegraph) and Rupert Murdoch (Sun ) and their minions should be high on the list.
13 million adults, with at least 12 yrs full time education, looked at the last 7 years and decided the best thing would be another 5 years of the same. MSM informed. We must teach critical thinking in schools.
Difficult to teach critical thinking in any form of ‘school’, by definition, surely?
Cf Socrates.
Teaching critical thinking has been squeezed out by overwhelming knowledge based academic curriculum. Wikipedia is the main source for referencing for students…. we used to teach critical thinking in media studies & IT – banning wikipedia for certain tasks; using fake websites among genuine for learning compare & review; comparing news stories in different media; etc but the new ICT curriculum focus is programming!
Programming is important
But programmed minds are not what we need
Indeed, Socrates – and look what happened! 🙂
Well, we all have to go some day
The big change is we now prefer the freedom to decide
One clarification, by “majority in parliament” I mean one which was suitably large (30 say, so an increase for Labour of approx. 90 seats from GE 2017) to implement Labour’s manifesto without all of the legislative headaches which the current government has.
Three aspects apply, both of which are subjective, but nevertheless I think constitute the reason.
1. The figure is contrived
2. The figure though wrong is not too far away from the truth because media brainwashing is so long-standing across the whole spectrum right down to subtleties of news delivery and reporting phraseology.
3. The neoliberal ‘left’ are so devoted to preserving the post-Keynsian disaster that right-wing ideology is normalised.
A very simple and recent example if number three can be seen from last night’s Question Time when Stella Creasy balked when Aditya Charabortty commented on DWP causing deaths by its unfair ideology-serving assessment system.
When the perception dial has been so fixed in one direction for so long, it just takes the compounding effect if such small instances to stop it moving.
The issue is serious but never gets a sustained debate. Hopefully you may have started one now that leads to conscious change. Faced with a dominant system fixed on and empowered to creating perception, I think the key issue is the same old chestnut connected to much else, which is how much the sum total standing under the progressive banner is progressive.
‘THREE aspects apply, BOTH of which are subjective’
I should apply for a media job
On Nitpicking Today?
Was my own error
No I meant on Altering Facts Blatantly
Brian Cartor’
If you’re going to nitpick…
“….neoliberal ‘left’ are….”
The neoliberal ‘left’ IS, please. 🙂 collective noun takes the singular.
A glib (but true) answer is that we know who informs this, but cannot say so now cos apparently it’s sexist.
The slightly longer answer is that it’s a combination of phenomena. Mostly it’s just the media returning to type after the shock of the election result. Partly it’s because both party leaders, for different reasons, have been less visible recently – something that will always tend to favour the really awful one. Partly it’s because the impetus for social-media rejoinders to corporate media distortion isn’t as strong as it was in the run up to the election and partly it is just pity (just talk to any elderly Tory voting relative if you’ve got any)
I’m surprised that the subject of social media has not come up, and its role in amplifying and reinforcing prejudices and creating echo chambers in which people only hear what they want to hear. It would be instructive to get an up to date analysis of where people are getting their ‘news’ from:
– MSM – newspapers, TV, and radio
– Social Media – Facebook, Twitter et al
– Mates at the pub – friends, family, workmates
For those who’ve not seen them, Jamie Bartlett’s documentaries on the evolving role of the social media companies and Silicon Valley are well worth a watch. No answers but some seriously worrying questions
Thanks and agreed
The only way to deal with the ‘social media echo chamber’ is to infiltrate it. In doing so you can begin to understand where the other person is ‘coming from’.
Most of the people who do this are easily spotted and labelled as ‘trolls’ because they have no manners and do not seek to understand the tribal prejudices of the group. Usually they become abusive.
People hold onto beliefs well beyond utility because they provide a sense of security and stability. ‘Strong and Stable’ is good. Even when its only an illusion it’s still reassuring. The notion that change is rarely for the better is hard wired into us from our very earliest years.
Deeply held beliefs are not easily altered by argument. Try arguing with a ‘person of faith’ of the religious variety. Logic doesn’t come in to it.
There is an exchange on here somewhere about the difficulty of teaching ‘thinking’. This is because we do not believe in education we believe in ‘teaching’. The assumption of teaching is that from all knowledge it is possible, by standing on the shoulders of giants, to make progress.
In reality it is necessity which is the mother of invention and creative thought often emerges from ignorance. |Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings….?
Get on Twitter then…
I far prefer the medium of Facebook.
I use Twitter only rarely.
Anecdotal evidence IS evidence.
Much more likely to be true than statistics.
