opinion polls conducted like this are garbage

What does this experience of an Ipsos Mori politics phone poll say for the credence of all their politics polls? Polls whose demographic is only the folks whò will passively take pushing around by the caller including arrogant ignorement of being short of time, are obviously not a true demographic of society. This caller ended the call and called me hostile just because I said “okay OKAY” to stop him giving a long winded repetitive spiel about the poll instead of keeping to the questions, ignoring that I had said at start I was relatively short of time.

Ipsos Mori’s Scottish politics poll called me at 17:50 on Oct 7, and by fluke, caught me in shortly before going out for the evening, and shortly before becoming older than the 16 to 54 age range they were polling. I have complained to Ipsos Mori that I was treated completely illogically + penalised for its caller’s own miscommunication, which does not make an honest poll, it makes a corrupt wrong poll.

First he seemed to say that the call was recorded, though later he said he could not listen to any recording. If there is a recording, I waive any confidentiality needed to allow investigators to listen to it, to hear how he conducted it.

As written to Ipsos Mori – When he asked me the most important issue in Scottish politics, he was stuck to categorise my answer, put it under “other” then said, how would I express it? Yet I had already given an answer, so what was he asking for now? You want me to think of a precis of my answer? No, he was asking me for the same answer again, for no reason ever explained, + when I tried to refer him back to the answer already given, that was when he said he had no recording. So I gave the answer again, then seemingly as a thanks for it he went straight off into a very long-winded spiel about the poll’s purpose. But this is after, at start I had said I did not have much time, soon to go out, + he had promised the call would only take 10 minutes! But now he was going round in circles, insistently reciting at least 3 different angles of spiel on the same thing, instead of continuing the questions.

So perfectly logically, to try to stop him + express time urgency, at a pause for response moment I said “okay OKAY!” Instantly he accused me of being hostile to him, + suggested that he should end the call. I said I was simply trying to prevent wasted time, + he ignored this, + in more long-winded recital he stuck to the charge of hostility, while “I’ve been perfectly courteous to you”, + asserted that he was ending the call.

To instantly start calling you hostile as soon as you have any collision at all, is a notorious unfair device used in modern corporate bullying, in business + by officials. It is a discrimination against standing up for yourself, an approach that only takes submission as amicable. No opinion poll conducted with that practice is fit. To suffer a termination of call so intemperately + not-listeningly of course creates hostility from that experience: in that way it is self-fulilling. It is also corporate bullying to declare yourself courteous when you have plainly not been. It is discourteous, very rude, to ignore the person’s statement of being relatively short of time, + despite it, insistently keep speaking to them in long-winded recitals of repetitive spiels about the poll instead of get on with the questions. Then it is discourteous to take as hostility a resulting “okay OKAY!” prod to return to the questions, and discourteous not to listen or budge to getting told that the called person wanted to save time. it is unfair polling as well as discourteous, to actually end a call for these things.

Polls confined to folks who passively accept unnecessary long-windedness even when they have limited time, + ignorement of them saying so, are not of a real demographic. All your polls stand invalid unless you say how handling calls like that is prevented + not allowed to happen.

search yourself Lesley Riddoch

Riddoch has written a National column seizing on the opinion poll of Brexit-raving Tory menbers, that found a majority polling as preferring to lose Scotland than drop Brexit. Symptomatic of what Brexit has done to the Tories, and some commenters have suggested it comes from the weight of Brexiters who have joined the Tories to influence the leadership election. But the nats are all falling over it with glee.

They and Riddoch are making a logical fallacy typical of them, in declaring this the end of unionism. They are assuming that all u ionists are Tories. A piece of mud they would sneakily love to stick, and which makes no sense alongside what they often say on low Tory support here. i.e. the majority of Unionists are not Tories, and their Unionism is completely logically unaffected by the Tories' collective crack-up.

Here are Riddoch's words asked back to her. As I asked them back to her in a National site comment.

SHE WROTE

>
• As Stuart Campbell [Wings over Bath] pointed out: “Tories in Scotland and Northern Ireland are clinging to a nation from which their own Conservative colleagues would drop them like a ticking time-bomb ... at the first inconvenience.”
• Who knows if that revelation prompted any heart-searching amongst Union-supporting Scots ? ... So the question is worth asking again.
• Knowing that “fellow” arch Unionists would throw you and your nation to the wolves rather than miss the chance to trash their own economy by cutting ties with the European Union – how do you feel about the Union now? Indeed, how do you rate the thought processes of your erstwhile colleagues?
• What on earth are we waiting for? Even Scotland’s No voters must be asking themselves the very same question.

