Jiggery-pollery
On the uses and abuses of polling
As so often this is a piece that began in one way and went in another. My apologies too for its lateness: the cough from Hell has really set me back this week. I gather I am not alone.
Hello again, Lenin
So this is how it started: as a series of notebook items beginning with an observation about a slew of polls all apparently suggesting that today’s youth are an undemocratic, extremist lot. And that putative note was itself inspired by a press release and a series of X’s published about ten days ago by a polling company called Whitestone Insight and highlighting a new poll they had just published concerning people’s attitudes towards Communism, Marxism and the Russian Revolution.
The first X post read:
New Whitestone Insight polling for The Museum of Communist Terror, commissioned for the centenary of Lenin’s death, reveals that young people are FIVE TIMES more likely than those aged 65+ (15% to 3%) to have a favourable view of the dictator.
The next post in the series asked readers “why do more rich (sic) support socialism than the poor?”, supporting this question with the information that their poll had found that “36% of those in AB social grade have (a) favourable view of socialism compared to 22% in DE social grade”. The post added “Whether it’s perceptions of #Lenin, #Marxism, #Communism, or the 1917 #RussianRevolution, the views of the poorest are consistently the most unfavourable, while the most affluent have the most favourable views .”
Finally Whitestone Insight posted that “the stand-out region” in their polling “is London where one in five have a favourable view of Communism compared to just 4% in SW England”.
And there we had the trifecta of treachery: the young, the wealthier (and better educated) and Londoners: professor Matthew Goodwin’s New Social Elite in a commie-loving nutshell.