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I don't remember Granny saying she was doing a poll that would be representative of the UK population?

The only person I've seen trying to trash any poll was you @Ex, I've not refereed to any poll apart from Granny's and a reference to Cameron's and May's proven mistakes on relying upon polls.

National political polls rely on people telling the truth. They have no way of measuring how much of the data is true, not only do people employ tactical voting in elections but they also employ tactical voting in polls. I do both and I know many other people do too.

The last five elections I have voted in I have voted tactically with a large group of other people. Commercial pollsters and organisations I disagree with will never get a straight response from me, why should they? They are benefiting themselves not me.

I don't understand any value of statistically forecasting national election results and putting the results in the public domain unless it is an attempt to corrupt that election. To my mind the process should be illegal on grounds of corruption and democracy.

Would just like to say that at one time I worked for the same company that does polls for Ipsos Mori, doing market research, and attacking the public to fill in questionnairs.

It was a highly paid job for not doing much. Mostly done by mums with children who worked between the hours of 10 am and rushed off at 3pm.

Mostly done near the entrance of Marks and Spencer's which would typify those who were targeted. Alternatively they may have been travelling on the intercity trains, with business men and women and there again, is that really a cross section of the community.

Just an example of how polls are carried out. Not many go knocking on doors anymore to get to the wider population. Of course the questionnaire and target audience is loaded for the purpose of a particular result, because psychologically, that result can have a huge impact on swaying others into the same line of opinion.

Que sera sera.

Quite so. Doing one that DOESN'T represent the whole of the UK population is a waste of time, misleading, and is pretty well meaningless which I why I attacked it.

Nor do properly run polls rely on everyone telling the truth. They rely, rather, on both sides having a roughly equal number of liars; although I cannot imagine what they hope to achieve by doing so. Much easier to tell the truth. If you resent them making money from your opinions and lie because of that, why not join Yougov? They pay you for completing an online poll. Personally, I can't see any reason for not telling the truth.

Interestingly, some product polls include questions which attempt to detect whether the interviewee is lying. Liars need good memories, and conflicting answers will lead to that set of results being rejected.

It has to be said, too, that polls are less reliable when both sides are about equal. If you get 99% for side A and 1% for side B, you are pretty sure of the result. If you get 51% for one side and 49% for the other, the answer is indeterminate.

I welcome the growing gap between remainers and leavers for this reason. It means the findings of the polls are more and more reliable.

We are in agreement about making political polls illegal though. I support that not because the polls are fiddled - the aren't - but because they are generally pretty accurate.

Knowing what the public is thinking promotes politicians who are prepared to do ANYTHING to gain power, changing opinion as the wind blows. I would much prefer to have politicians with their own convictions which one can support or reject as you see fit after listening to their arguments.

Ex "I welcome the growing gap between remainers and leavers for this reason. It means the findings of the polls are more and more reliable."

Problem there ex is your basing your belief that their is a growing gap between remainers and leavers on the polls. Cart and Horse..Horse and cart.

Just because you want a UK poll doesn't mean everybody does, local variations are important, just look at the London/non-London divide you often mention.

You could equally argue that a UK poll without a non-UK EU poll is meaningless as well etc etc

I don't particularly want a poll at all. But if we are expected to accept it as meaningful, then it has to be done properly. A poll only tells you anything useful about the result of an election if it is a representative sample of all those who can vote.

As to arguing that "a UK poll without a non-UK EU poll is meaningless", then you might be able to do so but I doubt if I could. I don't believe it is true at all.

I don't remember Granny stating that her poll was to represent the result of an election (or even a referendum)???

She was asking WikiWirral people on their opinion, it is strange that you try to turn it into something else (a UK election?) then "trash" what you have tried to turn it into.

I have no idea what was going through Granny's mind. My point is that asking a small self-selecting group of mainly senior citizens is an utterly pointless thing to do whatever she imagined might be shown by it.

I haven't trashed properly set up polls. You did that, with accusations of fiddling and god knows what else.

I think there will be a few here who quite rightly would object to being called "senior citizens". I might well have retired a number of years ago but there are quite a number of years until I become a senior citizen, I am in my fifties, there are plenty on WikiWirral that are younger than me.

Read back, I haven't trashed any properly set up polls that were accurate.

Basically you have been arguing against yourself, you misread something or miss-interpret something or make some assumptions then disagree with them instead of disagreeing with what was originally said.

Well, for better or worse, here's the most recent poll I can find which has a lot more useful information than anything that includes only us, whatever you want to call us as a group.

https://whatukthinks.org/eu/questio...-at-the-end-of-the-brexit-process/?notes

2004 people were asked their views and you can download all the detailed tables and see their methodology (ICM was the polling company)

The Wiki Poll is meaningless for the very fact that it seems to be set up as a:

Granny v Exoriator



Pathetic. Not voted.

Whatever the result- it means nothing.

Similar to your opinion.

Are we bothered ? No !

Interesting that there are 57 students when asked about work status and yet only 38 people "still studying" when it came to qualifications. I can only envisage how those figures could be the other way around unless there are 38 people without any qualifications and are now studying for a formal qualification or the questions were imprecise?

The students are an example of where an extremely small sample of 57 (2.8% of survey base ... out of a UK student population of well over 2 million students) which is not going to be representative of students is then weighted and boosted to 83 (4.1%). How can you use a weighting factor on a group that you know is probably not representative of the group the weighting factor is targetted at? So at least 4.1% of the data they have used is meaningless.

The survey population of 2004 is too small to sub-group and especially when using individual weighting factors for those sub-groups. Over 90% of the results they have produced have far too much uncertainty and could easily be misleading.