ASKED BACK TO HER

Lesley: you are a diaspora-born Scot who belongs to your nation by family. The White Paper does not give, and ever since it SNP and Yes have refused to give, unrefusable citizenship by the family connection route, parental descent. For 6 years you have faced the question, and you evaded it when asked by me at a meeting you did in Edinburgh Friends' Meeting House during the indyref:

• Why are you an eager leading voice of a movement that is racist against yourself ?
• Yessers who either are, or care about family/friends who are, parental descent Scots, are clinging to a nation from which their own Yes colleagues would drop them like a ticking time-bomb, by dogma without even waiting for an inconvenience.
• Who knows if that revelation prompted any heart-searching amongst indy-supporting Scots? So the question is worth asking again.
• Knowing that "fellow" arch Nats would throw you and your subset of your nation to the wolves rather than miss the chance to trash their own economy by cruelly dividing families in breach of ECHR article 8 - how do you feel about indy now? Indeed, how do you rate the thought processes of your erstwhile colleagues?
• As of Perth's recent hustings, Green leader Maggie Chapman has come round on parental descent citizenship. What are you waiting for? Even Scotland's SNP voters must be asking themselves the very same question.

the popular will

news.stv.tv/scotland-decides/news/279363-survey-finds-more-scots-want-trident-to-stay-than-go-after-yes-vote/ Opinion Poll More want to keep Trident!! So much for Eck telling the pulse of public opinion.

There is something very unclear, very smoke and mirrors, about the new draft constitution they are consulting on. Because the consultation actually ends after the vote, so that it will presumably just have to be abandoned if No wins, none of the draft's contents are commitments or policies when we vote. this is particularly agonising to remember in relation to citizenship, where perhaps prodded by voter concerns about the diaspora, they have now used the word "entitlement" in relation to citizenship by descent, and having a "claim" to citizenship. Trouble is, this only refers to forms of descent which are not specified, in this draft they don't specify any details of how citizenship by descent would work, so it does not attach these words to the White Paper policy on parental and grandparental descent. "if either of their parents meets requirements set out in law" and "another connection with Scotland as set out further in law". Also left open for the constitution writers is what the "prescribed procedures" for applying will be. So it still remains that they need to say, and until they say it they have not said it, that applications on parental and grandparental descent evidenced in any way at all will not be refusable.

bouncing on a poll

It is the perception of several of the papers, that that after the British parties vetoed a currency union the polls showed an initial bounce towards Yes, out of anger against having a British decision impose a situation on us, but that this has now converted into an eventual clearer swing to No as the outcome. Probably so, but why?

It is the perception of seemingly all the papers, that it is because the merits of what Osborne says has got through to us, or that we are accepting there won't be a currency union and being daft enough to think it matters. That does not sound right: all indications until now have been that nobody much among voters, only Salmond himself, ever cared about the currency union issue or was ever keen on the idea. so it can't be that, can it?

So here is a different idea. Isn't it more likely that folks' initial reaction to the currency union announcement, the Yes bounce, reflected and still reflects what we think of it. We did not all change our minds about it after a bit of thought, how likely is that? So something else, not the original announcement, has caused the swing to no that has followed. So what else has happened affecting perception of the issue? -Salmond's absurd response to it. Treating us as stupid, saying don't believe what they say, believe what I want to believe. Showing in the Yes campaign a character of unconvincingness and no regard for factual verification. not being offered any factual answer on the issue, any dealing with the position as it is. That's what is widely recgonised as the nonsense in the line the SNP has taken on this. So that's what has turned the polls back to No. Not the demerits of currency union itself or of the British announcement - but the demerits of responding to any issue with gameplaying frivolity and selective blotting out of facts. Some place to have in history.

Yes for who?

On the same day as the news of their sudden narrowing of the polls gap, the Yes side may have blown any deserving to win. Unless they put something right, they have let it slip through their fingers just when your spirits were highest, tragically by a thoughtless piece of racist sloppiness from the ideas-conservative heart of the SNP.

The latest Yes paper, which came through my door today, states "all British citizens who were born here or live here on day one of independence will have a right to a Scottish passport." It said nothing at all about the diaspora born's position, it was written in a way that the public can read as meaning the diaspora born who can't move back here before independence day are not necessarily entitled at all. It presents the exile born as not counting if they are not already here, it does not present the diaspora as equal.

They may be kids who will only be adult after the date, or young adults stuck in the family economic dependence that is deliberate Tory policy,

I know the White Paper clarifies that the exile born for 2 generations can also register for a passport by right - btw a betrayal of Salmond's plan of only a few months previously, to make it 3 generations. But this point is about the public message, rather than the less known detailed facts. The presentation has suddenly sloppily slid back to the 1999 election, when the SNP made that crucial policy foul-up and was open to attack by Labour as dividing families. This may cause racist bullying, among the thick laddish type of adult, and among schoolkids some of whom are in the 16 franchise where already before this Yes was said to be trailing unexpectedly.