Furthermore for people who like precision in numbers:
Anecdotal evidence is generally reckoned to be twelve times more reliable; hence the practice of having a jury composed of twelve jurors but only one judge (the superannuated twat in the wig) whose function is to uphold the law and ensure that justice is denied for the ‘good of society’.
I was into Yougov at the very early stages as an interesting site which was then relatively reliable, note the relatively. But I have been off it for a little while now because it was my view that some agencies had taken it up and what was going on was no longer statistically sound. Pity, but it’s what happens these days.
It’s a very significant point.
A common theme noticed among left YouGov subscribers is that once YouGov are informed of one’s left/progressive opinions they only subsequently consult about television viewing and fast food preferences.
Evidence?
It’s anecdotal rather than evidence, but that’s been my personal experience of YouGov so I stopped bothering. Would certainly like to see more evidence, given how often they are quoted
Now that is interesting…
There seems indeed not a widespread belief but at least a significantly notable opinion that YouGov use selection.
After an in-depth political survey about two years ago I have not had another, can since only recall a single political question tagged on to a consumer question last year. I probably do 3/4 surveys a month.
I notice that a HSBC global marketing bigwig joins YouGov next month.
Not sure what that means, if anything, but it seems to me in any debate about perception and information control it typifies the many areas due our consideration if we want the collective awareness to evolve.
I too have noticed a distinct lack of invitations to participate in political surveys. I’ve been on the YouGov panel for years and have always identified as a Labour voter, and a lefty as well.
I too often wonder, when I hear the results of YouGov polls in the news, why I wasn’t invited to participate. I also get a lot of generalised surveys about finances, coffee shops and my TV watching habits. It has never occurred to me that this might have some devious causes, but now I just have another worry to fuel my paranoia!
Anecdotal of course, but impossible to verify.
Richard Murphy says:
November 10 2017 at 2:12 pm
Evidence?
Anecdotal evidence IS evidence.
Much more likely to be true than statistics.
Somebody must be listening in – got a YouGov survey today – all political!
As to anecdotes being evidence? That’s precisely the world of social media and echo chambers. In research, anecdotes provide colour and clues but I’d want some data for conclusions to be substantive. Or a lot of anecdotes
I’d want to see the total sample; I’d want to know how the respondents were picked; the geographical area, age ranges. I learnt long ago not to take this sort of stuff at face value because it is the detail in the sample where critical thinking can have a field day interpreting it properly and putting it in its place.
Brian might be right. Lying is known to work – look at BREXIT. Propaganda still works. The bigger the lie, the more some want to believe it.
For my MBA (Maybe Best Avoided) I studied the area of knowledge management (KM for short).
In KM, one of the biggest problems is how to deal with ignorance: – ‘a lack of knowledge or information’.
I think that this is the wrong question. It is not that these days we suffer from a lack of any of these two utilities (knowledge and information). It is surely that we have way too much of them now. I read somewhere recently that even though more communication takes place in our lives than ever before, much of it lacks substance or is actually communication. It is selling: not communication (which is a two way process).
Maybe it is the marketization of information that is the problem? We are good at seeking out deals on air tickets, purchases, cheaper insurance, cheaper utilities, cheaper goods. This is because these things are constantly launched at us.
We think that we grow closer to celebrities and their lives by reading and taking part in their feeds on the internet; we think that we increase our social circle by posting our lives on line.
There is so much coming at us that feeds our more selfish, childish and narrow minded tendencies than our intellectual and more human-collective ones. We are awash with smaller things that inundate those that really matter. The internet is THE Soma for the mass perhaps?
I often wonder what would happen if the WWW just went down for a day or a week (the late comic Robin Williams though that many of us would sit there with our thumbs twitching uncontrollably).
All we can do for now is to try to use the same channels that everyone else uses to turn things around – we have to play the same game. It seems that Labour got this message at the last election and this helped to confound the naysayers.
I know that here the ‘clicktocracy’ is frowned upon but we may well have to face using it too.
A ray of hope is that although I come here to find a lifebuoy to cling to amidst a sea of neo-lib orthodox trash, I am increasingly talking to people face to face who have simply had enough with things as they are and who are getting more and more aware of what is going on.
So the number of pitch fork carriers is growing?
Well, I wouldn’t say pitchforks – I’d say that more like the forks you get in those little tubs of ice cream!!
But it’s a start.
Most of the people I talk to are just nice people who want change but do not know how to get it peacefully. Or even know how to start. They just hope that it will come somehow.
