Wardman Wire Magazine UK Edition

You are browsing the archives of 2007 December.

David Miliband is the Minister responsible for Government policy towards its Iraqi ex-employees, including those in fear of their lives. In a recent webchat on the Number 10 website, Mr Miliband was asked the following question by Justin McKeating: ‘I would like to ask the Foreign Secretary why the assistance being offered to locally employed staff in Iraq, […]

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General as was, has been putting himself about lately. In between pulling in £1 million a year from Debevoise & Plimpton, he has been telling Parliament and the media that he would have resigned over Tony Blair’s plan to extend the period for which terrorism suspects could […]

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Here is a challenge. Solana Larsen in a bright, short report on openDemocracy, says that that Desmond Tutu, one of a group of Elders for Rights that includes a special hero of mine, Ireland’s Mary Robinson, has said there should be a billion signatures attached to the Universal Declaration of Human […]

This is a Guest Article by Ordovicius, who writes about anything and everything in Welsh Politics and beyond. I have republished it today, as the links were stripped in the version published yesterday .

Lack of a Welsh Psephology

In the run-up to the Assembly Elections last May, it became quite evident that Welsh politics suffers from a lack of opinion polls, and what surveys there are are far from being tailor-made for Wales, as Alwyn ap Huw pointed out at the time:

UK wide opinion polls are fairly accurate; they are conducted according to a scientific discipline called psephology. Psephologists look at the make up of an electoral community and poll people by selecting respondents who reflect that balance. They try to create a gender balance, age balance, education balance, social class balance, earnings balance etc. that is the same as the balance of the electorate.

Because of a lack of regular opinion polling in Wales there is no such thing as Welsh psephology. Wales is not a microcosm of the UK it is a completely different place, one needs different polling methods in Wales than those used in the UK to get an accurate picture of voting intentions.

So how do Welsh voters vote? Well in Wales the most important factors have been and remain a) location and b) sense of identity.

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): There is a great irony in the position that the government and Conservatives adopt on the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. One of Gordon Brown’s specious red lines is designed to prevent the Charter from taking effect in the UK and to keep the European Court of Justice’s nose out […]