Former Labour ministers call for ban on pre-election polls to be considered
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Version 0 of 1. Banning political opinion polls in the run-up to elections or referendums should be given serious consideration, according to former ministers. Calls to radically rethink how both the media and politicians rely on polls came as YouGov’s president admitted all the major pollsters had passed over signs of a looming Tory victory, and continued to indicate that the parties were neck-and-neck in the run-up to election day. Lord Foulkes, a former Labour Scotland minister, has published a bill, which he will put to the new ballot system in the House of Lords, calling for the establishment of an Ofcom-style independent regulator of the polling industry, which would then rule on whether to ban or restrict political polling in the run-up to elections. Foulkes said the body should replace the British Polling Council, which has launched an inquiry into the accuracy of general election polling, and include politicians and the media. He blamed the demand for “snap opinions” from “media moguls” with vested interested in the results for new polling methods which he said were less than rigorous. “The people who volunteer to be polled online or on the phone are part of a panel who inevitably become institutionalised,” he said. “It is no longer a random sample of the population.” France, India, Italy and Spain all have restrictions on the publication of opinion polls for short periods in the run-up to a general election. Foulkes said he favoured a ban but said an independent body should decide on the parameters. The polling industry bosses need to take a “good, hard look at themselves,” he said, stopping short of calling for resignations. But he said that polling inaccuracy had the potential to seriously affect lawmaking. “We had one rogue poll before the Scottish referendum [suggesting the yes vote would win] and all of a sudden there were three party leaders in the Herald making ‘the vow’ of more powers to Scotland, and the Smith commission [on further devolution] was set up and now we are stuck with it,” he said. “All because of that poll.” The Labour MP and former minister Diane Abbott said she also believed serious consideration should be given to barring publishing opinion polls in the final weeks. She told Sky News’ Murnaghan programme: “We need to look at whether we should ban polls for the duration of the short campaign – they distorted people’s thinking and planning. “People do not change their mind in the closing 10 minutes of the campaign. The polls just got it wrong.” Nick Sparrow, former boss of the polling company ICM, said he had expected further calls for polls to be banned. “It will be said that polls might influence the choices people make, and frame political debate, and if they are plain wrong, their publication – especially at election time – cannot be justified,” he wrote on politicalbetting.com. Writing in the Sunday Times, Peter Kellner admitted his industry “got the election wrong” but said the method was not the issue, pointing out that online and telephone polling were “equally wide of the mark”. Kellner said there were obvious flaws in the “shy Tories” theory as a reason for an underestimation for Conservative support, first suggested after John Major’s victory in 1992. “One of the virtues of online research is, or should be, that it allows respondents to submit their views with complete anonymity. And how was it that the exit poll ... came so much closer to the result?” More likely, he said, was that these were “reluctant” Tory voters that the polls had missed until the last hour and the “weak image” of the Tories that meant those polled may have “like[d] to support someone else but, faced with a ballot paper in the privacy of the polling booth, simply can’t”. |