Mike Lyle wrote:


Worth noting that (unless -- as is quite possible -- I have
misunderstood) YouGov is a company in the Telegraph group. I think it
was Bigboard who believed that polls reflected the views of those who
paid for them.


Absolutely. I'm not defending the findings of the poll I quoted. I don't
defend any opinion polls!

I don't know the dates of the major independent surveys, but the
Telegraph/YouGov poll was published in 2002.

The article pointed out an enormous drop in the anti camp compared
with a previous poll: since this was so large a change as to suggest
a possible anomaly, I wondered about the precise form of the
questions asked. I noticed that the figure given was referred to as
the percentage who "wanted to see hunting criminalised". Now a good
survey will ask the same question in different ways; I wondered if
this survey had done that, and if so what the figures were for the
other forms of the question. The British public is pretty
good-natured, and the "criminalised" question could well have
elicited very different responses from the answers to questions
worded in ways which didn't put into the heads of the respondents the
idea of treating fox-hunters the same way as gangland murderers,
drug-dealers, and City fraudsters. Since the Telegraph, for its own
reasons, didn't give me this information, I can only speculate. But
if there was an anomaly, this might be a good place to start looking
for it.

Mike.



--
Excellent day for putting Slinkies on an escalator.