A live action bullsh*t Express poll!

The Daily Express (full disclosure, a former client of my employer but long before I joined) has a bit of a history with what we politely refer to as 'bullshit polls'.

Their typical style is to report on phone-in polls of their own readers as if they are representative samples of the British public when in fact they are the worst kind of self-selecting surveys.

For a refresher, the problem with self-selecting surveys is that the only people who take part are those with an axe to grind who are willing to call the premium rate number required to vote. When you add to this the fact that it's only Daily Express readers who are being presented with the numbers to call, itself a skewed subset of the UK population, it's no surprise that the results end up being curiously one-sided in favour of whatever the paper's editorial line is.

Incidentally, fair play to the 2% who don't want to ban new migrants, the 1% who don't want energy companies to cut their bills, the 1% who don't want Brussels to stop meddling in the UK's benefits system and the 1% who think foreigners should get free treatment on the NHS.

This behaviour is not exclusive to the right but at least that's an error rather than an ongoing editorial policy.

Anyway, what's happened this time is that two Conservative MPs (Peter Bone and Philip Hollobone) and the Tory PPC for Corby have staged a "mini-referendum" on EU membership in which 80% of those who bothered to take part said they'd like to leave. I don't know much about the Corby candidate but Bone and Hollobone are fairly well known as being keen for Britain to leave the EU so I'm sure that had no impact on the results.

The sample size looks large, over 14,000 people but this meaningless as it's just a postal version of the self-selecting survey. In fact it's even more skewed because posting a leaflet is more effort than picking up a telephone and the leaflets apparently had the faces of the three men pushing the vote on the cover accompanied no doubt by some neutral information.

In order to take part you would have had to take that leaflet, fill in the form and post it. Apparently of the 100,000+ leaflets handed out around 14,000 were posted so that's a 14% response rate. Around 11,000 of these wanted to leave the EU which gives us around 80%.

Imagine that you're an ordinary voter who doesn't have a strong opinion on the EU but, if push came to shove, you'd prefer to stay in. Would you take part in this? Or would you put it in the bin with the rest of the junk mail?

This poll is utterly meaningless. All it tells us is that there are just over 11,000 people in Northamptonshire who really want to leave the EU. So out of the potential electorate of about 45 million voters, 0.02% are confirmed "Out" voters.

It's just a larger scale version of the type of bullshit 'readers poll' the Express publishes every week and is just as flawed and misleading. but that won't stop many people who should (and in many cases probably do) know better citing it as fact.

EDIT: One thing I forgot was when the Express hilariously put out a headline saying a YouGov poll (a proper polling company rather than Express readers with a landline handy) had put UKIP in second place above Labour! This was swiftly debunked as being just a subset of the YouGov poll filtered to Sun readers. Wishful thinking on the Express's part I assume.

EDIT: Anthony Welles has an (as usual) excellent take down of this at UK Polling Report