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.

I should make myself clearer. If you visit http://www.yougov.com the Research Hub [left-hand panel] is UK and Southern Europe. It reminds me of some child’s request to Jim’ll Fix-It back in the dark-days of the ‘Seventies.

Sorry for the confusion….

By and large proposals are focus group tested and tailored to get a positive message before being released. In follows therefore that after a short while you could expect to see some drop once the alternative view catches up and the original proposal is scrutinised.

MP’s and indeed parties are supposed to do this but things like the poll tax and abolishing the 10p rate still get through while they are sleeping.

In addition as with referendums you can get a cumulative anti effect during a campaign where the proposal has to fend off a series of attacks many of which can be quite contradictory.

We saw this in Ireland with the EU treaty where business was warning that it could mean to many restrictions on employers while unions warned it might erode workers rights.

Both positions can’t be right but they were both arguments for voting No.

Peter.

There was a poll on 42 days for Liberty a month or two back that gave people the option of keeping 28 day detention and allowing post-charge questioning instead, and given the choice between the two post-charge questioning proved more popular than 42 day detention (sadly that poll also had it’s drawbacks, since it missed the rather obvious option of having 42 day detention AND post-charge questioning – hence it didn’t tell us about the popularity of 42 detention per se, only that post-charge questioning was even more popular!)

Last Tuesday in answer to a question about RIPA, the leader of Bradford Council revealed the expent to which this is used for investigations by council – and most frighteningly for me was that the most common use was covert surveillance of the Council’s own staff.

Anthony, I agree about not leading the witness but how often are you asking question the answer to which is not necessarily encapsulated by the choices presented to the respondent. Surely most people’s answer to the 42 day question – if given the chance to think about it – will be; “it depends…”