It’s time opinion pollsters courted the silent majority

Politicians should ignore people who vent spleen on Have Your Say forums: people who actually vote talk to their friends – not the internet

FIRST POSTED FEBRUARY 17, 2009

Two public opinion polls published on Sunday show the gap widening between the Conservatives and Labour. On the basis of these, it looks as if Gordon Brown will be forced to wait until the last moment before calling a general election in spring 2010, which he will just as certainly lose.

The polls are probably right: but do they any longer reflect real, private views in a culture gone public-opinion mad? Contemporary Britain is full of people being encouraged to Twitter, have their say, join in instant website votes, phone radio chat-shows, send a text to the news team, join a forum, give their views to opinion pollsters and attend focus groups.

Many MPs, for example, are very keen on Radio 2's Jeremy Vine Show. Hearing the way democratically deaf phone-in folk shout during Vine's lunchtime slot, one begins to understand why the radio term 'listeners' is rapidly dying out.

Most forums show the contributors to be illiterate and bigoted

Nevertheless, the show is seen by those who control us as an important recorder of the 'Voice of the People'. When politicians ran out of ideas some time during 1989, they turned readily to what might be another source of them: focus groups.

Hocus-pocus groups have more or less guided (even decided) the 'content' of government policy for nearly two decades now. The fact that such 'policy' has been going round in headless circles ought to be a clue for anyone paying attention; but our leaders have never quite grasped that conducting such research is about interpreting feedback and then deciding whether it's worth anything.

People who phone in to radio stations, attend focus sessions, stop to answer questions in the street, join forums and generally shout at the media are not the voice of anything: they are the sound of egos in various stages of inflation. Every newspaper has a 'forum' now.

The contents fill billions of pixels of website terrain - arguing, swearing gratuitously, and insulting other writers. If you subscribe to any news or current affairs website - or other parts of the 'blogosphere' - then you will know that Have Your Say is omnipresent.

Much of it shows the contributors to be illiterate, dense, paranoid, bigoted or blinkered. But tabloid hacks read it and write about it. So when the political elite take the tabloid temperature, they feel 'in touch' with the public mood.

They aren't: the media pack, the telly, the newspapers, the half-baked focus group psychologists, the phoner/blogger/letter-scribbler tendency and the soi-disant opinion leaders

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Mr. Ward: Please get your facts. Mr. Obama was the son of a native African and a white American, neither of which had slave forebears.

Posted by Neal Harrell at 9:09am on February 17, 2009

Quote: '... a lot of the younger end display frightening levels of disrespect for the whole political process.' I see that as positive, not frightening. For the young to disrespect the liars, crooks, self-servers, corrupt and just plain mad who make up the political establishment is a very positive sign. It means they are hard to fool or con, both valuable talents in the modern age. If politicians want to be respected, they must behave as if worthy of respect, stop lying as a preference to telling the truth, answer questions put to them rather than treating all questions as an opportunity to recite the party sound bite, and start addressing real issues that affect all of us. Eventually, they might get some respect back. But this writer appears not to be paying attention; Obama isn't the progeny of a slave family, he is the son of a white American mother and an African father. John Ward just seeing skin colour?

Posted by Peter Simmons at 12:02pm on February 17, 2009

All politicians should fear the silent majority and the anger that increases when they fail to seek a vote of confidence when they know that the public are diverging from them.

Posted by Peter at 12:11pm on February 17, 2009

This is a very difficult article to respond to, mainly because there is so much to say about it. Keeping it very short... I wholeheartedly and passionately agree with it's message. Going to people where they work, rest and play. Having the courage to listen to/communicate with/learn from people as experts about their own lives, with their own perceptions and as the basis for action/change works. I should also say that I do this qualitative, participatory work as my paid job.

Posted by Ross Mowbray at 12:37pm on February 17, 2009

Yup, good article. Look at the farrago over Ross and that big-haired chap with the tight trousers (what was his name again?) to see the madness of the mob and the stupidity of heeding the vociferous. Hang on a minute - isn't this the sort of thing the author was complaining about? People with too much time on their hands spending all day blabbing to other wastrels on internet sites? ARGH - recursion

Posted by Polsonby at 3:32pm on February 17, 2009

May I make a small correction to Mr Ward's article, much of which is similar to my own views? Mr Obama is not 'the progeny of a slave family'. His father was a Kenyan who studied in the USA and then returned home to Kenya. Of course the First lady does have ancestors who were slaves, but then she is not the president. I somehow do not believe that Mr Ward intended to imply that ALL people of African descent in America today descended from slaves.

Posted by Yolande Agble at 7:46am on February 18, 2009