Christian – I wouldn’t worry about going OTT. Just read some of Fluffy’s posts!.

OTT: is that Over-my-Thinkable-Thoughts…? And here was me thinking that I was a political puppy.

P.S. Camer’s gets a positive response form this week’s The Economist. Independent commentary; don’t you just love it…?

Surely it would be quite simple for the promulgation of a focus-group driven policy to include a pre-emptive answer to those objections? Why wait until the objections are raised before answering them?

Do such opposing questions simply get ignored once the decisions are made?

Christian – I wouldn’t worry about going OTT. Just read some of Fluffy’s posts!

Just the sort of comment I’d expect from a Nat . . .

I would actually go further. Not only are the issues focus group tested, but different focus groups are fed different contexts (e.g. as in the ICM poll, in a terrorism context). The results are not simply used to decide which policy is popular and should be adopted, but to find out how a given policy that has the potential to cause problems to your political opponent must be packaged to maximise the damage.

As you rightly state, the problems for the proponents start when the alternative view of the same issue gains popularity. But this alternative view must be pushed, and that’s what Davis tried to do.

And I suppose I was somewhat over the top in my earlier post. If the alternative view had really gained popularity, it should feed through even to questions that set out a different context. (That is, if people start to associate 42 days with civil liberties, then even the answers to straight yes/no questions should shift.)

Christian

Did you wipe the sweat from your brow when you just beat us English Democrats in the recount? Until a few months ago very few contributors claimed to know who the E.D.P. were.