If I might build on your points Pilgrim:
I started work in the IT industry and have also worked on knowledge management where we worked out quite a while back that ‘knowledge about knowledge’ (epistemology perhaps) was critically important. The ability to critique what you are finding and judge its provenance and credibility.
However, that’s a rare skill and I’m not sure where it’s taught.
In Econocracy, the book by the Post-Crash Economics team, they highlight how economics is taught today, with little or no critical thinking. I did an Engineering degree with not a lot of scope for critical thinking and then decades later a social sciences Masters which was all about critical thinking, from different perspectives; it really crystallised the point for me.
Yannis Varoufakis makes interesting points in his current book and talks about how he sees many parallels with with today’s world in the Matrix film. People can create – or even have created for them – a world on social media which perfectly reflects how they would like the world to be. That’s a comfortable place to be so why would they look like elsewhere? But who is creating that world for them? And with what agenda?
Robin
You do not need to ask in order to build on my points (such as they are). Just go for it mate. There is only so much I can do on my lunch break!!
Just trying to be polite Pilgrim! In keeping with what I think are Richard’s blog standards
Still think we are focusing too much on the traditional media, Love em or loathe em. All the political parties are now at least as interested in social media and some of that is turning out to be malign, as in the Trump/Russia/Brexit nexus. We are all way behind the curve in working out how to handle this.
I’ve always been amazed that people will vote for parties, or issues (Brexit) that will actually do them harm. I remember saying to a colleague after Mrs T won her first election, that I hoped people knew what they were voting for, as she made no secret of what she was going to do.
Is the electorate well informed or are they just stupid? So do we simply blame a lazy electorate who can’t be bothered to look behind the rhetoric and the partisan media headlines? I don’t know. But I don’t think we’ll find out just by rehearsing our favourite theories without any evidential basis.
According to Britpolitics,(for 16-18 year olds) there isn’t much research on why people vote the way they do, but there are 3 theories: 1 Class, aka social background – now in the descendant; 2 Rational Choice Theory – in the political supermarket I’ll choose the party that gives me ISA’s and cut price State Assets; 3 RCT now superseded by “Valence Issues” – who’ll be the best PM, who’ll run the economy best, who’ll save the NHS.
http://www.britpolitics.co.uk/a-level-uk-elections-how-vote-democracy
Conclusion: more research needed.
I’m not sure any of is ‘sufficiently informed’.
While much of the information required to make an informed choice is not in the public domain, there is plenty of information that it is available – either published or available by FOI.
But it is simply so vast to be impossible for any individual to adequately absorb or analyse beyond a superficial level.
I think the responses to these surveys (and voting) is about looking at the alternative. Mrs May might not be the greatest PM ever, but I’d much prefer her to Corbyn.
But you are fundamentally misunderstanding the question then
Which is not encouraging
What is the question I am misunderstanding?
As it stands, there is realistically only 2 choices for PM – May or Corbyn.
An individual respondent to a survey or voter can choose ‘none of the above’ (or can choose not to vote). But as a country collectively, there must be a PM – there is no option for the position to be vacant.
If the choice is between the two of them, it is not surprising that some prefer May. I’m one of them.
And as with every other voter (and I can’t think of anyone who is an exception), I am not sufficiently informed about this.
May can be replaced within the Tory party
Is that so hard to work out?
The YouGov survey you quoted didn’t appear to give the option to say whether you preferred a different Tory leader. It suggests May, Corbyn or Don’t Know.
Were there any other options?
In light of that kind of survey, it isn’t surprising Mrs May got a reasonable percentage.
But they could have chosen don’t know in that case
It is surely possible to express a preference for A over B when given that choice, even if you actually prefer a third option C which is not offered in the survey.
In any case, I am not sure what that has to do with my point (and the point of this post as I understand it) – that nobody really is sufficiently informed, and not even remotely so. The amount of information is just too vast and too hidden.
I’m wary of anyone who claims they are, and assume you are as well.
I think we fundamentally agree with each other on this.
Choosing “Don’t know” would suggest you can’t decide between May and Corbyn, rather than that you think someone else in either party would be better. If they had a “Neither” option, that would suggest you’d prefer someone else, which I suspect is why they don’t give you that option – they want to force you to choose between the two main party leaders.
At any rate, as someone who’s answered that question with YouGov on several occasions, that’s how I’ve always interpreted it. I’m not a particular fan of Corbyn, but right now I’d pick him over May, given that he could hardly be worse!
I’d agree with the need to pose all of those questions.
People don’t really consume that much news. Their daily lives are much more interesting, and unless and until those lives take a noticeable nosedive, they’ll continue to believe things are hunk dory.
