The British New Right needs it's own polling company
An Easy Win
There is little that J’accuse holds in greater contempt than the use of representative polling and focus groups to silence the truth with crude appeals to a false consensus. The above is a case in point. Luke ‘The Nuke’ Tryl calling upon ‘the polling’ on refugees to prove the point that ‘Brits want to provide sanctuary for those in need’, including with Afghans. I assume (I could be wrong) that Luke is referring to YouGov polling from August 2021, which found that:
‘52% of Britons support resettled Afghan refugees fleeing from the Taliban’
Is this evidence that Brits are in favour of resettling Afghans? Of course it isn’t. Leave aside the tiny margin, the wording is ludicrous (‘fleeing’) and has no bearing on the reality of Afghan resettlement.
Polling in general is useless for contentious issues (most people believe the police track their online activity, not unreasonably, so will not give answers that could be perceived as racist). Dodgy tactics are also used to get desired outcomes (nearly all polling is commissioned), as an example:
Does the public believe that immigration is a good thing for the economy? Well, 20% of people strongly agree, 15% somewhat agree, and 40% slightly agree with that statement, ergo 75% agree. A vast majority of Brits.
Finally, the entire premise of majority opinion being a substitute for reasoned argument is one that should be rejected, I actually do not care if most people ‘agree’ with demographic change. That is not because I think normies are stupid - it is because the average person in Britain has been subject to hundreds of thousands of hours of editorialised brainwashing courtesy of the BBC; of Ant and Dec, Wayne Rooney and Jimmy Savile. It is, in fact, testament to the indomitable strength of the human spirit that individuals like Thomas Skinner are able to endure this information environment with their instincts mostly intact.
But above all, the reason that I dislike the fake industry of polling is that it has been an effective means for an undesired outcome. Alongside Jonathan Portes’s economic studies in the early 2000s, polling on “British attitudes towards immigration” has been one of the strongest weapons in the woke arsenal when it comes to muddying the waters in the immigration debate.
It was this polling which convinced ‘modernisers’ in the Conservative Party that they had to abandon traditional populist messages on not just immigration but crime/justice and ‘climate change’ in order to appeal to a changing country; their dismal failure to trounce the ‘calculator with autism’ in the 2010 election did little to modify this view. The howling despair of Sunder Katwala, begging for media appearances more gilded than the ‘Middle Eastern Eye’ on his X account whilst Sir Keir Starmer apes the language of Enoch Powell is so spiritually enriching for this reason.
No complacency; the crusade will not be complete until his Princess Di’ bucks have been nationalised and redistributed to friends of the regime, and he is reduced to selling copies of the Big Issue outside Victoria station.
The main strength of polling is that it is extremely good at generating headlines. As has been relayed in an excellent Substack elsewhere - Westminster think tanks rely on polling as a means of creating cheap viral content for the press to demonstrate impact to their donors. The truth is that most policy work is orientated around this goal. Think tankers are always chasing the top line of a press release in the hopes of being cited repeatedly as this is how they establish their brand. There is no thorough peer review in most of these organisations and it is largely left to individuals with an agenda to attack their research. There are incidents of this happening - think Thdhmo on The Enterprise Network’s immigrant entrepreneur statistics - but for the most part journalists repeat their research credulously.
Existing institutions, IPSOS Mori as an example are not capable of being completely unbiased in their output. Whilst the industry is slightly mercenary, they retain editorial input over how questions are put forward - ostensibly for the sake of accuracy and credibility - in reality this is usually a cover for avoiding ideologically outre topics. These organisations occasionally delve into harder topics in a faltering way. Luke ‘The Nuke’ Tryl’s dodgy focus groups which reveal that Barry the builder from Lancaster wants a military coup drive good engagement but they are not the final product.
It’s obvious what an ideologically aligned polling company run by a suitable figure could focus on in order to drive important narrative points home. Put out polling questions which begin with the statistics on Afghan sexual crimes are and ask if British people would want them to live in their community. Focus group parents in Dover and ask them how concerned they are about migrant hotels near their children’s schools. The main skill will be to tie your work to trends in the media in a timely way to guarantee exposure. Funding should come easily with the amount of money circulating figure like Rupert Lowe at the moment and from the United States.
The work of Juice and the Centre For Migration Control shows that there is already a clear pipeline for mainstream institutions of the centre-right (GB News, Telegraph) to take forward data points and turn it into news. Part of why their work has been impactful is that the data it puts forward is from uncontested sources, whether that be the ONS (Juice) or from Freedom of Information requests. The likes of Katwala are thus forced to deny the term ‘per capita’ or to attempt to dismiss the evidence as ‘divisive’.
There are clear guidelines on how a hypothetical organisation or individual has to conduct national representative polling up to a gold standard, set out by the British Polling Council, all sensible stuff around transparency and sampling standards. You do not necessarily have to be part of the BPC to publish ‘credible’ polling but if you follow these rules, any challenge that your data is false can be answered with a libel charge.
You, dear reader, could be the right’s answer to Sunder Katwala. It could be your smug little face quote tweeting the Libs and telling them that your polling proves that their views are arcane, archaic, out of touch. There are millions of impressions, and therefore millions of pounds just waiting on the ground for you to scoop up.
I will close with some advice to anybody who reads these substacks, or lurks on X, and is thinking about launching a career in social media. It comes, oddly enough, from the YouTuber WoodysGamerTag, who became independently wealthy by riding the Call Of Duty Commentary phase. In one of his video series, he discussed what an aspiring youtuber would have to do to break through in a deeply saturated market. Alongside his more prosaic advice; make sure you have the highest quality of recording equipment, try to collaborate with bigger platforms - he said something which has stuck with me ever since - you have do to something original, or nobody has a reason to watch you.