Pandemics and Polls

When it comes to political polling here in the UK I generally don't trust it, primarily because I joined a prominent polling organisation several years ago and left less than a week later having seen the bias in its methodology first-hand. From survey questions with no option to disagree, viable alternatives removed, questions framed to lead you to an answer, to questions that were nothing more than propaganda often with wrong or misleading "facts" included, it was clear this organisation was set up to influence opinion rather than measure it.

There is a trend of polls deviating significantly from election results for most of the non-campaign periods, only for those polls to narrow during the campaign period until the final few polls close to the day of the election present realistic results. To be clear I don't think this is a case of voting intention suddenly changing within the space of a few weeks, I think most people have already made up their mind who they want to vote for long before that period; no what I think is actually happening is that polling organisations serve less biased questions closer to the election day to get a result that's actually accurate in order to safeguard their reputations.

There have been instances were polls have been monumentally wrong, in 1992 most notably they predicted a Labour victory right up until polling day with a 3% lead, the actual result was Tory victory with 7.6% lead meaning the polls were wrong by 10.6% which is beyond a margin of error.

Nevertheless, the UK faces a General Election on the 4th of July and as it stands Labour lead in the polls by 21% there is cautious optimism that we are heading for a change of government for the first time in 14 years.

I've been wondering what the tipping point has been. I've been exhausted with this government, and every iteration before it right back to 2010 when the coalition first came to power after the UK's first hung parliament for generations. Countless decisions made since then have been unnecessary, driven by ideology, cruelty, and hatred - but this isn't the first election we have had in 14 years, and everything that has happened has remained pretty much consistently bad, from an objective point of view for some time. I can say that objectively because I have no love for Labour, not that it matters, I can't vote for them anyway as they don't run in Northern Ireland. I would vote tactically for whoever was most likely to unseat a Tory in my seat if that were the reality I was facing, as it stands I don't have to as the Tories don't run here either.

I have come to a realisation though and as most things do, it comes back to age. I tend to measure past events by how much time has elapsed since they happened and how old someone could be who was born when they occurred, for example I recall the turn of the millennium when 1999 became 2000, that happened over 24 and a half years ago now, so naturally I conclude that there are people who are 24 years old, maybe some that are 25 or 26 that don't even remember it happening because they were too young at the time.

Turning this mentality on this election and there is the realisation that the last election the UK had in 2019 was pre-pandemic. Anyone who was 13 to 17 years old approaching 18 but not quite there in time for the vote was ineligible. Then in 2020 the pandemic hit, a year after the election now 14 to 18 in education, the last to be offered the vaccine, the last to be quarantined sent to school whilst most people were furloughed, old enough to be cognizant and witness political incompetence and its effect first-hand these 5 million people can now vote - suddenly the landslide defeat the Tories are facing makes sense if the polls really are to be believed. What was the tipping point? The pandemic. Have political commentators addressed this? No. In fact the pandemic as a voting issue isn't mentioned at all.

And yet, the idea that these 5 million people whose formative years were disrupted by one of the most monumental upheavals in peacetime have gotten over it and moved on and forgotten about it speaks to the arrogance of a political party that treated the general public with the same disdain. People missed funerals, people did not get to hold their loved ones hands as they died in hospital beds, people remember the care homes were left fall, people remember the 25 million confirmed cases, and the 232,000 deaths because those numbers aren't statistics on a spreadsheet to those people, each number has a name, a family, a life that was lived and lost because of political incompetence.

There are 5 million people whose lives were disrupted the most who are about to have the chance to vote for the first time since the pandemic, and whilst many older voters may have moved on, that wound is still fresh, the memory is still clear.