Neither politics nor civics nor indeed critical thinking are taught in our schools. Given how top-down and driven or education system currently is, that may be a small mercy. In truth, we need a complete sea change in how we prepare people for life, and that most certainly should include the above topics, discovered in a collegiate way as adolescents begin to reach adulthood. See what Finland is doing.
Following from that, though, we also need a media system which delivers news in a balanced way, rather than seeking sensationalist output to increase its viewing figures. Any advantages gained by refreshing our educational system would be frittered away if we didn’t also ensure the media was more responsive to the needs of democratic engagement.
And of course, if that new-found ability to engage with and dissect the real news was not also matched by changes in our political and economic systems, they would be for nothing. At the very least, PR and the replacement of the House of Lords with a democratic structure would be necessary, along with Right of Recall and a much more devolved and responsive system of governance, in the political sphere. And in the economics world, the very minimum requirement would be the bringing of the production of money into democratic control along with a move to more democratically organised enterprises.
Until this enormous work is complete, I’m afraid we must put up with the most rubbish form of democracy I can imagine.
I do think the media is a major part of the problem.
Take the recent Priti Patel scandal, for instance. I was truly shocked to see most commentators focusing on the flightpath of her aeroplane rather than exploring the potential consequences of her very serious actions, and much more importantly the potentially very scary consequences of having a prime minister that appeared not to know (or did she?) that Priti Patel had attended at least one meeting in the Golan Heights (!). No analysis of the PMs insufficient response either. Nor of why that matters.
Yesterday (?) Ian Duncan Smith made a seriously embarrassing and provocative comment about the length of time coalition negotiations are taking in Germany and elsewhere, suggesting that this reflected disorganisation rather than being the (highly sensible) norm when (a) forming coalitions and (b) thrashing out government programmes. No discussion of how this ignorant baiting by a member of the UK government might be received by EU member states at a critical moment in our relationship. Nor of the fact that we might expect our representatives to be far better informed!
These two examples are important because if the fourth estate was performing its role, essential in a well-functioning democracy, then the obvious questions about what we can do to prevent cabinet members from going rogue, about how we can improve the knowledge and behaviour of our MPs as well as our systems would have been asked. The fact that they are not is contributing to the erosion of democracy. And that road leads nowhere good…
OK they are neck & neck. But to win the next election, all Corbyn has to do is stay neck & neck until the election is called. At the moment, we’re on Mays track – parliament, scripted replies, baying mob of clones, staged interviews. Once the election is called, we’re on Corbyn’s track -campaigning, talking to crowds, being Monsieur Zen. The Tories will change their runner if they can – though that might not be in their power – but I don’t see anyone with form lacing up their spikes at the moment.
Well, from afar I would go for Corbyn, but it’s a low bar isn’t it?
Ed
You are right to say that people are entitled to their ignorance.
But there is nothing ignorant about the use that their ignorance is being put to.
And that is the problem with ignorance. How it is used by vested interests.
Savvy?
I don’t think this should be a surprise, but democracy doesn’t require that everyone agrees with you. We are fortunate in being able to make arguments and disagree with them without fear of a bullet in the back of the head, or even censure. That some people think May is doing a good job is their perogative. Get over it.
Alistair Harris,
May doesn’t bother me. It’s the headbangers behind her that bother me. The sort of people who were pulling Margaret Thatcher’s strings for her.
Same applies to Donald Trump. He runs nothing except his twitter account.
Very good questions.
Our world is now shallow, visual and dominated by sound bites.
The news that is reported is subjected in two ways; what is deemed newsworthy and spin.
A simple example today: look at all the stats released today
ONS
1) manufacturing a very good quarter
2) trade deficit: September was better than expected but the quarter was actual still worse than the previous
3) constructionis in recession
BDO
retail sales tracker for October -5.2% on the year
NIESR
estimated for growth for 3mths to end October is up to 0.5%
Which ones of these will be prominent on the news channels tonight. Especially what will be the business headlines?
How will the trade deficit be spun? Ie which one of the two stats will they pick?
I am so pleased to have found your site as it is so important to find critical thinkers otherwise the brain just turns to mush.
Thanks for the last
I have just read your Courageous State Richard and very interesting. I think I’ve found one, China. Xi Jinping has said that the collective is more important than individual freedoms and if you don’t like it, lump it. China works hard to correct minds as you have suggested. Perhaps you should take a visit, would be useful research for a new book where you can show socialism plus capitalism with Chinese characteristics really makes the state strong for almost everyone that goes about their daily lives without making trouble.
