Cowardly Custard
My jaw dropped when I read the comment of the Survation chief executive, Damian Lyons Lowe, who said that he dropped an eve of election poll because he thought the result (a six point lead for the Conservatives) was out of line with other pollsters.
Seems to me a line has been crossed by someone who should be reporting the facts and the figures, instead of taking the easy option and going with the flow of events and of how he perceived them to be.
Seems to me a line has been crossed by someone who should be reporting the facts and the figures, instead of taking the easy option and going with the flow of events and of how he perceived them to be.
Analysis: Peter Kellner
The result was the biggest setback for pollsters since 1992John Millard/PA
By Richard Ford - The Times
Pollsters face an independent inquiry into apparent bias after they failed to predict a Conservative majority.
The British Polling Council announced the investigation, led by Patrick Sturgis, director of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods, after several polls in the run-up to the vote showed that the Conservatives and Labour were neck-and-neck, suggesting a hung parliament.
George Osborne said the polls would face a “big post-mortem” after so many failed to predict the outcome while Michelle Harrison, of TNS, a polling company, admitted it had been a “mixed night for the polling community”.
Most of the polls this year overestimated Labour’s share of the vote while underestimating the Conservative share. They were, however, broadly correct for the Liberal Democrats, Ukip and the Greens.
While some pollsters apologised for their performance, others insisted that most polls were within a margin of error of between 1 and 3 percentage points. One pollster produced findings much closer to the actual result but failed to publish them because it feared the data was wrong.
Damian Lyons Lowe, chief executive of Survation, said he did not publish an eve-of-election poll putting the Conservatives on 37 per cent and Labour on 31 per cent because the results seemed “so out of line” with all polling conducted by his organisation and others.
He added: “I chickened out of publishing the figures, something I’m sure I’ll always regret.”
The result was the biggest setback for pollsters since 1992, when John Major triumphed over Neil Kinnock in spite of the polls pointing to a Labour victory. Some suggested one reason for their failure was because “shy Tories” did not admit their support for the party or that the figures had been distorted because some Conservatives did not wish to talk about their voting intentions.
