Stephen Bush accuses the People’s Vote campaign of asking “deliberately loaded questions” about Brexit without offering any evidence for his charge. This is not surprising for there is no such evidence.
Bush compares two findings from different YouGov polls of Labour Party members, one funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the other by the People’s Vote Campaign. (Respondents are not told the identity of the client: all they see are the questions themselves.)
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- None of the questions is “loaded”, deliberately or otherwise. This is not surprising: YouGov has its own reputation to defend, and rightly insists on unbiased questions.
- The three questions are in fact different: one is about how Labour should act, one about a respondents’ own views on a referendum on the Withdrawal Agreement, and one (posed some weeks earlier) about a public vote when the negotiations are complete. It’s as if one question had been: do you like oranges?; another: do you like apples?; a third, do you like pears?
- The striking thing is not how different the responses are, but how similar. In each case, if we exclude don’t knows (as is normal in reporting voting intention polls), pro-referendum responses reach 80 per cent or more, and outnumber anti-referendum responses by at least four-to-one. By any standards, these are conclusive margins.
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