the brilliantly leaping gazelle

It was an odd day, yesterday, with one of the oddest things being the right wing press’s fury over Jeremy Corbinned plan not to watch the queens speech on Christmas Day but possibly to visit a homeless shelter instead. In what universe is this a bad thing? My recollection of the bible may be a little hazy – I’ve got brain damage after all – but I don’t ever recall it mentioning Jesus partying with the rich and glamorous of Roman society. Nor I recollect it saying he sought out their company to share his teachings with them. Or do any of his party tricks for them.

So quite why any politician seeking election to the highest office in the land should be lambasted for not choosing to watch an unelected benefit scrounger telling us that she too has had a difficult year is utterly beyond me. She has palaces, castles and country estates – not inner-city, crime ridden and austerity ravaged estates either. One’s where one goes shooting, not try to avoid being shot or stabbed up.

t’s not like she’s going to throw open the doors to the hundreds of unused rooms in her various gaffs, is she? Or in her speech say something like ‘ I feel racked with guilt about having so much when so many of you have so little. It isn’t fair that you the taxpayer should keep me and my family warm and fed this Christmas! So to any one whose in a hostel this Christmas, let me give you a Christmas present, my doors of my houses are open to you, so come on in, you own them, after all’ No, her and her parasitic family of freeloaders will scrounge off us once again.

Isn’t Corbinned trying to embody of everything the bible claims Jesus was, said and did? Indeed, there is one interpretation of the bible that see’s Jesus as a socialist. This episode neatly encapsulates why Corbinned is fit for the top job, because whilst some of Labours policies may not be to everyone’s taste, they come from a good place and speak volumes about the direction he wants to lead Britain in and the difference between him and Boris’s Johnson.

It struck me only this morning that opinion polls are a bit like ready meals.

Last Friday, I was meant to attend an event at the London School Of Economics concerning a new methodology for the measuring of opinions that make opinion polls, so they can appear more trustworthy and indicative of the opinions they present. Because as we all know, the standing of opinion polls has been low since their disastrous misreading of the 2015 election, one that was only eclipsed by the failure to call the 2016 referendum. Mind you, that was only eclipsed by their utter failure to in any way predict clearly the 2017 election. So, improvements were urgently needed, as every newspaper and media outlet said in 2015, again in 2016, and er, in 2017. But be be that as it may, despite this the same newspapers and media outlets still need stories so are still reporting the findings of opinion polls as if none of this ever happened. Its almost as if newspapers only commission and publish polls whose findings they know either their proprietor or readers will agree with. Arrant nonsense I know!

Even though conducting interviews face to face is better than virtually every other method, as it allows for follow-ups and clarification, it is also much more expensive. Much, much more. That’s why online polls published by polling companies that offer incentives are not worth the paper they’re not printed on. I wrote a blog about them here and them helping to cause the ‘bandwagon effect’, namely, because how everyone likes to back a winner, so the polls help create the very thing they purport to show.

In much the same way people proclaimed themselves outraged by the ‘horse-meat’ scandal few years back when it turned out that one wasn’t able to buy a £3 lasagna ready meal and for it not contain the best cuts of meat. Inexplicably they imagined that they imagined could buy the quality for next to no money and this lack of credulity turned to anger when the whole sorry fiasco was revealed. The consumer wanted everything but the blame. No matter that horse meat is a far healthier meat to eat. Apparently what mattered that the people had been misled. It was the principle of the thing! This principle didn’t however last until the following Christmas, which had the temerity to be only a month or so later. Now their outrage was all forgotten.They wanted tables laden with food, they wanted to stuff themselves silly.  They wanted cheap food, 3 for 2 and ‘buy one get one free’ offers, because they really did think there was such a thing as a free meal.

That’s why opinion polls are much like ready meals, people remember what they want to remember!