Whistleblower reveals that Corbyn could have won 2017 election until Tories leant on YouGov – Dorset Eye
Nadhim Zahawi: it seems the co-founder of YouGov intimidated the polling firm into changing its methods – falsifying poll results – to make it seem the Tories were more popular than was true in 2017.
This is shocking and Nadhim Zahawi should be made to answer some hard questions.
It seems polling in 2017 showed Labour overtaking the Conservatives – until the Conservatives (Zahawi in particular) intimidated leading pollster YouGov.
A whistleblower on Dorset Eye explains:
The first thing I would do every morning is download the overnight data, and each day the gap just kept getting smaller and smaller. On the morning of the Manchester bombing, we actually had Labour pulling level, although the poll got spiked because the campaign rightly paused.
And then we released the MRP*. This was probably the worst possible idea. The MRP was actually showing exactly the same thing as our standard polls would have, but it was the first time anybody had said “hung parliament”.
Nadhim Zahawi called up the CEO and said he would call for his resignation if he was wrong.
This meant our polling and coverage was a lot worse for the rest of the campaign. We did a fantastic debate poll in the hours following the debate that Corbyn took part in. The results were stark – Corbyn won by a country mile, and one in four Tory voters thought he was best. But despite having written the story and designed the charts, we were banned from releasing the story because it was too positive about Labour.
Similarly, there were a few “minor” methodology changes for the final poll which increase the Tory lead. This was done after pressure from high-ups (and despite protests from those of us who thought it wasn’t ok).
Was the 2017 election rigged because people were influenced by falsified opinion polls?
The evidence here suggests it was. We might never have had Tory Brexit, Boris Johnson and all the horrors of the last five years if YouGov’s founder had left its employees to do their job. And will you ever trust an opinion poll again?
*MRP stands for multilevel regression and post-stratification. This is a statistical method that produces predictions for small geographic areas even if a poll had few respondents from that constituency. Instead, census data, such as the age and income distributions of voters in that area, is put into the model with the national survey data.
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We in the west really do believe we have a democracy, but it is a sham. At the moment we have a choice in the UK, Right wing or far right wing. There are countries in the global south and that includes Iran Iraq, Syria, Venezuela who have far fairer and more representative democracies than we do. Guess which ones the US and NATO target for democratization. Look at Ukraine prior to US interventionism 2014. Yanukovich had 90% Donbas and 95% Crimea voting for peaceful relations with Russia,, but that didn’t suit the US “spheres of Interest” or it’s plan for Russia. This time round, the polling showed that Zelensky would have won with an even bigger majority had the Donbas and Crimea(who were excluded)been allowed to vote. Whenever I hear western “democracies” crowing about how superior their democracies are to those elsewhere in the world I cringe, it’s embarrassing. This is what the US has given us along with presumptuous, entitled tits rigging the voting any way they can, just as they have done in the US during the Bush election.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a real election where such Shenanigans as we have witnessed were acted on instead of being overruled as inconsequential? Because Corbyn was hounded by the fourth estate with false anti-semitism and the backstabbing of right wing elements within the Labour Party like Starmer, and that weasel Tom Watson, the flipflopping of greasy pole climbers etc. Labour’s losses in membership numbers has plummeted and Starmer has almost bankrupted the party and as a consequence, Labour has no chance of winning the next General Election.
Pollster predictions do influence voting preference and this story highlights how voting can be rigged still further as Zahawi knew only too well.
I still believe that the Unions should stop backing Starmer’s “New”(again)Labour and allow it to go bankrupt and be given back to the members from which it was hijacked for them to reset it.
Mine may be a lone voice in the wilderness, but I will not vote for Labour until it is representative of Corbyn’s ideology, even though I am not a socialist. Corbyn got a lot right and would have been good had he been able to enact his Corbyn Economic strategy.
But what do I know?
Different pollsters will show varying results. Their methodologies may vary too. But they are always good for showing direction of travel. Changing methodology in the middle of a campaign and releasing those results should, in my view, be illegal as well as against the rules that pollster organisations follow. We know that the polls affect how voters behave (I’m honestly not sure why) so directly interfering in this is interfering in the democratic process. We DO know that the Conservatives have form for doing exactly this as they did this back in 2014 just on the eve of the Scottish referendum on independence. The actual results from some other of their privately commissioned polls have been kept secret despite FOI requests..