Grey Power To Decide?

Iain Duncan Smith is now gone. Michael Howard has been anointed.

Will it make a difference? Not enough.

My best guess still is that the election will be held on 5 May 2005, and Labour will win by another, their third, landslide. According to Blair's declining satisfaction ratings, the public's dissatisfaction with the Labour Government, their lack of confidence that 'things will only get better' or that public services will improve, the outcome of the next electoral contest should be in doubt.

Michael Howard will add a few points to the Tory share. The Conservatives have been 'flatlining' a 30% plus or minus five points since September 1992. They need to be above 40% to get to a hung party, and perhaps 45% to form the next government. A mighty mountain to climb. To get anywhere near, Michael Howard must broaden the party's appeal, adding weight from the one-nation Tory wing of his party to the Shadow Cabinet, and working on his party's image as 'remote', 'out of touch' and 'uncaring'.

Grey Power

Both parties are now busy cuddling up to the old folks. Most recently that canny Leader of Kent County Council, Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, has announced KCC are going to cap council tax for pensioners at the level of the cost of living. Smart politics.

For years I've been saying that 'Grey Power' is four times the voting weight of the youth vote, so beloved of Peter Mandelson, because there are twice as many of them, and they are twice as likely to vote.

In the run-up to the 2001 election, those 55 and over were twice as many as those under 25; as the table below shows. Now, those under 25 are just 12% of the electorate, while those 55 and over are 35%, nearly three to one. And of those who say they are 'certain' to vote, 53% of the electorate, the ratio isn't just four to one, it is nearly nine to one, 44% to 5%, of those most likely to vote in May 2005.

In 1983, when Mrs Thatcher won her 143 seat majority in the Commons, all ages were on the Conservative side of the ledger. Even among those under 25 at the time, the Tories had a 9 point lead, while those 55 and over gave her party a 20 point lead, thus an 'age (voting) gap' of 11%.

In the period of Conservative unpopularity following John Major's surprise victory over Neil Kinnock in 1992, when the labour lead was 18%, there was only an 8 point age gap. Now it is wider than it's ever been, a massive 34%, with young people giving Labour a 34 point lead over the Tories, while those over 55 give the Tories a narrow 2% margin.

Gray Power

Base: c. 2,000

Voodoo Polls

Recently an old friend posted a critique of a poll published in Newsweek, which although carried out to a high standard as one would expect from the Princeton Research people, was reported in a shockingly sloppy way by a journalist who clearly didn't know the first thing about the understanding and reporting of public opinion.

The friend who posted the critique, Marty Plissner, formerly the executive political director of CBS-TV News, wrote that the September 29 issue of Newsweek carried a report of a poll by-lined by Laura Fording that "Clark may have only entered the race on Thursday, but he is already the Democratic front-runner. In a survey of 377 (sic) Democrats and Democratic leaners, he is said to be supported by 14% --'outpacing' Howard Dean and Joe Lieberman (12% each), John Kerry (10%) and Dick Gebhardt (8%)."

Anyone with a modicum of understanding of the limitations of opinion poll sampling knows at least that a sample of (say) 1,000 has a statistical reliability of plus or minus three percent, so that at its most basic level, all five candidates are within plus or minus three percent of the midpoint of the group, 11%. Clark, the 'frontrunner' with 14%, three points over, and Gebhardt, lagging, with 8%, three points under. And that would be with 1,000 interviewed, without any consideration of non-sampling errors.

But this was a well conducted poll, even if the sample size is much more thin than we would condone in this country. The Guardian's Duncan Campbell, reporting from Los Angeles (October 25) reported American's view of 'afterlife' reporting answers to such questions as found that 76% believed in heaven, and 30% seeing it as 'an actual place of rest and reward', based on a 'survey' of 'around 100 people' carried out by the Barna Research Group in Oxnard, southern California (their web site indicates that they provide 'marketing research services relating to American cultural trends and the Christian church').

I recall in the general election of 1979, my client then, Derek Jameson, published a 'poll' of 500 blacks conducted by Sultan Mamood and his team of immigrant researchers over half of whom were under 35, asking such questions as 'Do you intend to live in Britain forever?'. When I tackled Derek about this nonsense, he response was 'Makes a good story, don't it? Besides, it only cost me 500 quid.' With such editorial irresponsibility, what hope is there for any quality standards in polling?

And I used to fight with LBC who ran phone(y) polls asking various questions; one participant is one of the LBC phoney polls wrote to the London Evening Standard saying how glad his side 'won', as he'd voted 157 times himself.

Now everybody is doing it, the New Statesman, never reporting how few people participate, the BBC, whose own guidelines warn against it, most of the tabloids and even some of the broadsheets, not to mention Sky's daily feeble effort. Recently the Kent Messenger, Britain's leading weekly newspaper, reported that 'of the 317 people who have voted so far, 256 (80.8%) opposed... Not 80%, 80.8%! Mathematically correct, statistical garbage. Any poll carried out to a decimal point suggest spurious accuracy.

What's one to do? Polls are being dumbed down daily, and no matter how hard I try, the polls' equivalent of Gresham's Law seems destined to drive out quality, to the detriment of the proper use of polls to illuminate debate, control demagoguery, and inform people what others are thinking, systematically, objectively, and responsibly.

This article was prepared for the November issue of Parliamentary Monitor magazine

Sir Robert Worcester is the Founder of MORI