Governance by YouGov polls
Junk polls are tools of technocrats and outsourced policy makers: the behavioural science nudge units.
As I made my way into the decimated city centre of Bristol, I passed dozens of abandoned commercial premises, not least a giant Debenhams store in an Art Deco building (now boarded over). For months, over 2020 and early 2021, streetlamps and signposts were posted with Bristol City Council (BCC) placards promoting COVID fear, until they were cut down by residents. Now new ones have sprung up, like politically correct crocuses sprouting in the asphalt canyons of the city.
The text of the new placard reads: “97% of women in the UK have been sexually harassed. If your words or actions are making someone feel uncomfortable or threatened… Unwanted flirting, catcall, compliment, hug, joke, touching, little kiss, attention, staring, photo, drink, number, grinding, grabbing, groping. If it’s unwanted it’s not OK.”
“97%” seems a rather high figure. Where did it come from? UN Women UK, using as a source a (self-selecting) online survey conducted via the online polling website YouGov. Like specialist groups that centre on “social problems”, UN Women UK is unabashedly campaigning. “We have to act now,” it declares. When UN Women UK demands actions, it wishes to empower local agencies to influence your behaviour and micromanage social interaction – acting in loco parentis, on behalf of the weak.
Apparently, “70% of women in the UK say they have experienced sexual harassment in public” and “Only 3% of women aged 18-24 told us they had not experienced any of the behaviours we asked about”. What sort of behaviours? According to a contemporaneous YouGov survey, offending behaviour included “being stared at” (52% of women, 29% of men) and “online comments or jokes” (16% women, 15% men). The threshold is so low, with such common and unremarkable behaviour, that you may not have noticed you have been harassed. The standards are so subjective that any comment a subject disliked could be classed as harassment. Statistics when it comes to serious matters – “being forced to participate in sexual behaviour” – are lower (11% women, 3% men).
Data from a self-selecting online survey on a site, one used by participants who have been pre-screened, is worthless as a measure of actual crimes. According to the Office for National Statistics, the most recent figures indicate a lowering of cases of sexual crimes. “The prevalence of sexual assault experienced in the last year (1.8%) for adults aged 16 to 74 years was significantly lower compared with the year ending March 2019 (2.4%).” (These are of recorded crimes, not convictions.) So, almost the inverse of the astronomical figures put out by UN Women UK and BCC.
What exactly the YouGov survey included as sexual harassment behaviour in this survey is not stated. Did it include the actions listed on the placard? What is meant by “unwanted flirting”? How can one tell whether flirting is wanted or unwanted unless one makes the gambit? Unreciprocated flirting is so banal and inoffensive, it seems as if the BCC is attempting to arbitrate the mildest of interactions. What about a smile across the street, an alleged wink, the pursing of lips that might have been a kissing gesture? Has someone taken a photo that might have inadvertently included you in the background? Did someone compliment you on your clothes? Those are all strikes and “it’s not OK”, as the BCC would put it.
There seems a conflation between behaviour disapproved of by BCC and the causes of sexual harassment. In the YouGov poll, it almost seems as if the aim was to get up to a shockingly high figure, obscure its origins and disseminate it widely; indeed YouGov has been described as a tool for not data collection but political manipulation.
Junk polls are tools of technocrats and outsourced policy makers: the behavioural science nudge units. YouGov provides junk polls to sway the public, which is in turn used to justify decisions already made. This is served up to a docile mass media that fails to interrogate the data or who is supplying it and to what ends, because the mass media agrees with the outlooks and aims of technocrats. Mass-media and popular sentiment is used by ministers and civil servants to explain why they need to restrict our freedom, privacy and autonomy. When was the last time you heard of a ministry stepping down a task force combatting inequality? When did you read a report by a pressure group that recommended reduction in funding? The ratchet only moves one way – towards more power to public bodies, more funding for local authorities to delegate monitoring to specialist pressure groups and to micro-manage the lives of citizens, more electronic surveillance, and more punitive measures (which will be applied selectively).
Remember the YouGov name as the service mark of a state-disinformation operation.