An interesting site linked to by Yes supporters on Facebook is "100 Artists and Creatives who support Scottish independence." The list includes diaspora born Lesley Riddoch. Were the folks in the campaign she supports remembering all their supporters when they wrote the paper?

the land of hope is poverty

It has been said that unionism, voting No, leads in the polls among the young and this is supposed to be an irony given how the referendum is making a first by lowering the voting age.

How many aged under 25, now threatened by Cameron with cutting off of support when in need, are still going to see the union as a country "sticking together"? From the voice who tells them "the land of hope is Tory"? The land of hope is not sticking together with its mass scapegoated young, is it? He tells them - "think of all we've achieved together" and deaths in a war of occupation that we should not be fighting are actually his own example!!!

clockwork yellow

The deja vu today is intense, and intensely dismal.

When a referendum goes 2 to 1 for No in the polls, historically that means the jinx has struck again of uncertain voters running for the emotionally easy option of caution. This is just like 6 weeks before poll for AV in 2011, after the Yes campaign disastrously neglected touse the power they had, to mailshot the country with info against their opponents' claims that played on public uncertainty towards the unfamiliar.

It feels the same spectacle, like clockwork, and historically these moments tend not to get turned round. But yes there is an obvious difference in this case, that there is a whole year left to go. That way there is still time for situational shift and mood shift. But when voters have turned cautious, they are fearful, and they won't be reached by jaunty dreamy optimism, they will need a fear jolt in the other direction, a reason to fear the status quo. Screamworthily even the bedroom tax does not yet seem to be giving them that jolt.

From now until anything changes or until the No win has happened, it's a wake for a chance of great reform thrown away, by the controlling political culture of choosing to filter what they got in from the public and select not to put all the reform issues into public record. They can still revers that choice, but Salmond won't, will he? He would rather be remembered in history as sending his own dreams down the plughole, than have democracy unfiltered and all wrongs necessarily made known and dealt with.

Be part of silly

Gordon Bennett. Just blimey and gasps. When is SNP unionism ever going to stop?

The lagging polls show folks already need more imaginative inspiring motivating to vote Yes than they are getting. The campaign has already made itself sound silly with the whole palaver of we are going to keep a currency union with the country seceded from, on demand and even though they say they won't agree to it. The strongest reason the Yes folks have held onto, have not toed the British line on, have kept rightly telling us is where there could be a big difference to be gained from going our own way, has been on social conscience standards of welfare and escape from the British austerity agenda.

The reason why real folks in Scotland have to continue to suffer trashed disability benefits, unemployment sanctions lasting 3 years, the bedroom tax, and pension worries, for over a year to come, has always been so that we will be convinced to vote against continuing to suffer them. (Hasn't it?)

And now, when we are already in the middle of a mood of hollow scepticism that independence is really intended to mean it at all - Sturgeon turns round and accepts a naff proposal, FROM HER GOVERNMENT'S OWN ADVISORY GROUP EVEN, that we should stay in a union of welfare systems with Tory Britain for a so-called "transitional period" whose length is not even defined, that is open ended. A Guardian story places it at at least to 2019 !!! where it far exceeds the Cameron government's full term so still inflicts its whole austerity programme on us. Through it, we would still get the social wrongs that most practically of all we are being asked to vote against still getting.

Silly silly silly. Who conceivably has been increased in belief in the whole Yes offer by this? In the Scottish National Party having the confidence to separate our state from the British state, which is supposed to be the whole point innit? "Be part of better", they told us. The Silly No Party, who just want to throw every last strand of our statehood away!!

See, folks might conclude this is a handy way for the SNP to make sure they can keep us neocon, the same as every major party wants to do. Just the same as Labour about this. So what do the other Yes supporting parties have to say? Are they going to be part of silly?

decide your statehood from an unpredictable economic forecast

Opinion poll says the country's vote could be swayed entirely by whether folks believe that on average they will be just £500 per year better or worse off in income?

How can such figures possibly be calculated? We live in an era when everyone should have seen that economic forecasts are no more convincing than astrology. Fractional income advantage whould be a shockingly momentary item to decide a country's future on: this vote won't be just like an election that will come round again shortly. But it is natural, and quite Yes Minister, when an opinion pollster asks you in the light of those income figures which way you would vote, that you say the way that sounds better. 61% vote Yes if told the figures are better with independence, but only 21% if told the figures are better off with the union.

It shows the decision is not deeply rooted in national sentiment, either way, and at least the people have got that right. In a time of distrust for political systems, national feeling about homeland should not be converted into feeling for a political state. This should worry the SNP though, there is not much around of the type of deep rooted naive patriotism they want and would make their task easiest. If they respond to that fact by just more of the same message, patriotically trust us, then they deserve the defeat they will risk. If they respond in the way they never yet have, by actually taking on issues about ordinary returners to Scotland from the diaspora, and exposing state dirty tricks like the police lying to returners that their newly bought houses are in a rough area, only then will they show that voters should take any interest in more than just speculative unprovable economic figures.