You have clearly not read me correctly
I place an emphasis on democracy
And I smell trolling
Trolling or no, Richard a visit to China might be very instructive. Carry your bags, sir?
I am willing to go…
But I have never found the reason for bag carriers
What worries me about these sort of opinion poll results is that the labour party will seek to move their agenda to the right so as not to frighten the horses and to pick up that wavering middle class vote.
What is needed is to loudly proclaim a left wing agenda and sell it to the people who are going to keep on getting shafted as they were under Blair and Brown.
I’d actually like to see published opinion polls banned completely. Obviously you couldn’t prevent parties polling for their own information, but publishing the results skews public opinion. It shouldn’t be allowed.
The main parties are only concerned with the votes and opinions of the ‘JAMS’ and the ‘Squeezed Middle’ There is no consideration given for the HOBSkOTTs (Hanging on by the skin of their teeth)
Opinion polls encourage politicians to lie or at the very least dissemble to gain favour with the electorate: they will say absolutely anything to get better opinion poll results. it’s a nonsense. The result is that come election time nobody has the faintest idea what they are voting for except the face they like the look of.
PAH !
If you were being cynical you would have to admit Theresa May is doing brilliantly to still be in No10.
The General election result told her to resign, most of her own party hates her apparently, she has nothing to say and no policies, but she hangs on in there.
And they say she has no political nous? What sustains her?
if Labour want to “loudly proclaim a left wing agenda and sell it to the people” how can they do that when the media is all owned by the right wing, where LVT is misrepresented as a Garden Tax, for instance? They have no way of communicating their true intentions to the voters.
Perhaps they should employ some talent?
Trouble is they wouldn’t recognise talent if it was jumping on their heads.
Bill – at the risk of sounding like a scratched record, as I understand it the Labour party (and LibDems) have been making extensive use of social media to tackle just that problem, and it was a factor to some degree in Corbyn’s massive improvement last time. Not much chance of changing the Mail/Express/Torygraph/Sun but there are ways to go round them.
@Andy “What worries me about these sort of opinion poll results is that the labour party will seek to move their agenda to the right so as not to frighten the horses and to pick up that wavering middle class vote.” I guess you haven’t been to any event with John McDonnell speaking. I was at one on Saturday. Your fears are groundless.
I hope you’re right, Carol.
Three points:
Check the wording of the poll; she’s certainly the best of the choices offered.
She really *is* the best choice on offer, within the Conservative Party. That’s quite alarming: I expect them to be generally unpleasant, often stupid and occasionally incompetent , but not universally and exclusively so.
Going by media presentation – a word I have chosen with some care – of the Corbyn alternative, it is entirely reasonable for a mainstream voter to regard May as the best on offer. It requires a determined rejection of all that one reads and hears and sees, and overhears in all social conversations that veer to politics, to consider otherwise.
Very, very few people are so skeptical, cantankerous, and privileged with easy access to alternative sources of information and opinion: people go along with whatever flow they are immersed in.
Those points being made, it is incomprehensible to me that anyone can think that she is doing a good job. All that I can offer is that there are definitions of ‘a good job’ among people with a distinctly ‘UKIP’ agenda, or worse, and I can only hope that they are a minority of the voting population.
“….. I can only hope that they are a minority of the voting population.”
The triumph of hope over expectation?
I would like to stick up for the judgement of the electorate – trying to be a glass half full type of person 🙂 The following taken from Marina Hyde’s article in the Guardian:
“In one sense, then, no one can really be surprised by the results of a Times-YouGov poll that asked voters who should replace Theresa May as leader. Even so, there is something rather mesmeric about it. Don’t Know is on 37%. None of Those Named is on 27%, with both distantly trailed by Boris Johnson at 10% and Jacob Rees-Mogg on 8%”
I think this in part explains May’s unreasonably positive approval ratings. None of the obvious contenders in the tory part are any better – and most are quite a bit worse! The choices offered were:
Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg, David Davis, Amber Rudd, Philip Hammond, Michael Gove, Sajid Javid, Liam Fox, Andrea Leadsom, Justine Greening, Damian Green.
But things do change: MMT was in the Independent this week!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/actually-the-magic-money-tree-does-exist-according-to-modern-monetary-theory-a8021501.html
Good!
In the 1990’s I remember working for a polling and market research firm.
Distant as those memories may be I feel secure in saying that the 31 per cent of people who think that Teresa May is “doing well” are mostly just Tory loyalists being loyal. They don’t always think about the specifics of the question.
I suspect that is true