Kmflett's Blog

The late socialist historian E P Thompson noted as long ago as 1959 the difference between psephology, the study of political trends, and ephology. The latter practice is designed not to analyse trends but by promoting a particular trend to influence them.

Reform for example are currently posting a series of entirely made up polls which show them leading which come firmly into the Ephology area.

Lord Ashcroft’s polls by contrast are genuine and he publishes tables to back them up. But as YouGov quite recently noted the answer you get to a question depends on what question you ask, and who you ask it of.

Lord Ashcroft’s poll published on 4th April was timed to get publicity over Easter and to an extent it has.. The main news stories are the Moon space mission and an expletive filled post from Trump threatening Easter armageddon.

As Zach Polanski has posted the poll is interesting because it shows the Greens in the lead, as he notes the first time a party to the left of Labour has led. That’s true although opinion polling has a relatively recent history. Were they around in 1848 the Chartists would certainly have led (as E P Thompson also pointed out).

A strong left vote is in my view a good thing but beware Ashcroft’s agenda. He is a Tory and the actual seat based outcome of the poll is to show the Tories with most seats and Labour with 30 odd seats. Clearly Labour is unpopular but so are the Tories. What Ashcroft is doing here is to try and influence political sentiment that the Tories are doing a lot better than they likely are.

Meantime I hope the Greens now have enough money to do some private polling and enough activists to know what is actually happening in the workplaces, communities, clubs and pubs.